incessant watchfulness.”  And, acting up to his light, Sir Austin did watch.  The youth submitted to an examination every night before he sought his bed; professedly to give an account of his studies, but really to recapitulate his moral experiences of the day.  He could do so, for he was pure.  Any wildness in him that his father noted, any remoteness or richness of fancy in his expressions, was set down as incidental to the Blossoming Season.  There is nothing like a theory for binding the wise.  Sir Austin, despite his rigid watch and ward, knew less of his son than the servant of his household.  And he was deaf, as well as blind.  Adrian thought it his duty to tell him that the youth was consuming paper.  Lady Blandish likewise hinted at his mooning propensities.  Sir Austin from his lofty watch-tower of the System had foreseen it, he said.  But when he came to hear that the youth was writing poetry, his wounded heart had its reasons for being much disturbed.

“Surely,” said Lady Blandish, “you knew he scribbled?”

“A very different thing from writing poetry,” said the baronet.  “No Feverel has ever written poetry.”

“I don’t think it’s a sign of degeneracy,” the lady remarked.  “He rhymes very prettily to me.”

A London phrenologist, and a friendly Oxford Professor of poetry, quieted Sir Austin’s fears.

The phrenologist said he was totally deficient in the imitative faculty; and the Professor, that he was equally so in the rhythmic, and instanced several consoling false quantities in the few effusions submitted to him.  Added to this, Sir Austin told Lady Blandish that Richard had, at his best, done what no poet had ever been known to be capable of doing:  he had, with his own hands, and in cold blood, committed his virgin manuscript to the flames:  which made Lady Blandish sigh forth, “Poor boy!”

Killing one’s darling child is a painful imposition.  For a youth in his Blossoming Season, who fancies himself a poet, to be requested to destroy his first-born, without a reason (though to pretend a reason cogent enough to justify the request were a mockery), is a piece of abhorrent despotism, and Richard’s blossoms withered under it.  A strange man had been introduced to him, who traversed and bisected his skull with sagacious stiff fingers, and crushed his soul while, in an infallible voice, declaring him the animal he was making him feel such an animal!  Not only his blossoms withered, his being seemed to draw in its shoots and twigs.  And when, coupled thereunto (the strange man having departed, his work done), his father, in his tenderest manner, stated that it would give him pleasure to see those same precocious, utterly valueless, scribblings among the cinders, the last remaining mental blossoms spontaneously fell away.  Richard’s spirit stood bare.  He protested not.  Enough that it could be wished!  He would not delay a minute in doing it.  Desiring his father to follow him, he went to a drawer in his room, and from a clean-linen recess, never suspected by Sir Austin, the secretive youth drew out bundle after bundle:  each neatly tied, named, and numbered:  and pitched them into flames.  And so Farewell my young Ambition! and with it farewell all true confidence between Father and Son.