The father of our hero was a thrifty London trader, whose business as a Turkey merchant had been prosperous enough to persuade him that no other career could possibly be so well adapted for his son.  The lad was of another opinion; but those were not the days when a parent’s will might be safely contravened.  Sent to Geneva to complete the education that had been commenced at London, he returned to a seat in the counting-room with intellectual qualifications that seemed to justify his aspirations for a very different scene of action.  He was a fluent linguist, a ready and graceful master of the pencil and brush, and very well versed in the schools of military design.  Add to these a proficiency in poetry and music, a person of unusual symmetry and grace, a face of almost feminine softness, yet not descending from the dignity of manhood, and we have an idea of the youth who was already meditating the means of throwing off the chains that bound him to the inkhorn and ledger, and embracing a more brilliant and glorious career.  With him, the love of fame was an instinctive passion.  The annals of his own fireside taught him how easily the path to distinction might be trod by men of parts and address; and he knew in his heart that opportunity was the one and the only thing needful to insure the accomplishment of his desires.  Of very moderate fortunes and utterly destitute of influential connections, he knew that his education better qualified him for the useful fulfilment of military duties than perhaps any man of his years in the service of the king.  Once embarked in the profession of arms, he had nothing to rely upon but his own address to secure patronage and promotion,—­nothing but his own merits to justify the countenance that his ingenuity should win.  Without undue vanity, it is tolerably safe to say now that he was authorized by the existing state of things to confidently predicate his own success on these estimates.

It is not easy to underrate the professional standard of the English officer a hundred years ago.  That some were good cannot be denied; that most were bad is very certain.  As there was no school of military instruction in the realm, so no proof of mental or even of physical capacity was required to enable a person to receive and to hold a commission.  A friend at the Horse Guards, or the baptismal gift of a godfather, might nominate a baby three days old to a pair of colors.  Court influence or the ready cash having thus enrolled a puny suckling among the armed defenders of the state, he might in regular process of seniority come out a full-fledged captain or major against the season for his being soundly birched at Eton; and an ignorant school-boy would thus be qualified to govern the lives and fortunes of five hundred stalwart men, and to represent the honor and the interests of the empire in that last emergency when all might be depending on his courage and capacity.  Even women were thus saddled upon the pay-lists; and the time is within the memory of living men, when a gentle lady, whose knowledge of arms may be presumed to have never extended beyond the internecine disputes of the nursery, habitually received the salary of a captaincy of dragoons.  In ranks thus officered, it was easy to foresee the speedy and sure triumph of competent ability, when once backed by patronage.