The passions, do but watch them, are all more or less intermittent.
As it chanced, he acted sagaciously, for Anthony at last wrote to say that his home in London was cheerless, and that he intended to move into fresh and airier lodgings, where the presence of a discreet young housekeeper, who might wish to see London, and make acquaintance with the world, would be agreeable to him.

His project was that one of his nieces should fill this office, and he requested his brother-in-law to reflect on it, and to think of him as of a friend of the family, now and in the time to come.

Anthony spoke of the seductions of London quite unctuously.

Who could imagine this to be the letter of an old crabbed miser?
"Tell her," he said, "there's fruit at stalls at every street-corner all the year through--oysters and whelks, if she likes--winkles, lots of pictures in shops--a sight of muslin and silks, and rides on omnibuses--bands of all sorts, and now and then we can take a walk to see the military on horseback, if she's for soldiers." Indeed, he joked quite comically in speaking of the famous horse-guards--warriors who sit on their horses to be looked at, and do not mind it, because they are trained so thoroughly.

"Horse-guards blue, and horse-guards red," he wrote--"the blue only want boiling." There is reason to suppose that his disrespectful joke was not original in him, but it displayed his character in a fresh light.