mity, to whom neither amusement nor
occupation ever offered themselves to beguile the painful hours, were
short, disturbed, and unrefreshing. My sleeping, still more than my
waking thoughts, were full of perplexity, deformity, and disorder. To
these slumbers succeeded the hours which, by the regulations of our
prison, I was obliged, though awake, to spend in solitary and cheerless
darkness. Here I had neither books nor pens, nor any thing upon which to
engage my attention; all was a sightless blank. How was a mind, active
and indefatigable like mine, to endure this misery? I could not sink it
in lethargy; I could nor forget my woes: they haunted me with
unintermitted and demoniac malice. Cruel, inexorable policy of human
affairs, that condemns a man to torture like this; that sanctions it,
and knows not what is done under its sanction; that is too supine and
unfeeling to enquire into these petty details; that calls this the
ordeal of innocence, and the protector of freedom! A thousand times I
could have dashed my brains against the walls of my dungeon; a thousand
times I longed for death, and wished, with inexpressible ardour, for an
end to what I suffered; a thousand times I meditated suicide, and
ruminated, in the bitterness of my soul, upon the different means of
escaping from the load of existence. What had I to do with life? I had
seen enough to make me regard it with detestation. Why should I wait the
lingering process of legal despotism, and not dare so much as to die,
but when and how its instruments decreed? Still some inexplicable
suggestion withheld my hand. I clung with desperate fondness to this
shadow of existence, its mysterious attractions, and its hopeless
prospects.

CHAPTER XII.

Such were the reflections that haunted the first days of my
imprisonment, in consequence of which they were spent in perpetual
anguish. But, after a time, nature, wearied with distress, would no
longer stoop to the burthen; thought, which is incessantly varying,
introduced a series of reflections totally different.

My fortitude revived. I had always been accustomed to cheerfulness, good
humour, and serenity; and this habit now returned to visit me at the
bottom of my dungeon. No sooner did my contemplations take this turn,
than I saw the reasonableness and possibility of tranquillity and peace;
and my mind whispered to me the propriety of showing, in this forlorn
condition, that I was superior to all my persecutor