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+The Project Gutenberg EBook The Disowned, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, V2
+#60 in our series by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
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+Title: The Disowned, Volume 2.
+
+Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
+Release Date: March 2005  [EBook #7632]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on March 4, 2004]
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+Edition: 10
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DISOWNED, LYTTON, V2 ***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by Tapio Riikonen
+and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+He who would know mankind must be at home with all men.
+                                          STEPHEN MONTAGUE.
+
+We left Clarence safely deposited in his little lodgings.  Whether
+from the heat of his apartment or the restlessness a migration of beds
+produces in certain constitutions, his slumbers on the first night of
+his arrival were disturbed and brief.  He rose early and descended to
+the parlour; Mr. de Warens, the nobly appellatived foot-boy, was
+laying the breakfast-cloth.  From three painted shelves which
+constituted the library of "Copperas Bower," as its owners gracefully
+called their habitation, Clarence took down a book very prettily
+bound; it was "Poems by a Nobleman."  No sooner had he read two pages
+than he did exactly what the reader would have done, and restored the
+volume respectfully to its place.  He then drew his chair towards the
+window, and wistfully eyed sundry ancient nursery maids, who were
+leading their infant charges to the "fresh fields and pastures new" of
+what is now the Regent's Park.
+
+In about an hour Mrs. Copperas descended, and mutual compliments were
+exchanged; to her succeeded Mr. Copperas, who was well scolded for his
+laziness: and to them, Master Adolphus Copperas, who was also
+chidingly termed a naughty darling for the same offence.  Now then
+Mrs. Copperas prepared the tea, which she did in the approved method
+adopted by all ladies to whom economy is dearer than renown, namely,
+the least possible quantity of the soi-disant Chinese plant was first
+sprinkled by the least possible quantity of hot water; after this
+mixture had become as black and as bitter as it could possibly be
+without any adjunct from the apothecary's skill, it was suddenly
+drenched with a copious diffusion, and as suddenly poured forth--weak,
+washy, and abominable,--into four cups, severally appertaining unto
+the four partakers of the matutinal nectar.
+
+Then the conversation began to flow.  Mrs. Copperas was a fine lady,
+and a sentimentalist,--very observant of the little niceties of phrase
+and manner.  Mr. Copperas was a stock-jobber and a wit,--loved a good
+hit in each capacity; was very round, very short, and very much like a
+John Dory; and saw in the features and mind of the little Copperas the
+exact representative of himself.
+
+"Adolphus, my love," said Mrs. Copperas, "mind what I told you, and
+sit upright.  Mr. Linden, will you allow me to cut you a leetle piece
+of this roll?"
+
+"Thank you," said Clarence, "I will trouble you rather for the whole
+of it."
+
+Conceive Mrs. Copperas's dismay!  From that moment she saw herself
+eaten out of house and home; besides, as she afterwards observed to
+her friend Miss Barbara York, the "vulgarity of such an amazing
+appetite!"
+
+"Any commands in the city, Mr. Linden?" asked the husband; "a coach
+will pass by our door in a few minutes,--must be on 'Change in half an
+hour.  Come, my love, another cup of tea; make haste; I have scarcely
+a moment to take my fare for the inside, before coachee takes his for
+the outside.  Ha! ha! ha! Mr. Linden."
+
+"Lord, Mr. Copperas," said his helpmate, "how can you be so silly?
+setting such an example to your son, too; never mind him, Adolphus, my
+love; fie, child! a'n't you ashamed of yourself? never put the spoon
+in your cup till you have done tea: I must really send you to school
+to learn manners.  We have a very pretty little collection of books
+here, Mr. Linden, if you would like to read an hour or two after
+breakfast,--child, take your hands out of your pockets,--all the best
+English classics I believe,--'Telemachus,' and Young's 'Night
+Thoughts,' and 'Joseph Andrews,' and the 'Spectator,' and Pope's
+Iliad, and Creech's Lucretius; but you will look over them yourself!
+This is Liberty Hall, as well as Copperas Bower, Mr. Linden!"
+
+"Well, my love," said the stock-jobber, "I believe I must be off.
+Here Tom, Tom (Mr. de Warens had just entered the room with some more
+hot water, to weaken still further "the poor remains of what was once
+"--the tea!), Tom, just run out and stop the coach; it will be by in
+five minutes."
+
+"Have not I prayed and besought you, many and many a time, Mr.
+Copperas," said the lady, rebukingly, "not to call De Warens by his
+Christian name?  Don't you know that all people in genteel life, who
+only keep one servant, invariably call him by his surname, as if he
+were the butler, you know?"
+
+"Now, that is too good, my love," said Copperas.  "I will call poor
+Tom by any surname you please, but I really can't pass him off for a
+butler!  Ha--ha--ha--you must excuse me there, my love!"
+
+"And pray, why not, Mr. Copperas?  I have known many a butler bungle
+more at a cork than he does; and pray tell me who did you ever see
+wait better at dinner?"
+
+"He wait at dinner, my love! it is not he who waits."
+
+"Who then, Mr. Copperas?"
+
+"Why we, my love; it's we who wait for dinner; but that's the cook's
+fault, not his."
+
+"Pshaw! Mr. Copperas; Adolphus, my love, sit upright, darling."
+
+Here De Warens cried from the bottom of the stairs,--"Measter, the
+coach be coming up."
+
+"There won't be room for it to turn then," said the facetious Mr.
+Copperas, looking round the apartment as if he took the words
+literally.
+
+"What coach is it, boy?"
+
+Now that was not the age in which coaches scoured the city every half
+hour, and Mr. Copperas knew the name of the coach as well as he knew
+his own.
+
+"It be the Swallow coach, sir."
+
+"Oh, very well: then since I have swallowed in the roll, I will now
+roll in the Swallow--ha--ha--ha!  Good-by, Mr. Linden."
+
+No sooner had the witty stock-jobber left the room than Mrs. Copperas
+seemed to expand into a new existence.  "My husband, sir," said she,
+apologetically, "is so odd, but he's an excellent sterling character;
+and that, you know, Mr. Linden, tells more in the bosom of a family
+than all the shining qualities which captivate the imagination.  I am
+sure, Mr. Linden, that the moralist is right in admonishing us to
+prefer the gold to the tinsel.  I have now been married some years,
+and every year seems happier than the last; but then, Mr. Linden, it
+is such a pleasure to contemplate the growing graces of the sweet
+pledge of our mutual love.--Adolphus, my dear, keep your feet still,
+and take your hands out of your pockets!"
+
+A short pause ensued.
+
+"We see a great deal of company," said Mrs. Copperas, pompously, "and
+of the very best description.  Sometimes we are favoured by the
+society of the great Mr. Talbot, a gentleman of immense fortune and
+quite the courtier: he is, it is true, a little eccentric in his
+dress: but then he was a celebrated beau in his young days.  He is our
+next neighbour; you can see his house out of the window, just across
+the garden--there!  We have also, sometimes, our humble board graced
+by a very elegant friend of mine, Miss Barbara York, a lady of very
+high connections, her first cousin was a lord mayor.--Adolphus, my
+dear, what are you about?  Well, Mr. Linden, you will find your
+retreat quite undisturbed; I must go about the household affairs; not
+that I do anything more than superintend, you know, sir; but I think
+no lady should be above consulting her husband's interests; that's
+what I call true old English conjugal affection.  Come, Adolphus, my
+dear."
+
+And Clarence was now alone.  "I fear," thought he, "that I shall get
+on very indifferently with these people.  But it will not do for me to
+be misanthropical, and (as Dr. Latinas was wont to say) the great
+merit of philosophy, when we cannot command circumstances, is to
+reconcile us to them."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+A retired beau is one of the most instructive spectacles in the world.
+                                          STEPHEN MONTAGUE.
+
+It was quite true that Mrs. Copperas saw a great deal of company, for
+at a certain charge, upon certain days, any individual might have the
+honour of sharing her family repast; and many, of various callings,
+though chiefly in commercial life, met at her miscellaneous board.
+Clarence must, indeed, have been difficult to please, or obtuse of
+observation, if, in the variety of her guests, he had not found
+something either to interest or amuse him.  Heavens! what a motley
+group were accustomed, twice in the week, to assemble there! the
+little dining-parlour seemed a human oven; and it must be owned that
+Clarence was no slight magnet of attraction to the female part of the
+guests.  Mrs. Copperas's bosom friend in especial, the accomplished
+Miss Barbara York, darted the most tender glances on the handsome
+young stranger; but whether or not a nose remarkably prominent and
+long prevented the glances from taking full effect, it is certain that
+Clarence seldom repaid them with that affectionate ardour which Miss
+Barbara York had ventured to anticipate.  The only persons indeed for
+whom he felt any sympathetic attraction were of the same sex as
+himself.  The one was Mr. Talbot, the old gentleman whom Mrs. Copperas
+had described as the perfect courtier; the other, a young artist of
+the name of Warner.  Talbot, to Clarence's great astonishment (for
+Mrs. Copperas's eulogy had prepared him for something eminently
+displeasing) was a man of birth, fortune, and manners peculiarly
+graceful and attractive.  It is true, however, that, despite of his
+vicinity, and Mrs. Copperas's urgent solicitations, he very seldom
+honoured her with his company, and he always cautiously sent over his
+servant in the morning to inquire the names and number of her expected
+guests; nor was he ever known to share the plenteous board of the
+stock-jobber's lady whenever any other partaker of its dainties save
+Clarence and the young artist were present.  The latter, the old
+gentleman really liked; and as for one truly well born and well bred
+there is no vulgarity except in the mind, the slender means, obscure
+birth, and struggling profession of Warner were circumstances which,
+as they increased the merit of a gentle manner and a fine mind, spoke
+rather in his favour than the reverse.  Mr. Talbot was greatly struck
+by Clarence Linden's conversation and appearance; and indeed there was
+in Talbot's tastes so strong a bias to aristocratic externals that
+Clarence's air alone would have been sufficient to win the good graces
+of a man who had, perhaps, more than most courtiers of his time,
+cultivated the arts of manner and the secrets of address.
+
+"You will call upon me soon?" said he to Clarence, when, after dining
+one day with the Copperases and their inmate, he rose to return home.
+And Clarence, delighted with the urbanity and liveliness of his new
+acquaintance, readily promised that he would.
+
+Accordingly the next day Clarence called upon Mr. Talbot.  The house,
+as Mrs. Copperas had before said, adjoined her own, and was only
+separated from it by a garden.  It was a dull mansion of brick, which
+had disdained the frippery of paint and whitewashing, and had indeed
+been built many years previously to the erection of the modern
+habitations which surrounded it.  It was, therefore, as a consequence
+of this priority of birth, more sombre than the rest, and had a
+peculiarly forlorn and solitary look.  As Clarence approached the
+door, he was struck with the size of the house; it was of very
+considerable extent, and in the more favourable situations of London,
+would have passed for a very desirable and spacious tenement.  An old
+man, whose accurate precision of dress bespoke the tastes of the
+master, opened the door, and after ushering Clarence through two long,
+and, to his surprise, almost splendidly furnished rooms, led him into
+a third, where, seated at a small writing-table, he found Mr. Talbot.
+That person, one whom Clarence then little thought would hereafter
+exercise no small influence over his fate, was of a figure and
+countenance well worthy the notice of a description.
+
+His own hair, quite white, was carefully and artificially curled, and
+gave a Grecian cast to features whose original delicacy, and exact
+though small proportions, not even age could destroy.  His eyes were
+large, black, and sparkled with almost youthful vivacity; and his
+mouth, which was the best feature he possessed, developed teeth white
+and even as rows of ivory.  Though small and somewhat too slender in
+the proportions of his figure, nothing could exceed the ease and the
+grace of his motions and air; and his dress, though singularly rich in
+its materials, eccentric in its fashion, and from its evident study,
+unseemly to his years, served nevertheless to render rather venerable
+than ridiculous a mien which could almost have carried off any
+absurdity, and which the fashion of the garb peculiarly became.  The
+tout ensemble was certainly that of a man who was still vain of his
+exterior, and conscious of its effect; and it was as certainly
+impossible to converse with Mr. Talbot for five minutes without
+merging every less respectful impression in the magical fascination of
+his manner.
+
+"I thank you, Mr. Linden," said Talbot, rising, "for your accepting so
+readily an old man's invitation.  If I have felt pleasure in
+discovering that we were to be neighbours, you may judge what that
+pleasure is to-day at finding you my visitor."
+
+Clarence, who, to do him justice, was always ready at returning a fine
+speech, replied in a similar strain, and the conversation flowed on
+agreeably enough.  There was more than a moderate collection of books
+in the room, and this circumstance led Clarence to allude to literary
+subjects; these Mr. Talbot took up with avidity, and touched with a
+light but graceful criticism upon many of the then modern and some of
+the older writers.  He seemed delighted to find himself understood and
+appreciated by Clarence, and every moment of Linden's visit served to
+ripen their acquaintance into intimacy.  At length they talked upon
+Copperas Bower and its inmates.
+
+"You will find your host and hostess," said the gentleman, "certainly
+of a different order from the persons with whom it is easy to see you
+have associated; but, at your happy age, a year or two may be very
+well thrown away upon observing the manners and customs of those whom,
+in later life, you may often be called upon to conciliate or perhaps
+to control.  That man will never be a perfect gentleman who lives only
+with gentlemen.  To be a man of the world, we must view that world in
+every grade and in every perspective.  In short, the most practical
+art of wisdom is that which extracts from things the very quality they
+least appear to possess; and the actor in the world, like the actor on
+the stage, should find 'a basket-hilted sword very convenient to carry
+milk in.'  [See the witty inventory of a player's goods in the
+"Tatler."]  As for me, I have survived my relations and friends.  I
+cannot keep late hours, nor adhere to the unhealthy customs of good
+society; nor do I think that, to a man of my age and habits, any
+remuneration would adequately repay the sacrifice of health or
+comfort.  I am, therefore, well content to sink into a hermitage in an
+obscure corner of this great town, and only occasionally to revive my
+'past remembrances of higher state,' by admitting a few old
+acquaintances to drink my bachelor's tea and talk over the news of the
+day.  Hence, you see, Mr. Linden, I pick up two or three novel
+anecdotes of state and scandal, and maintain my importance at Copperas
+Bower by retailing them second-hand.  Now that you are one of the
+inmates of that abode, I shall be more frequently its guest. By the
+by, I will let you into a secret: know that I am somewhat a lover of
+the marvellous, and like to indulge a little embellishing exaggeration
+in any place where there is no chance of finding me out.  Mind,
+therefore, my dear Mr. Linden, that you take no ungenerous advantage
+of this confession; but suffer me, now and then, to tell my stories my
+own way, even when you think truth would require me to tell them in
+another."
+
+"Certainly," said Clarence, laughing; "let us make an agreement: you
+shall tell your stories as you please, if you will grant me the same
+liberty in paying my compliments; and if I laugh aloud at the stories,
+you shall promise me not to laugh aloud at the compliments."
+
+"It is a bond," said Talbot; "and a very fit exchange of service it
+is.  It will be a problem in human nature to see who has the best of
+it: you shall pay your court by flattering the people present, and I
+mine by abusing those absent.  Now, in spite of your youth and curling
+locks, I will wager that I succeed the best; for in vanity there is so
+great a mixture of envy that no compliment is like a judicious abuse:
+to enchant your acquaintance, ridicule his friends."
+
+"Ah, sir," said Clarence, "this opinion of yours is, I trust, a little
+in the French school, where brilliancy is more studied than truth, and
+where an ill opinion of our species always has the merit of passing
+for profound."
+
+Talbot smiled, and shook his head.  "My dear young friend," said he,
+"it is quite right that you, who are coming into the world, should
+think well of it; and it is also quite right that I, who am going out
+of it, should console myself by trying to despise it.  However, let me
+tell you, my young friend, that he whose opinion of mankind is not too
+elevated will always be the most benevolent, because the most
+indulgent, to those errors incidental to human imperfection to place
+our nature in too flattering a view is only to court disappointment,
+and end in misanthropy.  The man who sets out with expecting to find
+all his fellow-creatures heroes of virtue will conclude by condemning
+them as monsters of vice; and, on the contrary, the least exacting
+judge of actions will be the most lenient.  If God, in His own
+perfection, did not see so many frailties in us, think you He would be
+so gracious to our virtues?"
+
+"And yet," said Clarence, "we remark every day examples of the highest
+excellence."
+
+"Yes," replied Talbot, "of the highest but not of the most constant
+excellence.  He knows very little of the human heart who imagines we
+cannot do a good action; but, alas! he knows still less of it who
+supposes we can be always doing good actions.  In exactly the same
+ratio we see every day the greatest crimes are committed; but we find
+no wretch so depraved as to be always committing crimes.  Man cannot
+be perfect even in guilt."
+
+In this manner Talbot and his young visitor conversed, till Clarence,
+after a stay of unwarrantable length, rose to depart.
+
+"Well," said Talbot, "if we now rightly understand each other, we
+shall be the best friends in the world.  As we shall expect great
+things from each other sometimes, we will have no scruple in exacting
+a heroic sacrifice every now and then; for instance, I will ask you to
+punish yourself by an occasional tete-a-tete with an ancient
+gentleman; and, as we can also by the same reasoning pardon great
+faults in each other, if they are not often committed, so I will
+forgive you, with all my heart, whenever you refuse my invitations, if
+you do not refuse them often.  And now farewell till we meet again."
+
+It seemed singular and almost unnatural to Linden that a man like
+Talbot, of birth, fortune, and great fastidiousness of taste and
+temper, should have formed any sort of acquaintance, however slight
+and distant, with the facetious stock-jobber and his wife; but the
+fact is easily explained by a reference to the vanity which we shall
+see hereafter made the ruling passion of Talbot's nature.  This
+vanity, which branching forth into a thousand eccentricities,
+displayed itself in the singularity of his dress, the studied yet
+graceful warmth of his manner, his attention to the minutiae of life,
+his desire, craving and insatiate, to receive from every one, however
+insignificant, his obolus of admiration,--this vanity, once flattered
+by the obsequious homage it obtained from the wonder and reverence of
+the Copperases, reconciled his taste to the disgust it so frequently
+and necessarily conceived; and, having in great measure resigned his
+former acquaintance and wholly outlived his friends, he was contented
+to purchase the applause which had become to him a necessary of life
+at the humble market more immediately at his command.
+
+There is no dilemma in which Vanity cannot find an expedient to
+develop its form, no stream of circumstances in which its buoyant and
+light nature will not rise to float upon the surface.  And its
+ingenuity is as fertile as that of the player who (his wardrobe
+allowing him no other method of playing the fop) could still exhibit
+the prevalent passion for distinction by wearing stockings of
+different colours.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+                             Who dares
+    Interpret then my life for me as 't were
+    One of the undistinguishable many?
+                              COLERIDGE: Wallenstein.
+
+The first time Clarence had observed the young artist, he had taken a
+deep interest in his appearance.  Pale, thin, undersized, and slightly
+deformed, the sanctifying mind still shed over the humble frame a
+spell more powerful than beauty.  Absent in manner, melancholy in air,
+and never conversing except upon subjects on which his imagination was
+excited, there was yet a gentleness about him which could not fail to
+conciliate and prepossess; nor did Clarence omit any opportunity to
+soften his reserve, and wind himself into his more intimate
+acquaintance.  Warner, the only support of an aged and infirm
+grandmother (who had survived her immediate children), was distantly
+related to Mrs. Copperas; and that lady extended to him, with
+ostentatious benevolence, her favour and support.  It is true that she
+did not impoverish the young Adolphus to enrich her kinsman, but she
+allowed him a seat at her hospitable board, whenever it was not
+otherwise filled; and all that she demanded in return was a picture of
+herself, another of Mr. Copperas, a third of Master Adolphus, a fourth
+of the black cat, and from time to time sundry other lesser
+productions of his genius, of which, through the agency of Mr. Brown,
+she secretly disposed at a price that sufficiently remunerated her for
+whatever havoc the slender appetite of the young painter was able to
+effect.
+
+By this arrangement, Clarence had many opportunities of gaining that
+intimacy with Warner which had become to him an object; and though the
+painter, constitutionally diffident and shy, was at first averse to,
+and even awed by, the ease, boldness, fluent speech, and confident
+address of a man much younger than himself, yet at last he could not
+resist the being decoyed into familiarity; and the youthful pair
+gradually advanced from companionship into friendship.  There was a
+striking contrast between the two: Clarence was bold and frank, Warner
+close and timid.  Both had superior abilities; but the abilities of
+Clarence were for action, those of Warner for art: both were
+ambitious; but the ambition of Clarence was that of circumstances
+rather than character.  Compelled to carve his own fortunes without
+sympathy or aid, he braced his mind to the effort, though naturally
+too gay for the austerity, and too genial for the selfishness of
+ambition.  But the very essence of Warner's nature was the feverish
+desire of fame: it poured through his veins like lava; it preyed as a
+worm upon his cheek; it corroded his natural sleep; it blackened the
+colour of his thoughts; it shut out, as with an impenetrable wall, the
+wholesome energies and enjoyments and objects of living men; and,
+taking from him all the vividness of the present, all the tenderness
+of the past, constrained his heart to dwell forever and forever amidst
+the dim and shadowy chimeras of a future he was fated never to enjoy.
+
+But these differences of character, so far from disturbing, rather
+cemented their friendship; and while Warner (notwithstanding his
+advantage of age) paid involuntary deference to the stronger character
+of Clarence, he, in his turn, derived that species of pleasure by
+which he was most gratified, from the affectionate and unenvious
+interest Clarence took in his speculations of future distinction, and
+the unwearying admiration with which he would sit by his side, and
+watch the colours start from the canvas, beneath the real though
+uncultured genius of the youthful painter.
+
+Hitherto, Warner had bounded his attempts to some of the lesser
+efforts of the art; he had now yielded to the urgent enthusiasm of his
+nature, and conceived the plan of an historical picture.  Oh! what
+sleepless nights, what struggles of the teeming fancy with the dense
+brain, what labours of the untiring thought wearing and intense as
+disease itself, did it cost the ambitious artist to work out in the
+stillness of his soul, and from its confused and conflicting images,
+the design of this long meditated and idolized performance!  But when
+it was designed; when shape upon shape grew and swelled, and glowed
+from the darkness of previous thought upon the painter's mind; when,
+shutting his eyes in the very credulity of delight, the whole work
+arose before him, glossy with its fresh hues, bright, completed,
+faultless, arrayed as it were, and decked out for immortality,--oh!
+then what a full and gushing moment of rapture broke like a released
+stream upon his soul!  What a recompense for wasted years, health, and
+hope!  What a coronal to the visions and transports of Genius: brief,
+it is true, but how steeped in the very halo of a light that might
+well be deemed the glory of heaven!
+
+But the vision fades, the gorgeous shapes sweep on into darkness, and,
+waking from his revery, the artist sees before him only the dull walls
+of his narrow chamber; the canvas stretched a blank upon its frame;
+the works, maimed, crude, unfinished, of an inexperienced hand, lying
+idly around; and feels himself--himself, but one moment before the
+creator of a world of wonders, the master spirit of shapes glorious
+and majestical beyond the shapes of men-dashed down from his momentary
+height, and despoiled both of his sorcery and his throne.
+
+It was just in such a moment that Warner, starting up, saw Linden (who
+had silently entered his room) standing motionless before him.
+
+"Oh, Linden!" said the artist, "I have had so superb a dream,--a dream
+which, though I have before snatched some such vision by fits and
+glimpses, I never beheld so realized, so perfect as now; and--but you
+shall see, you shall judge for yourself; I will sketch out the design
+for you;" and, with a piece of chalk and a rapid hand, Warner conveyed
+to Linden the outline of his conception.  His young friend was eager
+in his praise and his predictions of renown, and Warner listened to
+him with a fondness which spread over his pale cheek a richer flush
+than lover ever caught from the whispers of his beloved.
+
+"Yes," said he, as he rose, and his sunken and small eye flashed out
+with a feverish brightness, "yes, if my hand does not fail my thought,
+it shall rival even--"  Here the young painter stopped short, abashed
+at that indiscretion of enthusiasm about to utter to another the
+hoarded vanities hitherto locked in his heart of hearts as a sealed
+secret, almost from himself.
+
+"But come," said Clarence, affectionately, "your hand is feverish and
+dry, and of late you have seemed more languid than you were wont,--
+come, Warner, you want exercise: it is a beautiful evening, and you
+shall explain your picture still further to me as we walk."
+
+Accustomed to yield to Clarence, Warner mechanically and abstractedly
+obeyed; they walked out into the open streets.
+
+"Look around us," said Warner, pausing, "look among this toiling and
+busy and sordid mass of beings who claim with us the fellowship of
+clay.  The poor labour; the rich feast: the only distinction between
+them is that of the insect and the brute; like them they fulfil the
+same end and share the same oblivion; they die, a new race springs up,
+and the very grass upon their graves fades not so soon as their
+memory.  Who that is conscious of a higher nature would not pine and
+fret himself away to be confounded with these?  Who would not burn and
+sicken and parch with a delirious longing to divorce himself from so
+vile a herd?  What have their petty pleasures and their mean aims to
+atone for the abasement of grinding down our spirits to their level?
+Is not the distinction from their blended and common name a sufficient
+recompense for all that ambition suffers or foregoes?  Oh, for one
+brief hour (I ask no more) of living honour, one feeling of conscious,
+unfearing certainty that Fame has conquered Death! and then for this
+humble and impotent clay, this drag on the spirit which it does not
+assist but fetter, this wretched machine of pains and aches, and
+feverish throbbings, and vexed inquietudes, why, let the worms consume
+it, and the grave hide--for Fame there is no grave."
+
+At that moment one of those unfortunate women who earn their polluted
+sustenance by becoming the hypocrites of passions abruptly accosted
+them.
+
+"Miserable wretch!" said Warner, loathingly, as he pushed her aside;
+but Clarence, with a kindlier feeling, noticed that her haggard cheek
+was wet with tears, and that her frame, weak and trembling, could
+scarcely support itself; he, therefore, with that promptitude of
+charity which gives ere it discriminates put some pecuniary assistance
+in her hand and joined his comrade.
+
+"You would not have spoken so tauntingly to the poor girl had you
+remarked her distress," said Clarence.
+
+"And why," said Warner, mournfully, "why be so cruel as to prolong,
+even for a few hours, an existence which mercy would only seek to
+bring nearer to the tomb?  That unfortunate is but one of the herd,
+one of the victims to pleasures which debase by their progress and
+ruin by their end.  Yet perhaps she is not worse than the usual
+followers of love,--of love, that passion the most worshipped, yet the
+least divine,--selfish and exacting,--drawing its aliment from
+destruction, and its very nature from tears."
+
+"Nay," said Clarence, "you confound the two loves, the Eros and the
+Anteros; gods whom my good tutor was wont so sedulously to
+distinguish: you surely do not inveigh thus against all love?"
+
+"I cry you mercy," said Warner, with something of sarcasm in his
+pensiveness of tone.  "We must not dispute; so I will hold my peace:
+but make love all you will; what are the false smiles of a lip which a
+few years can blight as an autumn leaf? what the homage of a heart as
+feeble and mortal as your own?  Why, I, with a few strokes of a little
+hair and an idle mixture of worthless colours, will create a beauty in
+whose mouth there shall be no hollowness, in whose lip there shall be
+no fading; there, in your admiration, you shall have no need of
+flattery and no fear of falsehood; you shall not be stung with
+jealousy nor maddened with treachery; nor watch with a breaking heart
+over the waning bloom, and departing health, till the grave open, and
+your perishable paradise is not.  No: the mimic work is mightier than
+the original, for it outlasts it; your love cannot wither it, or your
+desertion destroy; your very death, as the being who called it into
+life, only stamps it with a holier value."
+
+"And so then," said Clarence, "you would seriously relinquish, for the
+mute copy of the mere features, those affections which no painting can
+express?"
+
+"Ay," said the painter, with an energy unusual to his quiet manner,
+and slightly wandering in his answer from Clarence's remark, "ay, one
+serves not two mistresses: mine is the glory of my art.  Oh! what are
+the cold shapes of this tame earth, where the footsteps of the gods
+have vanished, and left no trace, the blemished forms, the debased
+brows, and the jarring features, to the glorious and gorgeous images
+which I can conjure up at my will?  Away with human beauties, to him
+whose nights are haunted with the forms of angels and wanderers from
+the stars, the spirits of all things lovely and exalted in the
+universe: the universe as it was; when to fountain, and stream, and
+hill, and to every tree which the summer clothed, was allotted the
+vigil of a Nymph! when through glade, and by waterfall, at glossy
+noontide, or under the silver stars, the forms of Godhead and Spirit
+were seen to walk; when the sculptor modelled his mighty work from the
+beauty and strength of Heaven, and the poet lay in the shade to dream
+of the Naiad and the Faun, and the Olympian dwellers whom he walked in
+rapture to behold; and the painter, not as now, shaping from shadow
+and in solitude the dim glories of his heart, caught at once his
+inspiration from the glow of earth and its living wanderers, and, lo,
+the canvas breathed!  Oh! what are the dull realities and the abortive
+offspring of this altered and humbled world--the world of meaner and
+dwarfish men--to him whose realms are peopled with visions like
+these?"
+
+And the artist, whose ardour, long excited and pent within, had at
+last thus audibly, and to Clarence's astonishment, burst forth,
+paused, as if to recall himself from his wandering enthusiasm.  Such
+moments of excitement were indeed rare with him, except when utterly
+alone, and even then, were almost invariably followed by that
+depression of spirit by which all over-wrought susceptibility is
+succeeded.  A change came over his face, like that of a cloud when the
+sunbeam which gilded leaves it; and, with a slight sigh and a subdued
+tone, he resumed,--
+
+"So, my friend, you see what our art can do even for the humblest
+professor, when I, a poor, friendless, patronless artist, can thus
+indulge myself by forgetting the present.  But I have not yet
+explained to you the attitude of my principal figure;" and Warner
+proceeded once more to detail the particulars of his intended picture.
+It must be confessed that he had chosen a fine though an arduous
+subject: it was the Trial of Charles the First; and as the painter,
+with the enthusiasm of his profession and the eloquence peculiar to
+himself, dwelt upon the various expressions of the various forms which
+that extraordinary judgment-court afforded, no wonder that Clarence
+forgot, with the artist himself, the disadvantages Warner had to
+encounter in the inexperience of an unregulated taste and an imperfect
+professional education.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+    All manners take a tincture from our own,
+    Or come discoloured through our passions shown.--POPE.
+
+What! give up liberty, property, and, as the Gazeteer says, lie down
+to be saddled with wooden shoes?--Vicar of Wakefield.
+
+There was something in the melancholy and reflective character of
+Warner resembling that of Mordaunt; had they lived in these days
+perhaps both the artist and the philosopher had been poets.  But (with
+regard to the latter) at that time poetry was not the customary vent
+for deep thought or passionate feeling.  Gray, it is true, though
+unjustly condemned as artificial and meretricious in his style, had
+infused into the scanty works which he has bequeathed to immortality a
+pathos and a richness foreign to the literature of the age; and,
+subsequently, Goldsmith, in the affecting yet somewhat enervate
+simplicity of his verse, had obtained for Poetry a brief respite from
+a school at once declamatory and powerless, and led her forth for a
+"Sunshine Holiday" into the village green and under the hawthorn
+shade.  But, though the softer and meeker feelings had struggled into
+a partial and occasional vent, those which partook more of passion and
+of thought, the deep, the wild, the fervid, were still without "the
+music of a voice."  For the after century it was reserved to restore
+what we may be permitted to call the spirit of our national
+literature; to forsake the clinquant of the French mimickers of
+classic gold; to exchange a thrice-adulterated Hippocrene for the pure
+well of Shakspeare and of Nature; to clothe philosophy in the gorgeous
+and solemn majesty of appropriate music; and to invest passion with a
+language as burning as its thought and rapid as its impulse.  At that
+time reflection found its natural channel in metaphysical inquiry or
+political speculation; both valuable, perhaps, but neither profound.
+It was a bold, and a free, and an inquisitive age, but not one in
+which thought ran over its set and stationary banks, and watered even
+the common flowers of verse: not one in which Lucretius could have
+embodied the dreams of Epicurus; Shakspeare lavished the mines of a
+superhuman wisdom upon his fairy palaces and enchanted isles; or the
+Beautifier [Wordsworth] of this common earth have called forth
+
+    "The motion of the spirit that impels
+     All thinking things, all objects of all thought;"
+
+or Disappointment and Satiety have hallowed their human griefs by a
+pathos wrought from whatever is magnificent and grand and lovely in
+the unknown universe; or the speculations of a great but visionary
+mind [Shelley] have raised, upon subtlety and doubt, a vast and
+irregular pile of verse, full of dim-lighted cells, and winding
+galleries, in which what treasures lie concealed!  That was an age in
+which poetry took one path and contemplation another; those who were
+addicted to the latter pursued it in its orthodox roads; and many,
+whom Nature, perhaps intended for poets, the wizard Custom converted
+into speculators or critics.
+
+It was this which gave to Algernon's studies their peculiar hue;
+while, on the other hand, the taste for the fine arts which then
+universally prevailed, directed to the creations of painting, rather
+than those of poetry, more really congenial to his powers, the intense
+imagination and passion for glory which marked and pervaded the
+character of the artist.
+
+But as we have seen that that passion for glory made the great
+characteristic difference between Clarence and Warner, so also did
+that passion terminate any resemblance which Warner bore to Algernon
+Mordaunt.  With the former a rank and unwholesome plant, it grew up to
+the exclusion of all else; with the latter, subdued and regulated, it
+sheltered, not withered, the virtues by which it was surrounded.  With
+Warner, ambition was a passionate desire to separate himself by fame
+from the herd of other men; with Mordaunt, to bind himself by charity
+yet closer to his kind: with the one, it produced a disgust to his
+species; with the other, a pity and a love: with the one, power was
+the badge of distinction; with the other, the means to bless!  But our
+story lingers.
+
+It was now the custom of Warner to spend the whole day at his work,
+and wander out with Clarence, when the evening darkened, to snatch a
+brief respite of exercise and air.  Often, along the lighted and
+populous streets, would the two young and unfriended competitors for
+this world's high places roam with the various crowd, moralizing as
+they went or holding dim conjecture upon their destinies to be.  And
+often would they linger beneath the portico of some house where,
+"haunted with great resort," Pleasure and Pomp held their nightly
+revels, to listen to the music that, through the open windows, stole
+over the rare exotics with which wealth mimics the southern scents,
+and floated, mellowing by distance, along the unworthy streets; and
+while they stood together, silent and each feeding upon separate
+thoughts, the artist's pale lip would curl with scorn, as he heard the
+laugh and the sounds of a frivolous and hollow mirth ring from the
+crowd within, and startle the air from the silver spell which music
+had laid upon it.  "These," would he say to Clarence, "these are the
+dupes of the same fever as ourselves: like us, they strive and toil
+and vex their little lives for a distinction from their race.
+Ambition comes to them, as to all: but they throw for a different
+prize than we do; theirs is the honour of a day, ours is immortality;
+yet they take the same labour and are consumed by the same care.  And,
+fools that they are, with their gilded names and their gaudy
+trappings, they would shrink in disdain from that comparison with us
+which we, with a juster fastidiousness, blush at this moment to
+acknowledge."
+
+From these scenes they would rove on, and, both delighting in
+contrast, enter some squalid and obscure quarter of the city.  There,
+one night, quiet observers of their kind, they paused beside a group
+congregated together by some common cause of obscene merriment or
+unholy fellowship--a group on which low vice had set her sordid and
+hideous stamp--to gaze and draw strange humours or a motley moral from
+that depth and ferment of human nature into whose sink the thousand
+streams of civilization had poured their dregs and offal.
+
+"You survey these," said the painter, marking each with the curious
+eye of his profession: "they are a base horde, it is true; but they
+have their thirst of fame, their aspirations even in the abyss of
+crime or the loathsomeness of famished want.  Down in yon cellar,
+where a farthing rushlight glimmers upon haggard cheeks, distorted
+with the idiotcy of drink; there, in that foul attic, from whose
+casement you see the beggar's rags hang to dry, or rather to crumble
+in the reeking and filthy air; farther on, within those walls which,
+black and heavy as the hearts they hide, close our miserable
+prospect,--there, even there, in the mildewed dungeon, in the felon's
+cell, on the very scaffold's self, Ambition hugs her own hope or
+scowls upon her own despair.  Yes! the inmates of those walls had
+their perilous game of honour, their 'hazard of the die,' in which
+vice was triumph and infamy success.  We do but share their passion,
+though we direct it to a better object."
+
+Pausing for a moment, as his thoughts flowed into a somewhat different
+channel of his character, Warner continued, "We have now caught a
+glimpse of the two great divisions of mankind; they who riot in
+palaces, and they who make mirth hideous in rags and hovels: own that
+it is but a poor survey in either.  Can we be contemptible with these
+or loathsome with those?  Or rather have we not a nobler spark within
+us, which we have but to fan into a flame that shall burn forever,
+when these miserable meteors sink into the corruption from which they
+rise?"
+
+"But," observed Clarence, "these are the two extremes; the pinnacle of
+civilization, too worn and bare for any more noble and vigorous fruit,
+and the base upon which the cloud descends in rain and storm.  Look to
+the central portion of society; there the soil is more genial, and its
+produce more rich."
+
+"Is it so, in truth?" answered Warner; "pardon me, I believe not: the
+middling classes are as human as the rest. There is the region, the
+heart, of Avarice,--systematized, spreading, rotting, the very fungus
+and leprosy of social states; suspicion, craft, hypocrisy, servility
+to the great, oppression to the low, the waxlike mimicry of courtly
+vices, the hardness of flint to humble woes; thought, feeling, the
+faculties and impulses of man, all ulcered into one great canker,
+Gain,--these make the general character of the middling class, the
+unleavened mass of that mediocrity which it has been the wisdom of the
+shallow to applaud.  Pah! we too are of this class, this potter's
+earth, this paltry mixture of mud and stone; but we, my friend, we
+will knead gold into our clay."
+
+"But look," said Clarence, pointing to the group before them, "look,
+yon wretched mother, whose voice an instant ago uttered the coarsest
+accents of maudlin and intoxicated prostitution, is now fostering her
+infant, with a fondness stamped upon her worn cheek and hollow eye,
+which might shame the nice maternity of nobles; and there, too, yon
+wretch whom, in the reckless effrontery of hardened abandonment, we
+ourselves heard a few minutes since boast of his dexterity in theft,
+and openly exhibit its token,--look, he is now, with a Samaritan's own
+charity, giving the very goods for which his miserable life was risked
+to that attenuated and starving stripling!  No, Warner, no! even this
+mass is not unleavened.  The vilest infamy is not too deep for the
+Seraph Virtue to descend and illumine its abyss!"
+
+"Out on the weak fools!" said the artist, bitterly: "it would be
+something, if they could be consistent even in crime!" and, placing
+his arm in Linden's, he drew him away.
+
+As the picture grew beneath the painter's hand, Clarence was much
+struck with the outline and expression of countenance given to the
+regicide Bradshaw.
+
+"They are but an imperfect copy of the living original from whom I
+have borrowed them," said Warner, in answer to Clarence's remark upon
+the sternness of the features.  "But that original--a relation of
+mine, is coming here to-day: you shall see him."
+
+While Warner was yet speaking, the person in question entered.  His
+were, indeed, the form and face worthy to be seized by the painter.
+The peculiarity of his character made him affect a plainness of dress
+unusual to the day, and approaching to the simplicity, but not the
+neatness, of Quakerism.  His hair--then, with all the better ranks, a
+principal object of cultivation--was wild, dishevelled, and, in wiry
+flakes of the sablest hue, rose abruptly from a forehead on which
+either thought or passion had written its annals with an iron pen; the
+lower part of the brow, which overhung the eye, was singularly sharp
+and prominent; while the lines, or rather furrows, traced under the
+eyes and nostrils, spoke somewhat of exhaustion and internal fatigue.
+But this expression was contrasted and contradicted by the firmly
+compressed lip; the lighted, steady, stern eye; the resolute and even
+stubborn front, joined to proportions strikingly athletic and a
+stature of uncommon height.
+
+"Well, Wolfe," said the young painter to the person we have described,
+"it is indeed a kindness to give me a second sitting."
+
+"Tusk, boy!" answered Wolfe, "all men have their vain points, and I
+own that I am not ill pleased that these rugged features should be
+assigned, even in fancy, to one of the noblest of those men who judged
+the mightiest cause in which a country was ever plaintiff, a tyrant
+criminal, and a world witness!"  While Wolfe was yet speaking his
+countenance, so naturally harsh, took a yet sterner aspect, and the
+artist, by a happy touch, succeeded in transferring it to the canvas.
+
+"But, after all," continued Wolfe, "it shames me to lend aid to an art
+frivolous in itself, and almost culpable in times when Freedom wants
+the head to design, and perhaps the hand to execute, far other and
+nobler works than the blazoning of her past deeds upon perishable
+canvas."
+
+A momentary anger at the slight put upon his art crossed the pale brow
+of the artist; but he remembered the character of the man and
+continued his work in silence.  "You consider then, sir, that these
+are times in which liberty is attacked?" said Clarence.
+
+"Attacked!" repeated Wolfe,--" attacked!" and then suddenly sinking
+his voice into a sort of sneer, "why, since the event which this
+painting is designed to commemorate, I know not if we have ever had
+one solitary gleam of liberty break along the great chaos of jarring
+prejudice and barbarous law which we term forsooth a glorious
+constitution.  Liberty attacked! no, boy; but it is a time when
+liberty may be gained."
+
+Perfectly unacquainted with the excited politics of the day, or the
+growing and mighty spirit which then stirred through the minds of men,
+Clarence remained silent; but his evident attention flattered the
+fierce republican, and he proceeded.
+
+"Ay," he said slowly, and as if drinking in a deep and stern joy from
+his conviction in the truth of the words he uttered,--"ay, I have
+wandered over the face of the earth, and I have warmed my soul at the
+fires which lay hidden under its quiet surface; I have been in the
+city and the desert,--the herded and banded crimes of the Old World,
+and the scattered but bold hearts which are found among the savannahs
+of the New; and in either I have beheld that seed sown which, from a
+mustard grain, too scanty for a bird's beak, shall grow up to be a
+shelter and a home for the whole family of man.  I have looked upon
+the thrones of kings, and lo, the anointed ones were in purple and
+festive pomp; and I looked beneath the thrones, and I saw Want and
+Hunger, and despairing Wrath gnawing the foundations away.  I have
+stood in the streets of that great city where Mirth seems to hold an
+eternal jubilee, and beheld the noble riot while the peasant starved;
+and the priest built altars to Mammon, piled from the earnings of
+groaning Labour and cemented with blood and tears.  But I looked
+farther, and saw, in the rear, chains sharpened into swords, misery
+ripening into justice, and famine darkening into revenge; and I
+laughed as I beheld, for I knew that the day of the oppressed was at
+hand."
+
+Somewhat awed by the prophetic tone, though revolted by what seemed to
+him the novelty and the fierceness of the sentiments of the
+republican, Clarence, after a brief pause, said,--
+
+"And what of our own country?"
+
+Wolfe's brow darkened.  "The oppression here," said he, "has not been
+so weighty, therefore the reaction will be less strong; the parties
+are more blended, therefore their separation will be more arduous; the
+extortion is less strained, therefore the endurance will be more meek;
+but, soon or late, the struggle must come: bloody will it be, if the
+strife be even; gentle and lasting, if the people predominate."
+
+"And if the rulers be the strongest?" said Clarence.
+
+"The struggle will be renewed," replied Wolfe, doggedly.
+
+"You  still attend those oratorical meetings, cousin, I think?" said
+Warner.
+
+"I do," said Wolfe; "and if you are not so utterly absorbed in your
+vain and idle art as to be indifferent to all things nobler, you will
+learn yourself to take interest in what concerns--I will not say your
+country, but mankind.  For you, young man" (and the republican turned
+to Clarence), "I would fain hope that life has not already been
+diverted from the greatest of human objects; if so, come to-morrow
+night to our assembly, and learn from worthier lips than mine the
+precepts and the hopes for which good men live or die."
+
+"I will come at all events to listen, if not to learn," said Clarence,
+eagerly, for his curiosity was excited.  And the republican, having
+now fulfilled the end of his visit, rose and departed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+    Bound to suffer persecution
+    And martyrdom with resolution,
+    T'oppose himself against the hate
+    And vengeance of the incensed state.--Hudibras.
+
+Born of respectable though not wealthy parents, John Wolfe was one of
+those fiery and daring spirits which, previous to some mighty
+revolution, Fate seems to scatter over various parts of the earth,
+even those removed from the predestined explosion,--heralds of the
+events in which they are fitted though not fated to be actors.  The
+period at which he is presented to the reader was one considerably
+prior to that French Revolution so much debated and so little
+understood.  But some such event, though not foreseen by the common,
+had been already foreboded by the more enlightened, eye; and Wolfe,
+from a protracted residence in France among the most discontented of
+its freer spirits, had brought hope to that burning enthusiasm which
+had long made the pervading passion of his existence.
+
+Bold to ferocity, generous in devotion to folly in self-sacrifice,
+unflinching in his tenets to a degree which rendered their ardour
+ineffectual to all times, because utterly inapplicable to the present,
+Wolfe was one of those zealots whose very virtues have the semblance
+of vice, and whose very capacities for danger become harmless from the
+rashness of their excess.
+
+It was not among the philosophers and reasoners of France that Wolfe
+had drawn strength to his opinions: whatever such companions might
+have done to his tenets, they would at least have moderated his
+actions.  The philosopher may aid or expedite a change; but never does
+the philosopher in any age or of any sect countenance a crime.  But of
+philosophers Wolfe knew little, and probably despised them for their
+temperance: it was among fanatics--ignorant, but imaginative--that he
+had strengthened the love without comprehending the nature of
+republicanism.  Like Lucian's painter, whose flattery portrayed the
+one-eyed prince in profile, he viewed only that side of the question
+in which there was no defect, and gave beauty to the whole by
+concealing the half.  Thus, though on his return to England herding
+with the common class of his reforming brethren, Wolfe possessed many
+peculiarities and distinctions of character which, in rendering him
+strikingly adapted to the purpose of the novelist, must serve as a
+caution to the reader not to judge of the class by the individual.
+
+With a class of Republicans in England there was a strong tendency to
+support their cause by reasoning.  With Wolfe, whose mind was little
+wedded to logic, all was the offspring of turbulent feelings, which,
+in rejecting argument, substituted declamation for syllogism.  This
+effected a powerful and irreconcilable distinction between Wolfe and
+the better part of his comrades; for the habits of cool reasoning,
+whether true or false, are little likely to bias the mind towards
+those crimes to which Wolfe's unregulated emotions might possibly urge
+him, and give to the characters to which they are a sort of common
+denominator something of method and much of similarity.  But the
+feelings--those orators which allow no calculation and baffle the
+tameness of comparison--rendered Wolfe alone, unique, eccentric in
+opinion or action, whether of vice or virtue.
+
+Private ties frequently moderate the ardour of our public enthusiasm.
+Wolfe had none.  His nearest relation was Warner, and it may readily
+be supposed that with the pensive and contemplative artist he had very
+little in common.  He had never married, nor had ever seemed to wander
+from his stern and sterile path, in the most transient pursuit of the
+pleasures of sense.  Inflexibly honest, rigidly austere,--in his moral
+character his bitterest enemies could detect no flaw,--poor, even to
+indigence, he had invariably refused all overtures of the government;
+thrice imprisoned and heavily fined for his doctrines, no fear of a
+future, no remembrance of the past punishment could ever silence his
+bitter eloquence or moderate the passion of his distempered zeal;
+kindly, though rude, his scanty means were ever shared by the less
+honest and disinterested followers of his faith; and he had been known
+for days to deprive himself of food, and for nights of shelter, for
+the purpose of yielding food and shelter to another.
+
+Such was the man doomed to forsake, through a long and wasted life,
+every substantial blessing, in pursuit of a shadowy good; with the
+warmest benevolence in his heart, to relinquish private affections,
+and to brood even to madness over public offences; to sacrifice
+everything in a generous though erring devotion for that freedom whose
+cause, instead of promoting, he was calculated to retard; and, while
+he believed himself the martyr of a high and uncompromising virtue, to
+close his career with the greatest of human crimes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+Faith, methinks his humour is good, and his purse will buy good
+company.--The Parson's Wedding.
+
+When Clarence returned home, after the conversation recorded in our
+last chapter, he found a note from Talbot, inviting him to meet some
+friends of the latter at supper that evening.  It was the first time
+Clarence had been asked, and he looked forward with some curiosity and
+impatience to the hour appointed in the note.
+
+It is impossible to convey any idea of the jealous rancour felt by Mr.
+and Mrs. Copperas on hearing of this distinction,--a distinction which
+"the perfect courtier" had never once bestowed upon themselves.
+
+Mrs. Copperas tossed her head, too indignant for words; and the stock-
+jobber, in the bitterness of his soul, affirmed, with a meaning air,
+"that he dared say, after all, that the old gentleman was not so rich
+as he gave out."
+
+On entering Talbot's drawing-room, Clarence found about seven or eight
+people assembled; their names, in proclaiming the nature of the party,
+indicated that the aim of the host was to combine aristocracy and
+talent.  The literary acquirements and worldly tact of Talbot, joined
+to the adventitious circumstances of birth and fortune, enabled him to
+effect this object, so desirable in polished society, far better than
+we generally find it effected now.  The conversation of these guests
+was light and various.  The last bon mot of Chesterfield, the last
+sarcasm of Horace Walpole, Goldsmith's "Traveller," Shenstone's
+"Pastorals," and the attempt of Mrs. Montagu to bring Shakspeare into
+fashion,--in all these subjects the graceful wit and exquisite taste
+of Talbot shone pre-eminent; and he had almost succeeded in convincing
+a profound critic that Gray was a poet more likely to live than Mason,
+when the servant announced supper.
+
+That was the age of suppers!  Happy age!  Meal of ease and mirth; when
+Wine and Night lit the lamp of Wit!  Oh, what precious things were
+said and looked at those banquets of the soul!  There epicurism was in
+the lip as well as the palate, and one had humour for a hors d'oeuvre
+and repartee for an entremet.  At dinner there is something too
+pompous, too formal, for the true ease of Table Talk.  One's
+intellectual appetite, like the physical, is coarse but dull.  At
+dinner one is fit only for eating; after dinner only for politics.
+But supper was a glorious relic of the ancients.  The bustle of the
+day had thoroughly wound up the spirit, and every stroke upon the
+dial-plate of wit was true to the genius of the hour.  The wallet of
+diurnal anecdote was full, and craved unloading.  The great meal--that
+vulgar first love of the appetite--was over, and one now only
+flattered it into coquetting with another.  The mind, disengaged and
+free, was no longer absorbed in a cutlet or burdened with a joint.
+The gourmand carried the nicety of his physical perception to his
+moral, and applauded a bon mot instead of a bonne bouche.
+
+Then, too, one had no necessity to keep a reserve of thought for the
+after evening; supper was the final consummation, the glorious funeral
+pyre of day.  One could be merry till bedtime without an interregnum.
+Nay, if in the ardour of convivialism one did,--I merely hint at the
+possibility of such an event,--if one did exceed the narrow limits of
+strict ebriety, and open the heart with a ruby key, one had nothing to
+dread from the cold, or, what is worse, the warm looks of ladies in
+the drawing-room; no fear that an imprudent word, in the amatory
+fondness of the fermented blood, might expose one to matrimony and
+settlements.  There was no tame, trite medium of propriety and
+suppressed confidence, no bridge from board to bed, over which a false
+step (and your wine-cup is a marvellous corrupter of ambulatory
+rectitude) might precipitate into an irrecoverable abyss of perilous
+communication or unwholesome truth.  One's pillow became at once the
+legitimate and natural bourne to "the overheated brain;" and the
+generous rashness of the coenatorial reveller was not damped by
+untimeous caution or ignoble calculation.
+
+But "we have changed all that now."  Sobriety has become the successor
+of suppers; the great ocean of moral encroachment has not left us one
+little island of refuge.  Miserable supper-lovers that we are, like
+the native Indians of America, a scattered and daily disappearing
+race, we wander among strange customs, and behold the innovating and
+invading Dinner spread gradually over the very space of time in which
+the majesty of Supper once reigned undisputed and supreme!
+
+              O, ye heavens, be kind,
+    And feel, thou earth, for this afflicted race.--WORDSWORTH.
+
+As he was sitting down to the table, Clarence's notice was arrested by
+a somewhat suspicious and unpleasing occurrence.  The supper room was
+on the ground floor, and, owing to the heat of the weather, one of the
+windows, facing the small garden, was left open.  Through this window
+Clarence distinctly saw the face of a man look into the room for one
+instant, with a prying and curious gaze, and then as instantly
+disappear.  As no one else seemed to remark this incident, and the
+general attention was somewhat noisily engrossed by the subject of
+conversation, Clarence thought it not worth while to mention a
+circumstance for which the impertinence of any neighbouring servant or
+drunken passer-by might easily account.  An apprehension, however, of
+a more unpleasant nature shot across him, as his eye fell upon the
+costly plate which Talbot rather ostentatiously displayed, and then
+glanced to the single and aged servant, who was, besides his master,
+the only male inmate of the house.  Nor could he help saying to
+Talbot, in the course of the evening, that he wondered he was not
+afraid of hoarding so many articles of value in a house at once so
+lonely and ill guarded.
+
+"Ill guarded!" said Talbot, rather affronted, "why, I and my servant
+always sleep here!"
+
+To this Clarence thought it neither prudent nor well-bred to offer
+further remark.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+    Meetings or public calls he never missed,
+    To dictate often, always to assist.
+          .     .     .     .     .
+    To his experience and his native sense,
+    He joined a bold, imperious eloquence;
+    The grave, stern look of men informed and wise,
+    A full command of feature, heart and eyes,
+    An awe-compelling frown, and fear-inspiring size.--CRABBE.
+
+The next evening Clarence, mindful of Wolfe's invitation, inquired
+from Warner (who repaid the contempt of the republican for the
+painter's calling by a similar feeling for the zealot's) the direction
+of the oratorical meeting, and repaired there alone.  It was the most
+celebrated club (of that description) of the day, and well worth
+attending, as a gratification to the curiosity, if not an improvement
+to the mind.
+
+On entering, he found himself in a long room, tolerably well lighted,
+and still better filled.  The sleepy countenances of the audience, the
+whispered conversation carried on at scattered intervals, the listless
+attitudes of some, the frequent yawns of others, the eagerness with
+which attention was attracted to the opening door, when it admitted
+some new object of interest, the desperate resolution with which some
+of the more energetic turned themselves towards the orator, and then,
+with a faint shake of the head, turned themselves again hopelessly
+away,--were all signs that denoted that no very eloquent declaimer was
+in possession of the "house."  It was, indeed, a singularly dull,
+monotonous voice which, arising from the upper end of the room,
+dragged itself on towards the middle, and expired with a sighing sound
+before it reached the end.  The face of the speaker suited his vocal
+powers; it was small, mean, and of a round stupidity, without anything
+even in fault that could possibly command attention or even the
+excitement of disapprobation: the very garments of the orator seemed
+dull and heavy, and, like the Melancholy of Milton, had a "leaden
+look."  Now and then some words, more emphatic than others,--stones
+breaking, as it were with a momentary splash, the stagnation of the
+heavy stream,--produced from three very quiet, unhappy-looking persons
+seated next to the speaker, his immediate friends, three single
+isolated "hears!"
+
+    "The force of friendship could no further go."
+
+At last, the orator having spoken through, suddenly stopped; the whole
+meeting seemed as if a weight had been taken from it; there was a
+general buzz of awakened energy, each stretched his limbs, and
+resettled himself in his place,--
+
+    "And turning to his neighbour said,
+                'Rejoice!'"
+
+A pause ensued, the chairman looked round, the eyes of the meeting
+followed those of the president, with a universal and palpable
+impatience, towards an obscure corner of the room: the pause deepened
+for one moment, and then was broken; a voice cried "Wolfe!" and at
+that signal the whole room shook with the name.  The place which
+Clarence had taken did not allow him to see the object of these cries,
+till he rose from his situation, and, passing two rows of benches,
+stood forth in the middle space of the room; then, from one to one
+went round the general roar of applause; feet stamped, hands clapped,
+umbrellas set their sharp points to the ground, and walking-sticks
+thumped themselves out of shape in the universal clamour.  Tall,
+gaunt, and erect, the speaker possessed, even in the mere proportions
+of his frame, that physical power which never fails, in a popular
+assembly, to gain attention to mediocrity and to throw dignity over
+faults.  He looked very slowly round the room, remaining perfectly
+still and motionless, till the clamour of applause had entirely
+subsided, and every ear, Clarence's no less eagerly than the rest, was
+strained, and thirsting to catch the first syllables of his voice.
+
+It was then with a low, very deep, and somewhat hoarse tone, that he
+began; and it was not till he had spoken for several minutes that the
+iron expression of his face altered, that the drooping hand was
+raised, and that the suppressed, yet powerful, voice began to expand
+and vary in its volume.  He had then entered upon a new department of
+his subject.  The question was connected with the English
+constitution, and Wolfe was now preparing to put forth, in long and
+blackened array, the alleged evils of an aristocratical form of
+government.  Then it was as if the bile and bitterness of years were
+poured forth in a terrible and stormy wrath,--then his action became
+vehement, and his eye flashed forth unutterable fire: his voice,
+solemn, swelling, and increasing with each tone in its height and
+depth, filled, as with something palpable and perceptible, the shaking
+walls.  The listeners,--a various and unconnected group, bound by no
+tie of faith or of party, many attracted by curiosity, many by the
+hope of ridicule, some abhorring the tenets expressed, and nearly all
+disapproving their principles or doubting their wisdom,--the
+listeners, certainly not a group previously formed or moulded into
+enthusiasm, became rapt and earnest; their very breath forsook them.
+
+Linden had never before that night heard a public speaker; but he was
+of a thoughtful and rather calculating mind, and his early habits of
+decision, and the premature cultivation of his intellect, rendered him
+little susceptible, in general, to the impressions of the vulgar:
+nevertheless, in spite of himself, he was hurried away by the stream,
+and found that the force and rapidity of the speaker did not allow him
+even time for the dissent and disapprobation which his republican
+maxims and fiery denunciations perpetually excited in a mind
+aristocratic both by creed and education.  At length after a
+peroration of impetuous and magnificent invective, the orator ceased.
+
+In the midst of the applause that followed, Clarence left the
+assembly; he could not endure the thought that any duller or more
+commonplace speaker should fritter away the spell which yet bound and
+engrossed his spirit.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+At the bottom of the staircase was a small door, which gave way before
+Nigel, as he precipitated himself upon the scene of action, a cocked
+pistol in one hand, etc.--Fortunes of Nigel.
+
+The night, though not utterly dark, was rendered capricious and dim by
+alternate wind and rain; and Clarence was delayed in his return
+homeward by seeking occasional shelter from the rapid and heavy
+showers which hurried by.  It was during one of the temporary
+cessations of the rain that he reached Copperas Bower; and, while he
+was searching in his pockets for the key which was to admit him, he
+observed two men loitering about his neighbour's house.  The light was
+not sufficient to give him more than a scattered and imperfect view of
+their motions.  Somewhat alarmed, he stood for several moments at the
+door, watching them as well as he was able; nor did he enter the house
+till the loiterers had left their suspicious position, and, walking
+onwards, were hid entirely from him by the distance and darkness.
+
+"It really is a dangerous thing for Talbot," thought Clarence, as he
+ascended to his apartment, "to keep so many valuables, and only one
+servant, and that one as old as himself too.  However, as I am by no
+means sleepy, and my room is by no means cool, I may as well open my
+window, and see if those idle fellows make their re-appearance."
+Suiting the action to the thought, Clarence opened his little
+casement, and leaned wistfully out.
+
+He had no light in his room, for none was ever left for him.  This
+circumstance, however, of course enabled him the better to penetrate
+the dimness and haze of the night; and, by the help of the fluttering
+lamps, he was enabled to take a general though not minute survey of
+the scene below.
+
+I think I have before said that there was a garden between Talbot's
+house and Copperas Bower; this was bounded by a wall, which confined
+Talbot's peculiar territory of garden, and this wall, describing a
+parallelogram, faced also the road.  It contained two entrances,--one
+the principal adytus, in the shape of a comely iron gate, the other a
+wooden door, which, being a private pass, fronted the intermediate
+garden before mentioned and was exactly opposite to Clarence's window.
+
+Linden had been more than ten minutes at his post, and had just begun
+to think his suspicions without foundation and his vigil in vain, when
+he observed the same figures he had seen before advance slowly from
+the distance and pause by the front gate of Talbot's mansion.
+
+Alarmed and anxious, he redoubled his attention; he stretched himself,
+as far as his safety would permit, out of the window; the lamps,
+agitated by the wind, which swept by in occasional gusts, refused to
+grant to his straining sight more than an inaccurate and unsatisfying
+survey.  Presently, a blast, more violent than ordinary, suspended as
+it were the falling columns of rain and left Clarence in almost total
+darkness; it rolled away, and the momentary calm which ensued enabled
+him to see that one of the men was stooping by the gate, and the other
+standing apparently on the watch at a little distance.  Another gust
+shook the lamps and again obscured his view; and when it had passed
+onward in its rapid course, the men had left the gate, and were in the
+garden beneath his window.  They crept cautiously, but swiftly, along
+the opposite wall, till they came to the small door we have before
+mentioned; here they halted, and one of them appeared to occupy
+himself in opening the door.  Now, then, fear was changed into
+certainty, and it seemed without doubt that the men, having found some
+difficulty or danger in forcing the stronger or more public entrance,
+had changed their quarter of attack.  No more time was to be lost;
+Clarence shouted aloud, but the high wind probably prevented the sound
+reaching the ears of the burglars, or at least rendered it dubious and
+confused.  The next moment, and before Clarence could repeat his
+alarm, they had opened the door, and were within the neighbouring
+garden, beyond his view.  Very young men, unless their experience has
+outstripped their youth, seldom have much presence of mind; that
+quality, which is the opposite to surprise, comes to us in those years
+when nothing seems to us strange or unexpected.  But a much older man
+than Clarence might have well been at a loss to know what conduct to
+adopt in the situation in which our hero was placed.  The visits of
+the watchman to that (then) obscure and ill-inhabited neighborhood
+were more regulated by his indolence than his duty; and Clarence knew
+that it would be in vain to listen for his cry or tarry for his
+assistance.  He himself was utterly unarmed, but the stock-jobber had
+a pair of horse-pistols, and as this recollection flashed upon him,
+the pause of deliberation ceased.
+
+With a swift step he descended the first flight of stairs, and pausing
+at the chamber door of the faithful couple, knocked upon its panels
+with a loud and hasty summons.  The second repetition of the noise
+produced the sentence, uttered in a very trembling voice, of "Who's
+there?"
+
+"It is I, Clarence Linden," replied our hero; "lose no time in opening
+the door."
+
+This answer seemed to reassure the valorous stock-jobber.  He slowly
+undid the bolt, and turned the key.
+
+"In Heaven's name, what do you want, Mr. Linden?" said he.
+
+"Ay," cried a sharp voice from the more internal recesses of the
+chamber, "what do you want, sir, disturbing us in the bosom of our
+family and at the dead of night?"
+
+With a rapid voice, Clarence repeated what he had seen, and requested
+the broker to accompany him to Talbot's house, or at least to lend him
+his pistols.
+
+"He shall do no such thing," cried Mrs. Copperas.  "Come here, Mr. C.,
+and shut the door directly."
+
+"Stop, my love," said the stock-jobber, "stop a moment."
+
+"For God's sake," cried Clarence, "make no delay; the poor old man may
+be murdered by this time."
+
+"It's no business of mine," said the stock-jobber.  "If Adolphus had
+not broken the rattle I would not have minded the trouble of springing
+it; but you are very much mistaken if you think I am going to leave my
+warm bed in order to have my throat cut."
+
+"Then give me your pistols," cried Clarence; "I will go alone."
+
+"I shall commit no such folly," said the stock-jobber; "if you are
+murdered, I may have to answer it to your friends and pay for your
+burial.  Besides, you owe us for your lodgings: go to your bed, young
+man, as I shall to mine."  And, so saying, Mr. Copperas proceeded to
+close the door.
+
+But enraged at the brutality of the man and excited by the urgency of
+the case, Clarence did not allow him so peaceable a retreat.  With a
+strong and fierce grasp, he seized the astonished Copperas by the
+throat, and shaking him violently, forced his own entrance into the
+sacred nuptial chamber.
+
+"By Heaven," cried Linden, in a savage and stern tone, for his blood
+was up.  "I will twist your coward's throat, and save the murderer his
+labour, if you do not instantly give me up your pistols."
+
+The stock-jobber was panic-stricken.  "Take them," he cried, in the
+extremest terror; "there they are on the chimney-piece close by."
+
+"Are they primed and loaded?" said Linden, not relaxing his gripe.
+
+"Yes, yes!" said the stock-jobber, "loose my throat, or you will choke
+me!" and at that instant, Clarence felt himself clasped by the
+invading hands of Mrs. Copperas.
+
+"Call off your wife," said he, "or I will choke you!" and he tightened
+his hold, "and tell her to give me the pistols."
+
+The next moment Mrs. Copperas extended the debated weapons towards
+Clarence.  He seized them, flung the poor stock-jobber against the
+bedpost, hurried down stairs, opened the back door, which led into the
+garden, flew across the intervening space, arrived at the door, and
+entering Talbot's garden, paused to consider what was the next step to
+be taken.
+
+A person equally brave as Clarence, but more cautious, would not have
+left the house without alarming Mr. de Warens, even in spite of the
+failure with his master; but Linden only thought of the pressure of
+time and the necessity of expedition, and he would have been a very
+unworthy hero of romance had he felt fear for two antagonists, with a
+brace of pistols at his command and a high and good action in view.
+
+After a brief but decisive halt, he proceeded rapidly round the house,
+in order to ascertain at which part the ruffians had admitted
+themselves, should they (as indeed there was little doubt) have
+already effected their entrance.
+
+He found the shutters of one of the principal rooms on the ground-
+floor had been opened, and through the aperture he caught the glimpse
+of a moving light, which was suddenly obscured.  As he was about to
+enter, the light again flashed out: he drew back just in time,
+carefully screened himself behind the shutter, and, through one of the
+chinks, observed what passed within.  Opposite to the window was a
+door which conducted to the hall and principal staircase; this door
+was open, and in the hall at the foot of the stairs Clarence saw two
+men; one carried a dark lantern, from which the light proceeded, and
+some tools, of the nature of which Clarence was naturally ignorant:
+this was a middle-sized muscular man, dressed in the rudest garb of an
+ordinary labourer; the other was much taller and younger, and his
+dress was of a rather less ignoble fashion.
+
+"Hist! hist!" said the taller one, in a low tone, "did you not hear a
+noise, Ben?"
+
+"Not a pin fall; but stow your whids, man!"
+
+This was all that Clarence heard in a connected form; but as the
+wretches paused, in evident doubt how to proceed, he caught two or
+three detached words, which his ingenuity readily formed into
+sentences.  "No, no! sleeps to the left--old man above--plate chest;
+we must have the blunt too.  Come, track up the dancers, and douse the
+glim."  And at the last words the light was extinguished, and
+Clarence's quick and thirsting ear just caught their first steps on
+the stairs; they died away, and all was hushed.
+
+It had several times occurred to Clarence to rush from his hiding-
+place, and fire at the ruffians, and perhaps that measure would have
+been the wisest he could have taken; but Clarence had never discharged
+a pistol in his life, and he felt, therefore, that his aim must be
+uncertain enough to render a favourable position and a short distance
+essential requisites.  Both these were, at present, denied to him; and
+although he saw no weapons about the persons of the villains, yet he
+imagined they would not have ventured on so dangerous an expedition
+without firearms; and if he failed, as would have been most probable,
+in his two shots, he concluded that, though the alarm would be given,
+his own fate would be inevitable.
+
+If this was reasoning upon false premises, for housebreakers seldom or
+never carry loaded firearms, and never stay for revenge, when their
+safety demands escape, Clarence may be forgiven for not knowing the
+customs of housebreakers, and for not making the very best of an
+extremely novel and dangerous situation.
+
+No sooner did he find himself in total darkness than he bitterly
+reproached himself for his late backwardness, and, inwardly resolving
+not again to miss any opportunity which presented itself, he entered
+the window, groped along the room into the hall, and found his way
+very slowly and after much circumlocution to the staircase.
+
+He had just gained the summit, when a loud cry broke upon the
+stillness: it came from a distance, and was instantly hushed; but he
+caught at brief intervals, the sound of angry and threatening voices.
+Clarence bent down anxiously, in the hope that some solitary ray would
+escape through the crevice of the door within which the robbers were
+engaged.  But though the sounds came from the same floor as that on
+which he now trod, they seemed far and remote, and not a gleam of
+light broke the darkness.
+
+He continued, however, to feel his way in the direction from which the
+sounds proceeded, and soon found himself in a narrow gallery; the
+voices seemed more loud and near, as he advanced; at last he
+distinctly heard the words--
+
+"Will you not confess where it is placed?"
+
+"Indeed, indeed," replied an eager and earnest voice, which Clarence
+recognized as Talbot's, "this is all the money I have in the house,--
+the plate is above,--my servant has the key,--take it,--take all,--but
+save his life and mine."
+
+"None of your gammon," said another and rougher voice than that of the
+first speaker: "we know you have more blunt than this,--a paltry sum
+of fifty pounds, indeed!"
+
+"Hold!" cried the other ruffian, "here is a picture set with diamonds,
+that will do, Ben.  Let go the old man."
+
+Clarence was now just at hand, and probably from a sudden change in
+the position of the dark lantern within, a light abruptly broke from
+beneath the door and streamed along the passage.
+
+"No, no, no!" cried the old man, in a loud yet tremulous voice,--"no,
+not that, anything else, but I will defend that with my life."
+
+"Ben, my lad," said the ruffian, "twist the old fool's neck we have no
+more time to lose."
+
+At that very moment the door was flung violently open, and Clarence
+Linden stood within three paces of the reprobates and their prey.  The
+taller villain had a miniature in his hand, and the old man clung to
+his legs with a convulsive but impotent clasp; the other fellow had
+already his gripe upon Talbot's neck, and his right hand grasped a
+long case-knife.
+
+With a fierce and flashing eye, and a cheek deadly pale with internal
+and resolute excitement, Clarence confronted the robbers.
+
+"Thank Heaven," cried he, "I am not too late!"  And advancing yet
+another step towards the shorter ruffian, who struck mute with the
+suddenness of the apparition, still retained his grasp of the old man,
+he fired his pistol, with a steady and close aim; the ball penetrated
+the wretch's brain, and without sound or sigh, he fell down dead, at
+the very feet of his just destroyer.  The remaining robber had already
+meditated, and a second more sufficed to accomplish, his escape.  He
+sprang towards the door: the ball whizzed beside him, but touched him
+not.  With a safe and swift step, long inured to darkness, he fled
+along the passage; and Linden, satisfied with the vengeance he had
+taken upon his comrade, did not harass him with an unavailing pursuit.
+
+Clarence turned to assist Talbot.  The old man was stretched upon the
+floor insensible, but his hand grasped the miniature which the
+plunderer had dropped in his flight and terror, and his white and
+ashen lip was pressed convulsively upon the recovered treasure.
+
+Linden raised and placed him on his bed, and while employed in
+attempting to revive him, the ancient domestic, alarmed by the report
+of the pistol, came, poker in hand, to his assistance.  By little and
+little they recovered the object of their attention.  His eyes rolled
+wildly round the room, and he muttered,--"Off, off! ye shall not rob
+me of my only relic of her,--where is it?--have you got it?--the
+picture, the picture!"
+
+"It is here, sir, it is here," said the old servant; "it is in your
+own hand."
+
+Talbot's eye fell upon it; he gazed at it for some moments, pressed it
+to his lips, and then, sitting erect and looking wildly round, he
+seemed to awaken to the sense of his late danger and his present
+deliverance.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+    Ah, fleeter far than fleetest storm or steed,
+      Or the death they bear,
+    The heart which tender thought clothes like a dove
+      With the wings of care!
+    In the battle, in the darkness, in the need,
+      Shall mine cling to thee!
+    Nor claim one smile for all the comfort, love,
+      It may bring to thee!--SHELLEY.
+
+LETTER FROM ALGERNON MORDAUNT TO ISABEL ST. LEGER.
+
+You told me not to write to you.  You know how long, but not how
+uselessly I have obeyed you.  Did you think, Isabel, that my love was
+of that worldly and common order which requires a perpetual aliment to
+support it?  Did you think that, if you forbade the stream to flow
+visibly, its sources would be exhausted, and its channel dried up?
+This may be the passion of others; it is not mine.  Months have passed
+since we parted, and since then you have not seen me; this letter is
+the first token you have received from a remembrance which cannot die.
+But do you think that I have not watched and tended upon you, and
+gladdened my eyes with gazing on your beauty when you have not dreamed
+that I was by?  Ah, Isabel, your heart should have told you of it;
+mine would, had you been so near me!
+
+You receive no letters from me, it is true: think you that my hand and
+heart are therefore idle?  No.  I write to you a thousand burning
+lines: I pour out my soul to you; I tell you of all I suffer; my
+thoughts, my actions, my very dreams, are all traced upon the paper.
+I send them not to you, but I read them over and over, and when I come
+to your name, I pause and shut my eyes, and then "Fancy has her
+power," and lo! "you are by my side!"
+
+Isabel, our love has not been a holiday and joyous sentiment; but I
+feel a solemn and unalterable conviction that our union is ordained.
+
+Others have many objects to distract and occupy the thoughts which are
+once forbidden a single direction, but we have none.  At least, to me
+you are everything.  Pleasure, splendour, ambition, all are merged
+into one great and eternal thought, and that is you!
+
+Others have told me, and I believed them, that I was hard and cold and
+stern: so perhaps I was before I knew you, but now I am weaker and
+softer than a child.  There is a stone which is of all the hardest and
+the chillest, but when once set on fire it is unquenchable.  You smile
+at my image, perhaps, and I should smile if I saw it in the writing of
+another; for all that I have ridiculed in romance as exaggerated seems
+now to me too cool and too commonplace for reality.
+
+But this is not what I meant to write to you; you are ill, dearest and
+noblest Isabel, you are ill!  I am the cause, and you conceal it from
+me; and you would rather pine away and die than suffer me to lose one
+of those worldly advantages which are in my eyes but as dust in the
+balance,--it is in vain to deny it.  I heard from others of your
+impaired health; I have witnessed it myself.  Do you remember last
+night, when you were in the room with your relations, and they made
+you sing,--a song too which you used to sing to me, and when you came
+to the second stanza your voice failed you, and you burst into tears,
+and they, instead of soothing, reproached and chid you, and you
+answered not, but wept on?  Isabel, do you remember that a sound was
+heard at the window and a groan?  Even they were startled, but they
+thought it was the wind, for the night was dark and stormy, and they
+saw not that it was I: yes, my devoted, my generous love, it was I who
+gazed upon you, and from whose heart that voice of anguish was wrung;
+and I saw your cheek was pale and thin, and that the canker at the
+core had preyed upon the blossom.
+
+Think you, after this, that I could keep silence or obey your request?
+No, dearest, no!  Is not my happiness your object?  I have the vanity
+to believe so; and am I not the best judge how that happiness is to be
+secured?  I tell you, I say it calmly, coldly, dispassionately,--not
+from the imagination, not even from the heart, but solely from the
+reason,--that I can bear everything rather than the loss of you; and
+that if the evil of my love scathe and destroy you, I shall consider
+and curse myself as your murderer!  Save me from this extreme of
+misery, my--yes, my Isabel!  I shall be at the copse where we have so
+often met before, to-morrow, at noon.  You will meet me; and if I
+cannot convince you, I will not ask you to be persuaded.     A. M.
+
+And Isabel read this letter, and placed it at her heart, and felt less
+miserable than she had done for months; for, though she wept, there
+was sweetness in the tears which the assurance of his love and the
+tenderness of his remonstrance had called forth.  She met him: how
+could she refuse? and the struggle was past. Though not "convinced"
+she was "persuaded;" for her heart, which refused his reasonings,
+melted at his reproaches and his grief.  But she would not consent to
+unite her fate with him at once, for the evils of that step to his
+interests were immediate and near; she was only persuaded to permit
+their correspondence and occasional meetings, in which, however
+imprudent they might be for herself, the disadvantages to her lover
+were distant and remote.  It was of him only that she thought; for him
+she trembled; for him she was the coward and the woman; for herself
+she had no fears, and no forethought.
+
+And Algernon was worthy of this devoted love, and returned it as it
+was given.  Man's love, in general, is a selfish and exacting
+sentiment: it demands every sacrifice and refuses all.  But the nature
+of Mordaunt was essentially high and disinterested, and his honour,
+like his love, was not that of the world: it was the ethereal and
+spotless honour of a lofty and generous mind, the honour which custom
+can neither give nor take away; and, however impatiently he bore the
+deferring of a union, in which he deemed that he was the only
+sufferer, he would not have uttered a sigh or urged a prayer for that
+union, could it, in the minutest or remotest degree, have injured or
+degraded her.
+
+These are the hearts and natures which make life beautiful; these are
+the shrines which sanctify love; these are the diviner spirits for
+whom there is kindred and commune with everything exalted and holy in
+heaven and earth.  For them Nature unfolds her hoarded poetry and her
+hidden spells; for their steps are the lonely mountains, and the still
+woods have a murmur for their ears; for them there is strange music in
+the wave, and in the whispers of the light leaves, and rapture in the
+voices of the birds: their souls drink, and are saturated with the
+mysteries of the Universal Spirit, which the philosophy of old times
+believed to be God Himself.  They look upon the sky with a gifted
+vision, and its dove-like quiet descends and overshadows their hearts;
+the Moon and the Night are to them wells of Castalian inspiration and
+golden dreams; and it was one of them who, gazing upon the Evening
+Star, felt in the inmost sanctuary of his soul its mysterious
+harmonies with his most worshipped hope, his most passionate desire,
+and dedicated it to--LOVE.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+Maria.  Here's the brave old man's love,
+Bianca. That loves the young man.
+                  The Woman's Prize; or, The Tamer Tamed.
+
+"No, my dear Clarence, you have placed confidence in me, and it is now
+my duty to return it; you have told me your history and origin, and I
+will inform you of mine, but not yet.  At present we will talk of you.
+You have conferred upon me what our universal love of life makes us
+regard as the greatest of human obligations; and though I can bear a
+large burden of gratitude, yet I must throw off an atom or two in
+using my little power in your behalf.  Nor is this all: your history
+has also given you another tie upon my heart, and, in granting you a
+legitimate title to my good offices, removes any scruple you might
+otherwise have had in accepting them."
+
+"I have just received this letter from Lord ----, the minister for
+foreign affairs: you will see that he has appointed you to the office
+of attache at ----.  You will also oblige me by looking over this
+other letter at your earliest convenience; the trifling sum which it
+contains will be repeated every quarter; it will do very well for an
+attache: when you are an ambassador, why, we must equip you by a
+mortgage on Scarsdale; and now, my dear Clarence, tell me all about
+the Copperases."
+
+I need not say who was the speaker of the above sentences: sentences
+apparently of a very agreeable nature; nevertheless, Clarence seemed
+to think otherwise, for the tears gushed into his eyes, and he was
+unable for several moments to reply.
+
+"Come, my young friend," said Talbot, kindly; "I have no near
+relations among whom I can choose a son I like better than you, nor
+you any at present from whom you might select a more desirable father:
+consequently, you must let me look upon you as my own flesh and blood;
+and, as I intend to be a very strict and peremptory father, I expect
+the most silent and scrupulous obedience to my commands.  My first
+parental order to you is to put up those papers, and to say nothing
+more about them; for I have a great deal to talk to you about upon
+other subjects."
+
+And by these and similar kind-hearted and delicate remonstrances, the
+old man gained his point.  From that moment Clarence looked upon him
+with the grateful and venerating love of a son; and I question very
+much, if Talbot had really been the father of our hero, whether he
+would have liked so handsome a successor half so well.
+
+The day after this arrangement, Clarence paid his debt to the
+Copperases and removed to Talbot's house.  With this event commenced a
+new era in his existence: he was no longer an outcast and a wanderer;
+out of alien ties he had wrought the link of a close and even paternal
+friendship; life, brilliant in its prospects and elevated in its
+ascent, opened flatteringly before him; and the fortune and courage
+which had so well provided for the present were the best omens and
+auguries for the future.
+
+One evening, when the opening autumn had made its approaches felt, and
+Linden and his new parent were seated alone by a blazing fire, and had
+come to a full pause in their conversation, Talbot, shading his face
+with the friendly pages of the "Whitehall Evening Paper," as if to
+protect it from the heat, said,--
+
+"I told you, the other day, that I would give you, at some early
+opportunity, a brief sketch of my life.  This confidence is due to you
+in return for yours; and since you will soon leave me, and I am an old
+man, whose life no prudent calculation can fix, I may as well choose
+the present time to favour you with my confessions."
+
+Clarence expressed and looked his interest, and the old man thus
+commenced,--
+
+THE HISTORY OF A VAIN MAN.
+
+I was the favourite of my parents, for I was quick at my lessons, and
+my father said I inherited my genius from him; and comely in my
+person, and my mother said that my good looks came from her.  So the
+honest pair saw in their eldest son the union of their own
+attractions, and thought they were making much of themselves when they
+lavished their caresses upon me.  They had another son, poor Arthur,--
+I think I see him now!  He was a shy, quiet, subdued boy, of a very
+plain personal appearance.  My father and mother were vain, showy,
+ambitious people of the world, and they were as ashamed of my brother
+as they were proud of myself.  However, he afterwards entered the army
+and distinguished himself highly.  He died in battle, leaving an only
+daughter, who married, as you know, a nobleman of high rank.  Her
+subsequent fate it is now needless to relate.
+
+Petted and pampered from my childhood, I grew up with a profound
+belief in my own excellences, and a feverish and irritating desire to
+impress every one who came in my way with the same idea.  There is a
+sentence in Sir William Temple, which I have often thought of with a
+painful conviction of its truth: "A restlessness in men's minds to be
+something they are not, and to have something they have not, is the
+root of all immorality."  [And of all good.--AUTHOR.]  At school, I
+was confessedly the cleverest boy in my remove; and, what I valued
+equally as much, I was the best cricketer of the best eleven.  Here,
+then, you will say my vanity was satisfied,--no such thing!  There was
+a boy who shared my room, and was next me in the school; we were,
+therefore, always thrown together.  He was a great stupid, lubberly
+cub, equally ridiculed by the masters and disliked by the boys.  Will
+you believe that this individual was the express and almost sole
+object of my envy?  He was more than my rival, he was my superior; and
+I hated him with all the unleavened bitterness of my soul.
+
+I have said he was my superior: it was in one thing.  He could balance
+a stick, nay, a cricket-bat, a poker, upon his chin, and I could not;
+you laugh, and so can I now, but it was no subject of laughter to me
+then.  This circumstance, trifling as it may appear to you, poisoned
+my enjoyment.  The boy saw my envy, for I could not conceal it; and as
+all fools are malicious, and most fools ostentatious, he took a
+particular pride and pleasure in displaying his dexterity and showing
+off my discontent.  You can form no idea of the extent to which this
+petty insolence vexed and disquieted me.  Even in my sleep, the clumsy
+and grinning features of this tormenting imp haunted me like a
+spectre: my visions were nothing but chins and cricket-bats; walking-
+sticks, sustaining themselves upon human excrescences, and pokers
+dancing a hornpipe upon the tip of a nose.  I assure you that I have
+spent hours in secret seclusion, practising to rival my hated comrade,
+and my face--see how one vanity quarrels with another--was little
+better than a mass of bruises and discolorations.
+
+I actually became so uncomfortable as to write home, and request to
+leave the school.  I was then about sixteen, and my indulgent father,
+in granting my desire, told me that I was too old and too advanced in
+my learning to go to any other academic establishment than the
+University.  The day before I left the school, I gave, as was usually
+the custom, a breakfast to all my friends; the circumstance of my
+tormentor's sharing my room obliged me to invite him among the rest.
+However, I was in high spirits, and being a universal favourite with
+my schoolfellows, I succeeded in what was always to me an object of
+social ambition, and set the table in a roar; yet, when our festival
+was nearly expired, and I began to allude more particularly to my
+approaching departure, my vanity was far more gratified, for my
+feelings were far more touched, by observing the regret and receiving
+the good wishes of all my companions.  I still recall that hour as one
+of the proudest and happiest of my life; but it had its immediate
+reverse.  My evil demon put it into my tormentor's head to give me one
+last parting pang of jealousy.  A large umbrella happened accidentally
+to be in my room; Crompton--such was my schoolfellow's name--saw and
+seized it.  "Look here, Talbot," said he, with his taunting and
+hideous sneer, "you can't do this;" and placing the point of the
+umbrella upon his forehead, just above the eyebrow, he performed
+various antics round the room.
+
+At that moment I was standing by the fireplace, and conversing with
+two boys upon whom, above all others, I wished to leave a favourable
+impression.  My foolish soreness on this one subject had been often
+remarked; and, as I turned in abrupt and awkward discomposure from the
+exhibition, I observed my two schoolfellows smile and exchange looks.
+I am not naturally passionate, and even at that age I had in ordinary
+cases great self-command; but this observation, and the cause which
+led to it, threw me off my guard.  Whenever we are utterly under the
+command of one feeling, we cannot be said to have our reason: at that
+instant I literally believe I was beside myself.  What! in the very
+flush of the last triumph that that scene would ever afford me; amidst
+the last regrets of my early friends, to whom I fondly hoped to
+bequeath a long and brilliant remembrance, to be thus bearded by a
+contemptible rival, and triumphed over by a pitiful yet insulting
+superiority; to close my condolences with laughter; to have the final
+solemnity of my career thus terminating in mockery; and ridicule
+substituted as an ultimate reminiscence in the place of an admiring
+regret; all this, too, to be effected by one so long hated, one whom I
+was the only being forbidden the comparative happiness of despising?
+I could not brook it; the insult, the insulter, were too revolting.
+As the unhappy buffoon approached me, thrusting his distorted face
+towards mine, I seized and pushed him aside, with a brief curse and a
+violent hand.  The sharp point of the umbrella slipped; my action gave
+it impetus and weight; it penetrated his eye, and--spare me, spare me
+the rest.  [This instance of vanity, and indeed the whole of Talbot's
+history, is literally from facts.]
+
+The old man bent down, and paused for a few moments before he resumed.
+
+Crompton lost his eye, but my punishment was as severe as his.  People
+who are very vain are usually equally susceptible, and they who feel
+one thing acutely will so feel another.  For years, ay, for many years
+afterwards, the recollection of my folly goaded me with the bitterest
+and most unceasing remorse.  Had I committed murder, my conscience
+could scarce have afflicted me more severely.  I did not regain my
+self-esteem till I had somewhat repaired the injury I had done.  Long
+after that time Crompton was in prison, in great and overwhelming
+distress.  I impoverished myself to release him; I sustained him and
+his family till fortune rendered my assistance no longer necessary;
+and no triumphs were ever more sweet to me than the sacrifice I was
+forced to submit to, in order to restore him to prosperity.
+
+It is natural to hope that this accident had at least the effect of
+curing me of my fault; but it requires philosophy in yourself, or your
+advisers, to render remorse of future avail.  How could I amend my
+fault, when I was not even aware of it?  Smarting under the effects, I
+investigated not the cause, and I attributed to irascibility and
+vindictiveness what had a deeper and more dangerous origin.
+
+At college, in spite of all my advantages of birth, fortune, health,
+and intellectual acquirements, I had many things besides the one enemy
+of remorse to corrode my tranquillity of mind.  I was sure to find
+some one to excel me in something, and this was enough to embitter my
+peace.  Our living Goldsmith is my favourite poet, and I perhaps
+insensibly venerate the genius the more because I find something
+congenial in the infirmities of the man.  I can fully credit the
+anecdotes recorded of him.  I, too, could once have been jealous of a
+puppet handling a spontoon; I, too, could once have been miserable if
+two ladies at the theatre were more the objects of attention than
+myself!  You, Clarence, will not despise me for this confession; those
+who knew me less would.  Fools! there is no man so great as not to
+have some littleness more predominant than all his greatness.  Our
+virtues are the dupes, and often only the playthings, of our follies!
+smile, but it is mournfully, in looking back to that day.  Though
+rich, high-born, and good-looking, I possessed not one of these three
+qualities in that eminence which could alone satisfy my love of
+superiority and desire of effect.  I knew this somewhat humiliating
+truth, for, though vain, I was not conceited.  Vanity, indeed, is the
+very antidote to conceit; for while the former makes us all nerve to
+the opinion of others, the latter is perfectly satisfied with its
+opinion of itself.
+
+I knew this truth, and as Pope, if he could not be the greatest of
+poets, resolved to be the most correct, so I strove, since I could not
+be the handsomest, the wealthiest, and the noblest of my
+contemporaries, to excel them, at least, in the grace and
+consummateness of manner; and in this after incredible pains, after
+diligent apprenticeship in the world and intense study in the closet,
+I at last flattered myself that I had succeeded.  Of all success,
+while we are yet in the flush of youth and its capacities of
+enjoyment, I can imagine none more intoxicating or gratifying than the
+success of society, and I had certainly some years of its triumph and
+eclat.  I was courted, followed, flattered, and sought by the most
+envied and fastidious circles in England and even in Paris; for
+society, so indifferent to those who disdain it, overwhelms with its
+gratitude--profuse though brief--those who devote themselves to its
+amusement.  The victim to sameness and ennui, it offers, like the
+pallid and luxurious Roman, a reward for a new pleasure: and as long
+as our industry or talent can afford the pleasure, the reward is ours.
+At that time, then, I reaped the full harvest of my exertions: the
+disappointment and vexation were of later date.
+
+I now come to the great era of my life,--Love.  Among my acquaintance
+was Lady Mary Walden, a widow of high birth, and noble though not
+powerful connections.  She lived about twenty miles from London in a
+beautiful retreat; and, though not rich, her jointure, rendered ample
+by economy, enabled her to indulge her love of society.  Her house was
+always as full as its size would permit, and I was among the most
+welcome of its visitors.  She had an only daughter: even now, through
+the dim mists of years, that beautiful and fairy form rises still and
+shining before me, undimmed by sorrow, unfaded by time.  Caroline
+Walden was the object of general admiration, and her mother, who
+attributed the avidity with which her invitations were accepted by all
+the wits and fine gentlemen of the day to the charms of her own
+conversation, little suspected the face and wit of her daughter to be
+the magnet of attraction.  I had no idea at that time of marriage,
+still less could I have entertained such a notion, unless the step had
+greatly exalted my rank and prospects.
+
+The poor and powerless Caroline Walden was therefore the last person
+for whom I had what the jargon of mothers term "serious intentions."
+However, I was struck with her exceeding loveliness and amused by the
+vivacity of her manners; moreover, my vanity was excited by the hope
+of distancing all my competitors for the smiles of the young beauty.
+Accordingly I laid myself out to please, and neglected none of those
+subtle and almost secret attentions which, of all flatteries, are the
+most delicate and successful; and I succeeded.  Caroline loved me with
+all the earnestness and devotion which characterize the love of woman.
+It never occurred to her that I was only trifling with those
+affections which it seemed so ardently my intention to win.  She knew
+that my fortune was large enough to dispense with the necessity of
+fortune with my wife, and in birth she would have equalled men of
+greater pretensions to myself; added to this, long adulation had made
+her sensible though not vain of her attractions, and she listened with
+a credulous ear to the insinuated flatteries I was so well accustomed
+to instil.
+
+Never shall I forget--no, though I double my present years--the shock,
+the wildness of despair with which she first detected the selfishness
+of my homage; with which she saw that I had only mocked her trusting
+simplicity; and that while she had been lavishing the richest
+treasures of her heart before the burning altars of Love, my idol had
+been Vanity and my offerings deceit.  She tore herself from the
+profanation of my grasp; she shrouded herself from my presence.  All
+interviews with me were rejected; all my letters returned to me
+unopened; and though, in the repentance of my heart, I entreated, I
+urged her to accept vows that were no longer insincere, her pride
+became her punishment, as well as my own.  In a moment of bitter and
+desperate feeling; she accepted the offers of another, and made the
+marriage bond a fatal and irrevocable barrier to our reconciliation
+and union.
+
+Oh, how I now cursed my infatuation! how passionately I recalled the
+past! how coldly I turned from the hollow and false world, to whose
+service I had sacrificed my happiness, to muse and madden over the
+prospects I had destroyed and the loving and noble heart I had
+rejected!  Alas! after all, what is so ungrateful as that world for
+which we renounce so much?  Its votaries resemble the Gymnosophists of
+old, and while they profess to make their chief end pleasure, we can
+only learn that they expose themselves to every torture and every
+pain!
+
+Lord Merton, the man whom Caroline now called husband, was among the
+wealthiest and most dissipated of his order; and two years after our
+separation I met once more with the victim of my unworthiness, blazing
+in "the full front" of courtly splendour, the leader of its gayeties
+and the cynosure of her followers.  Intimate with the same society, we
+were perpetually cast together, and Caroline was proud of displaying
+the indifference towards me, which, if she felt not, she had at least
+learnt artfully to assume.  This indifference was her ruin.  The
+depths of my evil passion were again sounded and aroused, and I
+resolved yet to humble the pride and conquer the coldness which galled
+to the very quick the morbid acuteness of my self-love.  I again
+attached myself to her train; I bowed myself to the very dust before
+her.  What to me were her chilling reply and disdainful civilities?---
+only still stronger excitements to persevere.
+
+I spare you and myself the gradual progress of my schemes.  A woman
+may recover her first passion, it is true; but then she must replace
+it with another.  That other was denied to Caroline: she had not even
+children to engross her thoughts and to occupy her affections; and the
+gay world, which to many becomes an object, was to her only an escape.
+
+Clarence, my triumph came!  Lady Walden (who had never known our
+secret) invited me to her house: Caroline was there.  In the same spot
+where we had so often stood before, and in which her earliest
+affections were insensibly breathed away, in that same spot I drew
+from her colourless and trembling lips the confession of her weakness,
+the restored and pervading power of my remembrance.
+
+But Caroline was a proud and virtuous woman: even while her heart
+betrayed her, her mind resisted; and in the very avowal of her
+unconquered attachment, she renounced and discarded me forever.  I was
+not an ungenerous though a vain man; but my generosity was wayward,
+tainted, and imperfect.  I could have borne the separation; I could
+have severed myself from her; I could have flown to the uttermost
+parts of the earth; I could have hoarded there my secret yet
+unextinguished love, and never disturbed her quiet by a murmur: but
+then the fiat of separation must have come from me!  My vanity could
+not bear that her lips should reject me, that my part was not to be
+the nobility of sacrifice, but the submission of resignation.
+However, my better feelings were aroused, and though I could not
+stifle I concealed my selfish repinings.  We parted: she returned to
+town; I buried myself in the country; and, amidst the literary studies
+to which, though by fits and starts, I was passionately devoted, I
+endeavoured to forget my ominous and guilty love.
+
+But I was then too closely bound to the world not to be perpetually
+reminded of its events.  My retreat was thronged with occasional
+migrators from London; my books were mingled with the news and scandal
+of the day.  All spoke to me of Lady Merton; not as I loved to picture
+her to myself, pale and sorrowful, and brooding over my image; but
+gay, dissipated, the dispenser of smiles, the prototype of joy.  I
+contrasted this account of her with the melancholy and gloom of my own
+feelings, and I resented her seeming happiness as an insult to myself.
+
+In this angry and fretful mood I returned to London.  My empire was
+soon resumed; and now, Linden, comes the most sickening part of my
+confessions.  Vanity is a growing and insatiable disease: what seems
+to its desires as wealth to-day, to-morrow it rejects as poverty.  I
+was at first contented to know that I was beloved; by degrees, slow,
+yet sure, I desired that others should know it also.  I longed to
+display my power over the celebrated and courted Lady Merton; and to
+put the last crown to my reputation and importance.  The envy of
+others is the food of our own self-love.  Oh, you know not, you dream
+not, of the galling mortifications to which a proud woman, whose love
+commands her pride, is subjected!  I imposed upon Caroline the most
+humiliating, the most painful trials; I would allow her to see none
+but those I pleased; to go to no place where I withheld my consent;
+and I hesitated not to exert and testify my power over her affections,
+in proportion to the publicity of the opportunity.
+
+Yet, with all this littleness, would you believe that I loved Caroline
+with the most ardent and engrossing passion?  I have paused behind
+her, in order to kiss the ground she trod on; I have stayed whole
+nights beneath her window, to catch one glimpse of her passing form,
+even though I had spent hours of the daytime in her society; and,
+though my love burned and consumed me like a fire, I would not breathe
+a single wish against her innocence, or take advantage of my power to
+accomplish what I knew from her virtue and pride no atonement could
+possibly repay.  Such are the inconsistencies of the heart, and such,
+while they prevent our perfection, redeem us from the utterness of
+vice!  Never, even in my wildest days, was I blind to the glory of
+virtue, yet never, till my latest years, have I enjoyed the faculty to
+avail myself of my perception.  I resembled the mole, which by Boyle
+is supposed to possess the idea of light, but to be unable to
+comprehend the objects on which it shines.
+
+Among the varieties of my prevailing sin, was a weakness common enough
+to worldly men.  While I ostentatiously played off the love I had
+excited I could not bear to show the love I felt.  In our country, and
+perhaps, though in a less degree, in all other highly artificial
+states, enthusiasm or even feeling of any kind is ridiculous; and I
+could not endure the thought that my treasured and secret affections
+should be dragged from their retreat to be cavilled and carped at by--
+
+    "Every beardless, vain comparative."
+
+This weakness brought on the catastrophe of my love; for, mark me,
+Clarence, it is through our weaknesses that our vices are punished!
+One night I went to a masquerade; and, while I was sitting in a remote
+corner, three of my acquaintances, whom I recognized, though they knew
+it not, approached and rallied me upon my romantic attachment to Lady
+Merton.  One of them was a woman of a malicious and sarcastic wit; the
+other two were men whom I disliked, because their pretensions
+interfered with mine; they were diners-out and anecdote-mongers.
+Stung to the quick by their sarcasms and laughter, I replied in a
+train of mingled arrogance and jest; at last I spoke slightingly of
+the person in question; and these profane and false lips dared not
+only to disown the faintest love to that being who was more to me than
+all on earth, but even to speak of herself with ridicule and her
+affection with disdain.
+
+In the midst of this, I turned and beheld, within hearing, a figure
+which I knew upon the moment.  O Heaven! the burning shame and agony
+of that glance!  It raised its mask--I saw that blanched cheek, and
+that trembling lip!  I knew that the iron had indeed entered into her
+soul.
+
+Clarence, I never beheld her again alive.  Within a week from that
+time she was a corpse.  She had borne much, suffered much, and
+murmured not; but this shock pressed too hard, came too home, and from
+the hand of him for whom she would have sacrificed all!  I stood by
+her in death; I beheld my work; and I turned away, a wanderer and a
+pilgrim upon the face of the earth.  Verily, I have had my reward.
+
+The old man paused, in great emotion; and Clarence, who could offer
+him no consolation, did not break the silence.  In a few minutes
+Talbot continued--
+
+From that time the smile of woman was nothing to me: I seemed to grow
+old in a single day.  Life lost to me all its objects.  A dreary and
+desert blank stretched itself before me: the sounds of creation had
+only in my ears one voice; the past, the future, one image.  I left my
+country for twenty years, and lived an idle and hopeless man in the
+various courts of the Continent.
+
+At the age of fifty I returned to England; the wounds of the past had
+not disappeared, but they were scarred over; and I longed, like the
+rest of my species, to have an object in view.  At that age, if we
+have seen much of mankind and possess the talents to profit by our
+knowledge, we must be one of two sects,--a politician or a
+philosopher.  My time was not yet arrived for the latter, so I
+resolved to become the former; but this was denied me, for my vanity
+had assumed a different shape.  It is true that I cared no longer for
+the reputation women can bestow; but I was eager for the applause of
+men, and I did not like the long labour necessary to attain it.  I
+wished to make a short road to my object, and I eagerly followed every
+turn but the right one, in the hopes of its leading me sooner to my
+goal.
+
+The great characteristic of a vain man in contradistinction to an
+ambitious man, his eternal obstacle to a high and honourable fame, is
+this: he requires for any expenditure of trouble too speedy a reward;
+he cannot wait for years, and climb, step by step, to a lofty object;
+whatever he attempts, he must seize at a single grasp.  Added to this,
+he is incapable of an exclusive attention to one end; the universality
+of his cravings is not contented, unless it devours all; and thus he
+is perpetually doomed to fritter away his energies by grasping at the
+trifling baubles within his reach, and in gathering the worthless
+fruit which a single sun can mature.
+
+This, then, was my fault, and the cause of my failure.  I could not
+give myself up to finance, nor puzzle through the intricacies of
+commerce: even the common parliamentary drudgeries of constant
+attendance and late hours were insupportable to me; and so after two
+or three "splendid orations," as my friends termed them, I was
+satisfied with the puffs of the pamphleteers and closed my political
+career.  I was now, then, the wit and the conversationalist.  With my
+fluency of speech and variety of information, these were easy
+distinctions; and the popularity of a dinner-table or the approbation
+of a literary coterie consoled me for the more public and more durable
+applause I had resigned.
+
+But even this gratification did not last long.  I fell ill; and the
+friends who gathered round the wit fled from the valetudinarian.  This
+disgusted me, and when I was sufficiently recovered I again returned
+to the Continent.  But I had a fit of misanthropy and solitude upon
+me, and so it was not to courts and cities, the scenes of former
+gayeties, that I repaired; on the contrary, I hired a house by one of
+the most sequestered of the Swiss lakes, and, avoiding the living, I
+surrendered myself without interruption or control to commune with the
+dead.  I surrounded myself with books and pored with a curious and
+searching eye into those works which treat particularly upon "man."
+My passions were over, my love of pleasure and society was dried up,
+and I had now no longer the obstacles which forbid us to be wise; I
+unlearned the precepts my manhood had acquired, and in my old age I
+commenced philosopher; Religion lent me her aid, and by her holy lamp
+my studies were conned and my hermitage illumined.
+
+There are certain characters which in the world are evil, and in
+seclusion are good: Rousseau, whom I knew well, is one of them. These
+persons are of a morbid sensitiveness, which is perpetually galled by
+collision with others.  In short, they are under the dominion of
+VANITY; and that vanity, never satisfied and always restless in the
+various competitions of society, produces "envy, hatred, malice, and
+all uncharitableness!" but, in solitude, the good and benevolent
+dispositions with which our self-love no longer interferes have room
+to expand and ripen without being cramped by opposing interests: this
+will account for many seeming discrepancies in character.  There are
+also some men in whom old age supplies the place of solitude, and
+Rousseau's antagonist and mental antipodes, Voltaire, is of this
+order.  The pert, the malignant, the arrogant, the lampooning author
+in his youth and manhood, has become in his old age the mild, the
+benevolent, and the venerable philosopher.  Nothing is more absurd
+than to receive the characters of great men so implicitly upon the
+word of a biographer; and nothing can be less surprising than our
+eternal disputes upon individuals: for no man throughout life is the
+same being, and each season of our existence contradicts the
+characteristics of the last.
+
+And now in my solitude and my old age, a new spirit entered within me:
+the game in which I had engaged so vehemently was over for me; and I
+joined to my experience as a player my coolness as a spectator; I no
+longer struggled with my species, and I began insensibly to love them.
+I established schools and founded charities; and, in secret but active
+services to mankind, I employed my exertions and lavished my desires.
+
+From this amendment I date the peace of mind and elasticity which I
+now enjoy; and in my later years the happiness which I pursued in my
+youth and maturity so hotly, yet so ineffectually, has flown
+unsolicited to my breast.
+
+About five years ago I came again to England, with the intention of
+breathing my last in the country which gave me birth.  I retired to my
+family home; I endeavoured to divert myself in agricultural
+improvements, and my rental was consumed in speculation.  This did not
+please me long: I sought society,--society in Yorkshire!  You may
+imagine the result: I was out of my element; the mere distance from
+the metropolis, from all genial companionship, sickened me with a
+vague feeling of desertion and solitude; for the first time in my life
+I felt my age and my celibacy.  Once more I returned to town, a
+complaint attacked my lungs, the physicians recommended the air of
+this neighbourhood, and I chose the residence I now inhabit.  Without
+being exactly in London, I can command its advantages, and obtain
+society as a recreation without buying it by restraint.  I am not fond
+of new faces nor any longer covetous of show; my old servant therefore
+contented me: for the future, I shall, however, to satisfy your fears,
+remove to a safer habitation, and obtain a more numerous guard.  It
+is, at all events, a happiness to me that Fate, in casting me here and
+exposing me to something of danger, has raised up in you a friend for
+my old age, and selected from this great universe of strangers one
+being to convince my heart that it has not outlived affection.  My
+tale is done; may you profit by its moral!
+
+When Talbot said that our characters were undergoing a perpetual
+change he should have made this reservation,--the one ruling passion
+remains to the last; it may be modified, but it never departs; and it
+is these modifications which do, for the most part, shape out the
+channels of our change; or as Helvetius has beautifully expressed it,
+"we resemble those vessels which the waves still carry towards the
+south, when the north wind has ceased to blow;" but in our old age,
+this passion, having little to feed on, becomes sometimes dormant and
+inert, and then our good qualities rise, as it were from an incubus,
+and have their sway.
+
+Yet these cases are not common, and Talbot was a remarkable instance,
+for he was a remarkable man.  His mind had not slept while the age
+advanced, and thus it had swelled as it were from the bondage of its
+earlier passions and prejudices.  But little did he think, in the
+blindness of self-delusion,--though it was so obvious to Clarence,
+that he could have smiled if he had not rather inclined to weep at the
+frailties of human nature,--little did he think that the vanity which
+had cost him so much remained "a monarch still," undeposed alike by
+his philosophy, his religion, or his remorse; and that, debarred by
+circumstances from all wider and more dangerous fields, it still
+lavished itself upon trifles unworthy of his powers and puerilities
+dishonouring his age.  Folly is a courtesan whom we ourselves seek,
+whose favours we solicit at an enormous price, and who, like Lais,
+finds philosophers at her door scarcely less frequently than the rest
+of mankind!
+
+
+
+
+
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