how much and almost
how culpably he was beloved by my deceased wife, how extravagantly she
admired every idea, impulse and peculiarity of the child, and that Abbe
his tutor also, who only excited his imagination and nourished it with
legends and miracles; his youthful mind was thus dazzled and rendered
incapable of discerning truth and reality, it accustomed him to indulge
freely in all the emotions of his heart and to consider them unerring
and most exalted. Imperceptibly a contempt for all, who did not
coincide with him, crept into his mind, he looked upon them as cold and
perverse, and in his zealous hatred, he believed himself infinitely
superior to them. I was too weak, too irresolute to remedy the evil
while it was yet time, I flattered myself, that it would not take root
so easily, and when at last my suffering wife, whose feelings I ever
feared to distress, died in giving birth to my youngest child, it was
too late."

"All that may be true," rejoined his friend, "but not so bad however as
you consider it, stupidity and madness are alone incurable; a vein of
good runs through all really excitable natures, and the life of these
irritable and violent men is spent in continual struggles between good
and evil, so that the best part may be extracted and shine forth
glorified."

"You speak," said the Counsellor, "like a physician and chemist, you
deny that the soul can appropriate to itself immutable perversities
which afterwards constitute its life."

"So long as a man is young," rejoined the former, "I despair of nothing
and still less of your son, for he has never given himself up to
dissipation. This only and bad company ruin a man entirely, and the
exhaustion is not confined to the body, it also causes vacuity of mind,
it closes up every avenue to the heart, so that, finally, neither
reason nor understanding, nor any feeling for morality or honour
remains. Those are such as are incurable. You reproach yourself for the
indulgent education you have given him, it is not in that alone,
however, my old friend, that you have neglected it; you complain of
your son's want of activity, but you have yourself excluded him from
every means of exercising it. When he had grown up, he was destined to
follow your profession; he had, however, an antipathy to become a
lawyer, and then declared he would rather be shorn and become a monk. I
cannot censure him for this, forgive me, if I am too frank. He desired
to go to sea, you w