to the enslaved state of the labouring
majority, perfectly in unison with Maria's mode of thinking.

She read them over and over again; and fancy, treacherous fancy, began
to sketch a character, congenial with her own, from these shadowy
outlines.--"Was he mad?" She reperused the marginal notes, and
they seemed the production of an animated, but not of a disturbed
imagination. Confined to this speculation, every time she re-read them,
some fresh refinement of sentiment, or acuteness of thought impressed
her, which she was astonished at herself for not having before observed.

What a creative power has an affectionate heart! There are beings who
cannot live without loving, as poets love; and who feel the electric
spark of genius, wherever it awakens sentiment or grace. Maria had often
thought, when disciplining her wayward heart, "that to charm, was to be
virtuous." "They who make me wish to appear the most amiable and good
in their eyes, must possess in a degree," she would exclaim, "the graces
and virtues they call into action."

She took up a book on the powers of the human mind; but, her attention
strayed from cold arguments on the nature of what she felt, while she
was feeling, and she snapt the chain of the theory to read Dryden's
Guiscard and Sigismunda.

Maria, in the course of the ensuing day, returned some of the books,
with the hope of getting others--and more marginal notes. Thus shut out
from human intercourse, and compelled to view nothing but the prison of
vexed spirits, to meet a wretch in the same situation, was more surely
to find a friend, than to imagine a countryman one, in a strange land,
where the human voice conveys no information to the eager ear.

"Did you ever see the unfortunate being to whom these books belong?"
asked Maria, when Jemima brought her slipper. "Yes. He sometimes
walks out, between five and six, before the family is stirring, in the
morning, with two keepers; but even then his hands are confined."

"What! is he so unruly?" enquired Maria, with an accent of
disappointment.

"No, not that I perceive," replied Jemima; "but he has an untamed look,
a vehemence of eye, that excites apprehension. Were his hands free,
he looks as if he could soon manage both his guards: yet he appears
tranquil."

"If he be so strong, he must be young," observed Maria.

"Three or four and thirty, I suppose; but there is no judging of a
person in his situation."

"Are you sure that he is mad?"