side opposed to Government, writers of great name
and high attainments had shone with peculiar effect, and the Earl was
naturally desirous that they should be opposed by an equal array of
intellect on the side espoused by himself. The name alone of Eugene
Aram, at a day when scholarship was renown, would have been no ordinary
acquisition to the cause of the Earl's party; but that judicious and
penetrating nobleman perceived that Aram's abilities, his various
research, his extended views, his facility of argument, and the heat and
energy of his eloquence, might be rendered of an importance which could
not have been anticipated from the name alone, however eminent, of
a retired and sedentary scholar; he was not therefore without an
interested motive in the attentions he now lavished upon the Student,
and in his curiosity to put to the proof the disdain of all worldly
enterprise and worldly temptation, which Aram affected. He could not
but think, that to a man poor and lowly of circumstance, conscious of
superior acquirements, about to increase his wants by admitting to them
a partner, and arrived at that age when the calculations of interest
and the whispers of ambition have usually most weight;--he could not but
think that to such a man the dazzling prospects of social advancement,
the hope of the high fortunes, and the powerful and glittering influence
which political life, in England, offers to the aspirant, might be
rendered altogether irresistible.

He took several opportunities in the course of the next week, of
renewing his conversation with Aram, and of artfully turning it into
the channels which he thought most likely to produce the impression he
desired to create. He was somewhat baffled, but by no means dispirited,
in his attempts; but he resolved to defer his ultimate proposition until
it could be made to the fullest advantage. He had engaged the Lesters to
promise to pass a day at the castle; and with great difficulty, and
at the earnest intercession of Madeline, Aram was prevailed upon to
accompany them. So extreme was his distaste to general society, and,
from some motive or another more powerful than mere constitutional
reserve, so invariably had he for years refused all temptations to enter
it, that natural as this concession was rendered by his approaching
marriage to one of the party, it filled him with a sort of terror and
foreboding of evil. It was as if he were passing beyond the boundary of
some la