can now amuse myself only by
images of the past; and, in the darkness and solitude of years, I take
their Magic Lantern, and replace life by the strange, wild, and
high-coloured extravagances, the ghosts and genii of the phantasmagoria
of ambition.

I was the seventh son of one of the oldest families of England. If I had
been the seventh son of the seventh son, I should, by all the laws of
juggling, have been a conjurer; but I was a generation too early for
fame. My father was an earl, and as proud of his titles as if he had won
them at Crecy or Poictiers, and not in the campaigns of Westminster,
consummated on the backstairs of Whitehall. He had served his country,
as he termed it, in a long succession of Parliaments; and served her
still more, as his country neighbours termed it, by accepting a peerage,
which opened the county to any other representative among the sons of
men. He was a strong-built, stern-countenanced, and haughty-tongued
personage--by some thought a man of sense; by others a fool, with all
his depth, arising from his darkness. My own experience convinced me,
that no man made more of a secret, or thought less of a job. From my
boyhood I own I feared more than honoured him; and as for love, if I had
been more susceptible, mine would have flown round the globe before it
could have fixed on that iron visage. The little love that I could
afford for any human being, was for another and a different order of
existence. Boys have a natural fondness for the mother; and mine was
gentle, timid, and fond. She always parted with me, on my going to
school, as if she had lost a limb, and when I returned, received me as
if she had found a pinion in its place. She perhaps spoiled me by
indulgence, as much as my lord and father spoiled me by severity; but
indulgence is the pleasanter of the two, and I followed the course of
nature, and gave her whatever heart I have. I still remember her. She
was remarkably indebted to nature, at least for externals. She had fine
eyes--large, dark, and sentimental; her dress, which would now be
preposterous, seemed to me, then, the perfection of all taste, and was
in the highest fashion of her time. Her beauty worked miracles; for now
and then I have observed even my father's eye fixed on her, with
something of the admiration which we might conceive in an Esquimaux for
a fixed star, or in an Italian highwayman for some Parian statue which
he had stumbled on in his thickets. But the ad