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SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

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THE FIRST AND LAST APPEARANCE.

Mr. Henry Augustus Constantine Stubbs (or as he distinguished himself on his new visiting cards, H.A.C.  Stubbs) had taken up his abode in one of the demi-fashionable squares, among judges, physicians, barristers, and merchants, at the north side of the metropolis.  Being the only lawfully begotten issue of his father, when the frail Angelina made it impossible he should have any brothers and sisters, he succeeded, by will, to three-fourths of the late Mr. Jonathan Stubbs’s property, and, by oxalic acid, to the remaining fourth;[5] the affair being too sudden to permit of any further testamentary dispositions, or of any of those benevolent codicils, which sometimes have the effect of tapering down primary bequests, like Prior’s Emma, “fine by degrees and beautifully less.”  Upon a fair computation, after a few trifling legacies were paid, and all debts satisfied, young Mr. Stubbs might calculate his inheritance, in India stock, Bank stock, houses, canal shares, and exchequer bills, at nearly eighty thousand pounds.

   [5] Mr. Jonathan Stubbs retired from business long before he reached
       his grand climacteric, to his country house at Newington Butts,
       with the solid dignity of at least half a plum.  What length of
       years might have been in store for him, if he had regularly taken
       Dr. James’s analeptic pills, it is impossible to say; but not doing
       so, he had occasion to send the coachman one night for an ounce of
       Epsom salts.  They proved to be oxalic acid; and stomach-pumps not
       being then in existence, there was an inevitable termination to the
       existence of Mr. Stubbs.  An “extraordinary sensation,” as the
       newspapers have it, was produced in Newington Butts by this
       dreadful catastrophe.

His education had not been neglected; that is to say, his father sent him, at nine years old, to one of those suburban seminaries for “young gentlemen,” usually kept by elderly gentlemen, who know what it is to have been deprived of similar advantages in their own youth.  They feel, therefore, a laudable gratification in enabling the rising generation to pluck some of that fruit from the tree of knowledge which they themselves never tasted at all.  Here he remained till he was nearly seventeen; and here he acquired a little French, a little Greek, a little Latin, a little mathematics, a little logic, and a little geography, “with the use of the globes.”  In short, he brought away with him a little learning, for the obtaining of which his father had not paid a little money.  He subsequently enlarged his Lilliputian stock of ideas, by assiduously prosecuting his studies at home, three days a-week, and three hours