The Brother’s House

It has pleased one of the merriest writers of this age to call courts of law the chimnies of society, through which all the smoke and black vapours find a vent; thence inferring, that the sweepers must have black hands. I am not qualified to decide whether these chimnies of the moral world could be cleansed by besoms, or other machines, as satisfactorily as by human sweepers, alias lawyers. Let future parliaments consider this, as our’s have bountifully compassionated a fraternity of the same colour, I comfort myself by remembering, that my profession acquaints me particularly with the firesides of my fellow creatures, and that the stains on our hands may be washed away.

There was once in the North of England a half forsaken by-road, which led the traveler round the skirts of a wide woody garden, from whence a flight of stone steps ascended to a green terrace, where stood the remnant of an ancient building called the Brother’s House. It owed this name to the appropriation of the mansion in other times to a Moravian fraternity, long since dissolved. A few flat tablets scattered among the neglected flowers in the garden, distinguished the spots sanctified by their remains; and the last inhabitant of the Brother’s House might have been mistaken for one of their society. But though his habits now appeared so simple and sequestered, he had acted a celebrated part on the grand theatre of life. His genius and sensibility had been blunted in his youth by too early inheritance of rank and fortune, yet he did not become, like the prodigal of the seventeenth century, by turns “a fidler, statesman, and… Read More