’He holds a living about three miles from here; his history, as far as I am acquainted with it, is as follows.  His father was a respectable tanner in the neighbouring town, who, wishing to make his son a gentleman, sent him to college.  Having never been at college myself, I cannot say whether he took the wisest course; I believe it is more easy to unmake than to make a gentleman; I have known many gentlemanly youths go to college, and return anything but what they went.  Young Mr. Platitude did not go to college a gentleman, but neither did he return one:  he went to college an ass, and returned a prig; to his original folly was superadded a vast quantity of conceit.  He told his father that he had adopted high principles, and was determined to discountenance everything low and mean; advised him to eschew trade, and to purchase him a living.  The old man retired from business, purchased his son a living, and shortly after died, leaving him what remained of his fortune.  The first thing the Reverend Mr. Platitude did, after his father’s decease, was to send his mother and sister into Wales to live upon a small annuity, assigning as a reason that he was averse to anything low, and that they talked ungrammatically.  Wishing to shine in the pulpit, he now preached high sermons, as he called them, interspersed with scraps of learning.  His sermons did not, however, procure him much popularity; on the contrary, his church soon became nearly deserted, the greater part of his flock going over to certain dissenting preachers, who had shortly before made their appearance in the neighbourhood.  Mr. Platitude was filled with wrath, and abused Dissenters in most unmeasured terms.  Coming in contact with some of the preachers at a public meeting, he was rash enough to enter into argument with them.  Poor Platitude! he had better have been quiet, he appeared like a child, a very infant, in their grasp; he attempted to take shelter under his college learning, but found, to his dismay, that his opponents knew more Greek and Latin than himself.  These illiterate boors, as he had supposed them, caught him at once in a false concord, and Mr. Platitude had to slink home overwhelmed with shame.  To avenge himself he applied to the ecclesiastical court, but was told that the Dissenters could not be put down by the present ecclesiastical law.  He found the Church of England, to use his own expression, a poor, powerless, restricted Church.  He now thought to improve his consequence by marriage, and made up to a rich and beautiful young lady in the neighbourhood; the damsel measured him from head to foot with a pair of very sharp eyes, dropped a curtsey, and refused him.  Mr. Platitude, finding England a very stupid place, determined to travel; he went to Italy; how he passed his time there he knows best, to other people it is a matter of little importance.  At the end of two years he returned with a real or assumed contempt for everything English, and especially