it has not seen the daylight for years. I had a reverence for the book, and I liked not to destroy it; but I feared lest it might become a witness against me. What name do you see written there? -not Delaval, methinks; right-Henry Moreton : he was my father! Ah! look you lower down: that is the record of my birth. Well, what is it? you have come at my proper name now."

"Godfray Moreton!"

"Right! and now you shall listen to my history."

CHAPTER IX.

List a brief tale,

And when 'tis told, oh! that my heart would burst.

SHAKSPEARE.

"My name is Godfray Moreton. My father was a man of some eminence in the law, and possessed of considerable property at the period of my unhappy nativity. I was his only child; and my entrance into the world was ushered in by an act of homicide. My mother died in parturition. I never knew what it was to be fostered by maternal affection, love foreswore in my mother's womb.' On the threshold of existence, I was greeted with curses and lamentations.

"Jerningham! if you wish to know the source of all my errors and misfortunes, these are mild terms -I ought to say, of my guilt and desolation; I will tell you, without delay, that I owe my fall solely to the unnatural susceptibility of my senses. From my childhood upwards, I have been the victim of passions so easily awakened, of feelings so easily acted upon,- that a word, a look, a circumstance in itself most minute and insignificant, when relating, either directly or indirectly, to ine, has ever possessed the power of elevating or depressing my spirits, - of making me an angel, or a monster, in a second. I looked upon every thing, as it were, through a magnifying glass. Nothing whatever escaped me. I had no mean. I was always immoderately wretched, when not immoderately joyous. My days were without twilight; when the splendour of the sun had departed, darkness came suddenly on, black, thick, and impenetrable. Childhood was not with me a season of thoughtless and unsorrowing innocence: if my stature had kept pace with my passions in their growth, I should have been a giant in the very spring of my boyhood. A word of unkindness from my father cut keener than the lash would upon others. He never smote me, for he was not cruel; peradventure, I should have hated him had he done so. And yet he was not kind; at least not as a parent should be to his child, an only parent to an only child. But I made allowance for the conduct of my father; I felt that my birth

The reiterated gratitude to which Leicester gave vent bore the impress of feelings which might have been awakened, had the veriest stranger rescued him from death; they bore not that exclusive stamp, which I expected my individuality to have moulded them into ;-they had nothing individual about them; they were couched in vague, general terms, expressing a full sense, it is true, of the vast obligation he was labouring under; but further than this I recognised nothing. My seal was not set upon his gratitude, -my image was not uppermost in his thoughts,-I expected the eye to brighten, the bosom to swell, the whole frame to dilate with rapture, when he was told that I had saved him. But I saw nothing of this. Nay; I thought that the cup of his enjoyment was dashed with some bitter reflections, for I observed a cloud to pass over his brow, when first apprized that my hand had rescued him. Oh! how the thought maddened me,-how my heart sickened to the death,-how my hopes were crushed into annihilation! Yet I hated him not for all this. My love survived the wreck of my peace; and sat amidst the ashes of my joy. My time had not yet come; and I was still the same, doating fool, though the veil of delusion had been rent in twain, and I saw that Leicester cared not for me. But I nursed him,-I watched over him,-I tended him; and I quitted not his side till the vacation tore him from me and relieved me from the charge.

"I went to my father's home, broken down in body and in mind. But Leicester came not to see me; neither did he inquire after me, though I was in a perilous state, fearfully conditioned and desolate; my flesh wasting from my bones, and my intellect prostrated by delirium. It is true that the mother wrote to me, but what had her son to do with that? But I must hurry on with my story. I recovered-I was restored to health by a skilful physician. Again I returned to Eton; again I moved on the same stage with Leicester.

"We became once more the most inseparable companions in Eton; but we were never friends again from that hour. Oh! no; our connection now was but the ghost of our former friendship we played with one another - we read with one another - we walked with one another but our souls communed not. We were two bodies linked together by fate; but further than this there was nothing - nothing which spoke of the union that had been. It would have been impossible, situated as we were, to have moved both of us, upon the same arena, with an outward semblance of indifference, palpable to the senses of all around us. It would have been too unnatural too inexplica