Look at our hunting and sporting gentry: you can see what their legs and arms are about, whether riding after the hounds or striding after partridges or pheasants; but as to their heads—they are stagnant pools in which is no mental circulation. I do not reproach them. God made them so, but I do not care for their society."
What greatly pleased him was the letter in the Spectator of October 1, 1711, relative to one Nicholas Hart, who was accustomed to sleep from the fifth of August to the eleventh of the same month.
On the first day of the month he grew dull; on the second, he appeared drowsy; on the third he fell a-yawning; on the fourth he began to nod; on the fifth he dropped asleep; on the sixth he was heard to snore; on the seventh he turned himself in his bed; on the eighth he recovered his former posture; on the ninth he fell a-stretching; on the tenth, about midnight, he awoke; on the eleventh, in the morning, he called for a tankard of small beer.
The correspondent of the Spectator adds his remarks: "This seems a very natural picture of the life of many an honest English gentleman, whose whole history very often consists of yawning, nodding, stretching, turning, sleeping, drinking, and the like particulars. The worst of it is, that the drowsy part of our species is chiefly made up of very honest gentlemen, who live quietly among their neighbours without ever disturbing the public peace. They are drones without stings." Exactly my father's sentiments. And he could not bring himself to live among the drones.
My father had quite sense enough and good feeling to acknowledge that these drones were in their right place, and that their interests comported with their environment, and that their activities were, though not to a large extent, beneficial. It was not they, it was himself who was out of place. In full consciousness of this he sought to dislodge himself from it, and go abroad.
At a time when my mother was absent, staying with her mother in Exeter, my father then at Bratton wrote on a domestic change—the dismissal of one charwoman and the introduction of another, that shows us how different were the wages in those days from what they are at present.
