Page:Devonshire Characters and Strange Events.djvu/512

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
426
DEVONSHIRE CHARACTERS

vanity and self-esteem of this runaway from civilized life, as it does also his utter callousness to truth and honesty. He relates his frauds and falsehoods with unblushing effrontery, glorying in his shame. There have always been persons who have rebelled against the restraints of culture, and have reverted to a state of savagery more or less. Nowadays there are the colonies, to which those who are energetic and dislike the bonds of civilization at home can fly and live a freer life, one also simpler. And this desire, located in many hearts, to be emancipated from limitations and ties that are conventional, is thus given an opening for fulfilment. It may be but a temporary outburst of independence, but with some, unquestionably, like Falstaff, there is a "kind of alacrity in sinking."

Bampfylde-Moore Carew broke all ties when a boy, and remained a voluntary outcast from society to his death.

"Mr. Carew was born in the Month of July, 1693"—even at birth he is Mister—"and never was there known a more splendid Appearance of Gentlemen and Ladies of the first Rank and Quality at any Baptism in the West of England than at his." He was the son of the Rev. Theodore Carew, rector of Bickleigh, near Tiverton.

At the age of twelve, Bampfylde was sent to Tiverton school, "where he contracted an intimate Acquaintance with young Gentlemen of the first Rank in Somersetshire, Devonshire, Cornwall, and Dorsetshire." Here he and other boys kept a pack of hounds, and as these, with Carew and others behind them, once gave chase to a deer strayed from Exmoor over standing corn, so much damage was done that the farmers complained to the headmaster. Bampfylde was too great a coward to wait and take his whipping. He ran away