FATHER AND MOTHER 23 



and manly sentiment in the old sailor fashion, were 

 in him inherent and inextinguishable either by age, 

 suffering, or injustice. He looked, as he was, every 

 inch a gentleman ; he must have been everywhere 

 notable, even among handsome men, both for his 

 face and his gallant bearing ; not so much that of 

 a sailor, you would have said, as like one of those 

 gentle and graceful soldiers that, to this day, are 

 the most pleasant of Englishmen to see. But 

 though he was in these ways noble, the dunce scholar 

 of Northiam was to the end no genius. Upon all 

 points that a man must understand to be a gentle- 

 man, to be upright, gallant, affectionate and dead 

 to self, Captain Jenkin was more knowing than one 

 among a thousand ; outside of that, his mind was 

 very largely blank. He had indeed a simplicity 

 that came near to vacancy ; and in the first forty 

 years of his married life, this want grew more 

 accentuated. In both families imprudent marriages 

 had been the rule ; but neither Jenkin nor Campbell 

 had ever entered into a more unequal union. It 

 was the captain's good looks, we may suppose, 

 that gained for him this elevation ; and in some 

 ways and for many years of his life, he had to pay 

 the penalty. His wife, impatient of his incapacity 

 and surrounded by brilliant friends, used him with a 

 certain contempt. She was the managing partner ; 

 the life was hers, not his ; after his retirement they 

 lived much abroad, where the poor captain, who 



