Read Online Sir William by David Stacton - Free Book Online Page A

become one, with or without portfolio. Meanwhile enjoy yourself: instruct the girl.”
    “It is true that I have much to teach,” said Greville, with the obliviousness of true humility.
    “My dear boy, of course you have,” said Towneley, with a cockatoo prance. “So why not get it out of your system now, while there is still time?”
    So Emily was saved, in the best Hannah More style, by education. Greville commenced at once, though he would need advice.
    The most notable exponent of education, excepting always Hannah More, was Mr. Day, the friend of Erasmus Darwin, the friend of Anna Seward, the friend of Johnson, who in his turn was the friend of Mrs. Thrale, who had married a merchant, so none of them was exactly respectable. Nor would the Bishop of Derry do. He was an admirable sedentary old rip whom eminence had rendered plummy, who admired erudition, could pull odds and ends of Horace out of a hat with the best of them, read the worst parts of Procopius in his cabinet, and had no use for education whatsoever. He preferred, he said, learning, for you can educate a rabbit, but nothing will make him learned unless he wants to be, in which case he is not a rabbit, so why stuff the memory with forcemeat, like a Michaelmas goose? It is a waste of time.
    There was Rousseau….
    Looking up at the Paulus Potter, Greville uttered an ungulate groan: should he begin with Taste or Tacitus? Or would his own moral apothegms be better? He had already instituted a course of instruction in those.
    “If you give compliments solely in order to give pleasure, you will get what you want,” he had said when she was trying to butter up Mr. Hayley. “If you give them solely to get what you want, you will merely displease. You have not the art to dissimulate, dear Emma.”
    “And it must be said, you do not seem to need it,” said Hayley, about whom everything was pleasant but his verse. “If you wish me to inscribe the Triumphs of Temper, why of course I shall.”
    “I do not like the girl to appear pert,” said Greville. “She is at times.”
    “You must come to the country more often. So is my climbing rose,” said Hayley. “She is Serena to the life.”
    “Reading it is one of her few diversions.”
    “She seems to wish to improve herself, at any rate,” said Hayley, Serena being the heroine of the above-mentioned work.
    Indeed she did.
    “Being ignorant of Taste, her only thought, upon seeing the sculpture around her, is to ask the subject of the scene, and so, to feed her curiosity, I have thought it best to instruct her in the elements of Classic Greek Myth,” wrote Greville to his uncle.
    As for the celestial tittle-tattle of Greek myth, Emma had seldom heard such disgusting carryings on in her life, but into the memory box it went, and down went the lid, while Hope droned around the room with all the random diligence of a mosquito.
    “The gnats in this part of Delaware are as large as sparrows. I have armed myself against them by wearing trousers,” wrote the Earl of Carlisle. In it went. Had she not been so pretty, Emma would have qualified as a bluestocking tomorrow. She had the erudition of a magpie; that is, she did not care what it was, what it meantor where it came from, but if it sparkled, into that jackdaw’s nest of a memory of hers it went. The worst was French.
    “On pent comparer la sociét é à une salle de spectacle: on n’y é tait aux loges que parce qu’on payait d’avantage,” mouthed Emma.
    “And what is this ubiquitous caterwauling, pray?”
    “It is French.”
    “Child,” said Mrs. Cadogan, who lived in terror of foreign travel, for parsnips were not procurable abroad, “why?”
    “It is a polite accomplishment and contains no ‘h’s,’” said Emma, holding out the book. “You see. There is an haitch. But you pay it no mind. That’s the beauty of it.”
    “She is teachable. She shall vie with Mrs. Delaney,” said Greville.
    “Ah, Charles,” said the Bishop of Derry,