Scarcely had he recovered the shock of being ran away with by my aunt, before, terminating for ever his vagrancies, he was ran through by my uncle.  The wits made an epigram upon the event; and my uncle, who was as bold as a lion at the point of a sword, was, to speak frankly, terribly disconcerted by the point of a jest.  He retired to the country in a fit of disgust and gout.  Here his own bon naturel rose from the layers of art which had long oppressed it, and he solaced himself by righteously governing domains worthy of a prince, for the mortifications he had experienced in the dishonourable career of a courtier.  Hitherto I have spoken somewhat slightingly of my uncle; and in his dissipation he deserved it, for he was both too honest and too simple to shine in that galaxy of prostitute genius of which Charles II. was the centre.  But in retirement he was no longer the same person, and I do not think that the elements of human nature could have furnished forth a more amiable character than Sir William Devereux, presiding at Christmas over the merriment of his great hall.  Good old man! his very defects were what we loved best in him; vanity was so mingled with good nature that it became graceful, and we reverenced one the most, while we most smiled at the other.  One peculiarity had he, which the age he had lived in, and his domestic history, rendered natural enough, viz. an exceeding distaste to the matrimonial state:  early marriages were misery; imprudent marriages idiotism; and marriage at the best he was wont to say, with a kindling eye and a heightened colour, marriage at the best—­was the devil.  Yet it must not be supposed that Sir William Devereux was an ungallant man.  On the contrary, never did the beau sexe have a humbler or more devoted servant.  As nothing in his estimation was less becoming to a wise man than matrimony, so nothing was more ornamental than flirtation.  He had the old man’s weakness, garrulity, and he told the wittiest stories in the world, without omitting any thing in them but the point.  This omission did not arise from the want either of memory or of humour, but solely from a deficiency in the malice natural to all jesters.  He could not persuade his lips to repeat a sarcasm hurting even the dead or the ungrateful; and when he came to the drop of gall which should have given zest to the story, the milk of human kindness broke its barrier despite himself, and washed it away.  He was a fine wreck, a little prematurely broken by dissipation, but not perhaps the less interesting on that account; tall, and somewhat of the jovial old English girth, with a face where good nature and good living mingled their smiles and glow.  He wore the garb of twenty years back, and was curiously particular in the choice of his silk stockings.  He was not a little vain of his leg, and a compliment on that score was always sure of a gracious reception.

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The Gatherer.