There were tendencies in John which made him very uneasy,
and Theobald, his second son, was idle and at times far from truthful.
His children might, perhaps, have answered, had they known what was in
their father's mind, that he did not knock his money about as he not
infrequently knocked his children. He never dealt hastily or pettishly
with his money, and that was perhaps why he and it got on so well
together.
It must be remembered that at the beginning of the nineteenth century the
relations between parents and children were still far from satisfactory.
The violent type of father, as described by Fielding, Richardson,
Smollett and Sheridan, is now hardly more likely to find a place in
literature than the original advertisement of Messrs. Fairlie &
Pontifex's "Pious Country Parishioner," but the type was much too
persistent not to have been drawn from nature closely. The parents in
Miss Austen's novels are less like savage wild beasts than those of her
predecessors, but she evidently looks upon them with suspicion, and an
uneasy feeling that _le pere de famille est capable de tout_ makes itself
sufficiently apparent throughout the greater part of her writings.
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