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Moral Tales for Young People: The good aunt
Moral Tales for Young People The good aunt Author:Maria Edgeworth Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Alderman Holloway prophesied to his friends, that his son Augustus would be one of the first orators in England. He was in a hurry to have him ready to enter the... more » college, and had a borough secure for him at the proper age. The proper age, he regretted, that parliament had fixed to twenty one ; for the alderman was impatient to introduce his young statesman to the house, especially as he saw honours, perhaps a title, iu the distant perspective of his son's advancement. Whilst this vision occupied the father's imagination, a vision of another sort played upon the juvenile fancy of his son ; a vision—of a gig ; for though Augustus was but a school-boy, he had very manly ideas—if those ideas be manly which most young men have. Lord Rawson, the son of the earl of Marryborough, had lately appeared to Augustus in a gig. The young lord Rawson had lately been a school-boy at Westminster like Augustus: he was now master of himself and three horses at college. Alderman Holloway had lent the earl of Marryborough certain monies, the interest of which the earl scrupulously paid in civility. The alderman valued himself upon being a shrewd man ; he looked to one of the earl's boroughs as a security for his principal, and, from long-sighted political motives, encouraged an intimacy between the young nobleman and his son. It was one of those useful friendships, one of those fortunate connexions, which some parents consider as the peculiar advantage of a public school. Lord Rawson's example already powerfully operated upon his young friend s mind, and this intimacy was most likely to have a decisive influence upon the future destiny of Au- gus. Augustus was the son of an alderman— Lord Rawson was two years older than Holloway —had left school—had been at college—had driven both a curricle and a g...« less