 CHAPTER I Sir Walter Elliot, of Kell and Chal, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the baronetage. There he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one. There his faculties were roused into admiration and respect by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents. There any unwelcome sensations arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century. And there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed. This was the page at which the favourite volume always opened. Elliot of Kell and Chal Walter Elliot, born March 1, 1760, married July 15, 1784, Elizabeth, daughter of James Stevenson, a squire, of South Park, in the county of Gloucester, by which lady, who died in 1800, he has issue Elizabeth, born June 1, 1785, Anne, born August 9, 1787, a stillborn son, November 5, 1789, Mary, born November 20, 1791. Precisely such had the paragraph originally stood from the printer's hands, but Sir Walter had improved it by adding, for the information of himself and his family, his words, after the date of Mary's birth, married December 16, 1810, Charles, son and heir of Charles Musgrove, Esquire, of Upper Cross, in the county of Somerset, and by inserting most accurately the day of the month on which he had lost his wife. Then followed the history and rise of the ancient and respectable family, in the usual terms, how it had been first settled in Cheshire, how mentioned in Dugdale, serving the office of high sheriff, representing a borough in three successive parliaments, exertions of loyalty and dignity of baronet, in the first year of Charles II, with all the Marys and Elizabeths they had married, forming altogether two handsome duodecimo pages, and concluding with the arms and motto, principal seat, Kellynch Hall, in the county of Somerset, from Sir Walter's handwriting again in this finale. Air presumptive, William Walter Elliott Esquire, great-grandson of the second Sir Walter. Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliott's character, vanity of person and of situation. He had been remarkably handsome.