The Youth and Manhood of Cyril Thornton (Classic Reprint) - Tapa blanda

Excerpt from The Youth and Manhood of Cyril Thornton

The stock of which I have the honour to be a scion, is one of ancient descent and spotless blazon. Though untitled, its dig nity had always been baronial; and the frequency with which the names of my ancestors occur in the county records, as filling offices of provincial trust and importance, shows their influence to have been considerable. While it is due to truth and my pro genitors to state thus much, I am quite ready to confess that our family-tree has produced no very distinguished fruit. Its branches have never been pendent with the weight of poets, heroes, statesmen, or philosophers. If they have writ our annals right, births, marriages, and deaths, the sale or purchase of land, the building of a house, or adonation to the parish church or county hospital, were generally the only events sufficiently salient to afford footing even for the partial eloquence of a family historian. But if I have little reason to boast, I have certainly none to blush, for my ancestors. They were English gentle men, fulfilling with propriety the duties of their situation, gene rally respectable in their relations to society, and leaving, when dead, nothing either to point a moral or adorn a tale.

My grandfather was a courtier and a man of expense. He married an earl's daughter, whose habits and tastes were even more expensive than his own, and engaged in several ruinous contests for the representation of the county. The natural con sequences followed. Part of the family estate was sold, heavy mortgages were incurred on the remainder, and when, in the course of nature, the succession devolved on my father, he found himself in possession of little more than the wreck of a magni ficent estate.

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