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THE

HAB.

EDINBURGH TALES.

CONDUCTED BY

MRS. JOHNSTONE.

VOLUME II.

WILLIAM TAIT, EDINBURGH.

CHAPMAN AND HALL, LONDON.
JOHN CUMMING, DUBLIN,

MDCCCXLVI.

820.8
J73
V.2

EDINBURGII:

Printed by William Tait, 107, Prince's Street.

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THE

EDINBURGH TALES.

THE AUTHOR'S DAUGHTER.

CHAPTER I.

BY MARY HOWITT.

MR. FRANK LAWFORD offended his family by three things. He turned author; he adopted liberal opinions in politics; and he married a poor and nameless wife. Any one of these would have been bad enough, according to the hereditary notions of the Lawford family; but all these combined in one person, was an unimaginable delinquency which the Lawfords could not forgive. But in order that our readers may have a more definite idea of this family, which had considered itself par excellence sans reproche, we must go back to the time of Peter Lawford, the old squire.

Peter Lawford, and his ancestors before him, had been members of the squirearchy of Leicestershire for some hundreds of years. The chancel vault was full of the bones of the Lawfords, male and female; and the church walls were covered with monumental tablets, in marble and brass, commemorating their virtues and their greatness. The Lawfords of the fifteenth century endowed the grammar school; the Lawfords built the alms-houses; the Lawfords had given, and still gave, doles of beef and fuel to the poor at Christmas; they had always sate on the magisterial bench; they were in all trusts of bridges and turnpike roads for their part of the county. Lawfords also had sate in Parliament; they had served their king and country in the army and on sea; and according to their belief they served God also, by VOL. II.

providing out of their own family a Lawford to occupy the living of Lawford, which, of course, was in their gift—a comfortable way it was of serving God, for the living had always been a good one, and, at the time of our story, amounted to £800 a-year.

But whatever the Lawfords of former times had been as to wealth, Peter Lawford, when he came into possession of the estate, found that its revenues were somewhat encumbered. Peter was the second son, and had been brought up to the law, for which he always entertained the highest regard; holding it as his firm opinion, that, had fate left him to pursue his own course, he should have risen to the highest eminence. But fate made a country gentleman of him; and as it is a much easier and safer thing to regret the loss of greatness than to try to achieve it, Peter sate down contentedly on the broad lands of Lawford, to try to rid himself of the encumbrances which he had never expected to find there. The older Lawford had been a speculator before the true time for profitable speculation began, and therefore won for himself the character of insanity, because he laid down in his park an infant rail-road, on which he laboured hard to perfect self-propelling carriages. He built velocipedes and constructed balloons, but, poor man, succeeded in nothing. He was one of those men with glimmerings of truth before the age is prepared to receive it; precursors of discoveries on the very verge of their birth. Had Mr. Lawford lived fifty years later he No. 27.

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