the  play),  "died  as  soon  as  they  were  born."  My  uncle  was
now  only  at  a  loss  what  to  do  with  his  wife — that  remaining
treasure,  whose  readiness  to  oblige  him  had  been  so  miracu-
lously evinced.  She  saved  him  the  trouble  of  long  cogitation —
an  exercise  of  intellect  to  which  he  was  never  too  ardently
inclined.  There  was  a  gentleman  of  the  court,  celebrated  for
his  sedateness  and  solemnity  ;  my  aunt  was  piqued  into  emu-
lating Orpheus,  and,  six  weeks  after  her  confinement,  she  put
this  rock  into  motion — they  eloped.  Poor  gentleman  ! — it
must  have  been  a  severe  trial  of  patience  to  a  man  never  known
before  to  trangress  the  very  slowest  of  all  possible  walks — to
have  had  two  events  of  the  most  rapid  nature  happen  to  him
in  the  same  week  :  scarcely  had  he  recovered  the  shock  of
being  run  away  with  by  my  aunt,  before,  terminating  for  ever
his  vagrancies,  he  was  run  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  swoid,  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  natural  goodness
soon  recovered  the  effects  of  the  artificial  atmosphere  to  which
it  had  been  exposed,  and  he  solaced  himself  by  righteously
governing  domains  worthy  of  a  prince,  for  the  mortifications
he  had  experienced  in  the  dishonorable  career  of  a  courtier.
