Sinopsis

Family Pictures, with select Views of the Estate, fenced with distant Prospects. Every book has a beginning, and the beginning of every book is the undoubted spot on which the historian is bound to parade his hero. The novelist may therefore continue to envelope his man in a fog as long as he likes, but for myself I shall at once unfold to the world that I am my own hero; and though that same world hold my countrymen to be rich in wants, with the article of modesty among them, yet do I hope to maintain the character I have assumed, with as much propriety as can reasonably be expected of one labouring under such a national infirmity, for "I am a native of that land, which Some poets' lips and painters' hands" have pictured barren and treeless. But to shew that these are mere fancy sketches, I need only mention that as long as I anything, there grew a bonny brier and sundry gooseberry bushes in our kail-yard, and it was surrounded by a stately row of pines, rearing their long spinster waists and umbrella heads over the cabbages, as carefully as a hen does her wings over her brood of chickens, so that neither the sun nor moon, and but a very few favoured sta...