is personal circumstances which was now
unbroken from day to day save by the excitement of sporting, drinking,
card-playing, or the rarer and less oblivious pleasure of seeing Miss
Nancy Lammeter. The subtle and varied pains springing from the higher
sensibility that accompanies higher culture, are perhaps less pitiable
than that dreary absence of impersonal enjoyment and consolation which
leaves ruder minds to the perpetual urgent companionship of their own
griefs and discontents. The lives of those rural forefathers, whom we
are apt to think very prosaic figures--men whose only work was to ride
round their land, getting heavier and heavier in their saddles, and who
passed the rest of their days in the half-listless gratification of
senses dulled by monotony--had a certain pathos in them nevertheless.
Calamities came to _them_ too, and their early errors carried hard
consequences: perhaps the love of some sweet maiden, the image of
purity, order, and calm, had opened their eyes to the vision of a life
in which the days would not seem too long, even without rioting; but
the maiden was lost, and the vision passed away, and then what was left
to them, especially when they had become too heavy for the hunt, or for
carrying a gun over the furrows, but to drink and get merry, or to
drink and get angry, so that they might be independent of variety, and
say over again with eager emphasis the things they had said already any
time that twelvemonth? Assuredly, among these flushed and dull-eyed men
there were some whom--thanks to their native human-kindness--even riot
could never drive into brutality; men who, when their cheeks were
fresh, had felt the keen point of sorrow or remorse, had been pierced
by the reeds they leaned on, or had lightly put their limbs in fetters
from which no struggle could loose them; and under these sad
circumstances, common to us all, their thoughts could find no
resting-place outside the ever-trodden round of their own petty history.

That, at least, was the condition of Godfrey Cass in this
six-and-twentieth year of his life. A movement of compunction, helped
by those small indefinable influences which every personal relation
exerts on a pliant nature, had urged him into a secret marriage, which
was a blight on his life. It was an ugly story of low passion,
delusion, and waking from delusion, which needs not to be dragged from
the privacy of Godfrey's bitter memory. He had long known that the
de