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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