The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 22: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE BROTHERS 3 destiny’s arbiters in respect to the worldly career of those whom the laws of primogeniture and entail thus throw in de- pendence upon them. Moreover, there is often, even in the breasts of the best-disposed youths, a spirited and prideful disinclination to be taunted with being “‘ bookworms ’”’ and ‘“‘ saints,” when elder brothers invite them to partake in pleasures and amusements; and thus is it that well-prin- cipled lads are frequently led, by a sense of false shame, to quit pursuits in reality most congenial to their tastes, and deviate into others but little consonant with their inclina- tions. To all these varied but potent influences was Bertram Vivian subjected, and when once the ice was broken, — when once, in other words, he had left his studies to accom- pany his brother and that brother’s boon companions amidst scenes of pleasure, the compunctious feelings attendant thereon gradually wore off. Not, however, that Bertram became inveterately dissipated, or that he aban- doned himself so completely to pleasure, as did Hugh, but still he was not so steady as he ought to have been. The consequences were, that at the end of the first year of the two young men’s collegiate experience, they found that they had far outstripped their pecuniary means, and that they had contracted debts which they dared not mention to their father, and which nevertheless without his succour they had not the remotest chance of liquidating. The university tradesmen were not however clamorous. It was sufficient for them to know that the Vivians belonged to a family in which there were lofty titles that bespoke the accompaniment of great wealth, and they considered themselves tolerably safe in being sooner or later paid by some member of this aristocratic family. Hugh pursued his career of extravagance as if he were actual heir to the Marquisate of Viviandale from which the family lustre was derived, between which and himself there were nevertheless great gulfs fixed; while Bertram, though without the moral courage to stop short in the pathway of ruin, was at times distracted by the sense of those difficulties that were grad- ually enmeshing him in a web which he feared to be inex- tricable. He had not, we say, the moral courage to check himself: that feeling of false shame, and that idea of more or less dependence on his brother, to which we have already alluded, prevented him from asserting the natural rectitude ¢om (@) DOOkKs (E(O)