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CHAPTER IX.

MUN AND HIS LOVE-MAKING.

1656-1660.

'But if she cannot love you, sir ? '

'I cannot be so answer'd-'

'Sooth but you must.' Twelfth Night.

IN May 1656 Edmund Verney returned home, a young man in his twentieth year. He had an affectionate and pleasant temper, he was tall and handsome, but somewhat clumsily and beavily built, and his awkwardness of manner and slovenliness of dress were a great trouble to his precise and gentlemanlike father; 'Much more will be expected from Mun,' he wrote, 'than from such youths as have gonn noe father then Oxford or Cambridg, or at most the Inns of Court.'

Never had. Mary been more sadly missed than in this fresh chapter of the family life, when Sir Ralph had to make a home and a career for his eldest son. No one welcomed him back with the womanly love which mother and sister would have lavished upon him, no one was there to see that in taking a son's place at Claydon, his habits did not clash with his

Dec. 8,

1656

father's; and so the home-coming was not as successful as it might have been, after the joy of the first meetings and greetings had subsided. Sir Ralph himself had been an ideal son, never thinking of his own amusements, if he could share in Sir Edmund's duties and lighten his cares. Edmund arrived in the midst of the worries and vexations of the Decimation, but it did not occur to him that these things were any concern of his. He looked upon himself as the heir to a fine estate, and he felt annoyed when every request for money was met with a dismal recital of his grandfather's debts, and the burdens under which Sir Ralph was groaning. Careless of expense, and ignorant of business, Mun was far from appreciating the sacrifices his father had made for his education, in the days of his greatest poverty, or how hardly he now raised the 201. or 50l. which slipped through the son's fingers so rapidly.

Sir Ralph was full of large schemes for the improvement of Claydon, in which Mun took but little interest, and he thought, not unnaturally, that with less outlay in building and planting, his father might afford to give him a proper allowance, to enable him to be as well dressed, and as well mounted, as the other young sparks who splashed up the mud at a fashionable hour in Hyde Park.

'As

Sir Ralph justified himself as a father and landowner always does under these conditions. for my buildings, I see I have already lost one great part of the contentment I tooke in them, which was

that you should perceive that what money I did expend, was layd out to your advantage, to make the house more handsome and convenient for you and yours. . . I must confesse I shall not debarre myselfe of any expence that I thinke moderate, to supply any extravagancies that you either have or shall committ, and yet, if any misfortune should befall you, noe man liveing should more readily and cheerfully suffer with and for you.'

The boy had his own vague ambitions too, although he rarely confided them to Sir Ralph :

'I do positively affirme,' he wrote to his intimate friend Dr. Hyde, 'that hetherto my father hath not given me any education whereby I might be rendered accomplisht in body and mind; nay further, though I am naturally inclined to be that which the Italians call un Vertuoso, hee never did so much as countenance mee therein, but hath continually opposed me. Considering these premisses aforesaid my industrie will labour under a greate difficulty of acquiring a title above an honest elder brother, which now a dayes is accounted but little above a silly fellow, yet I think myselfe capable of deserving much better, and I hope without vanitie. . . . My father is courteous and kind enough to me . . . and seemes very well pleased with mee, and would be more yet, if I could dispose my humour to affect, what I hate, Rusticq matters and effeminate things-all which aforesaid I do contemplate with some wonder.'

The relations and friends had only one course to