breathe with your long posterity; all
these are feelings sad and trying, and are among those daily pangs which
moralists have forgotten in their catalogue of miseries, but which
do not the less wear out those heart-strings at which they are so
constantly tugging.

This was the situation of Mr. Dacre. The whole of his large property was
entailed, and descended to his nephew, who was a Protestant; and yet,
when he looked upon the blooming face of his enchanting daughter, he
blessed the Providence which, after all his visitations, had doomed him
to be the sire of a thing so lovely. An exile from her country at an
early age, the education of May Dacre had been completed in a foreign
land; yet the mingling bloods of Dacre and of Howard would not in a
moment have permitted her to forget The inviolate island of the sage and
free! even if the unceasing and ever-watchful exertions of her father
had been wanting to make her worthy of so illustrious an ancestry.

But this, happily, was not the case; and to aid the development of the
infant mind of his young child, to pour forth to her, as she grew
in years and in reason, all the fruits of his own richly-cultivated
intellect, was the solitary consolation of one over whose conscious head
was impending the most awful of visitations. May Dacre was gifted with
a mind which, even if her tutor had not been her father, would have
rendered tuition a delight. Her lively imagination, which early unfolded
itself; her dangerous yet interesting vivacity; the keen delight, the
swift enthusiasm, with which she drank in knowledge, and then panted for
more; her shrewd acuteness, and her innate passion for the excellent and
the beautiful, filled her father with rapture which he repressed, and
made him feel conscious how much there was to check, to guide, and to
form, as well as to cherish, to admire, and to applaud.

As she grew up the bright parts of her character shone with increased
lustre; but, in spite of the exertions of her instructor, some less
admirable qualities had not yet disappeared. She was still too often
the dupe of her imagination, and though perfectly inexperienced, her
confidence in her theoretical knowledge of human nature was unbounded.
She had an idea that she could penetrate the characters of individuals
at a first meeting; and the consequence of this fatal axiom was, that
she was always the slave of first impressions, and constantly the victim
of prejudice. She was ever th