ticity which I now
enjoy; and in my later years the happiness which I pursued in my youth
and maturity so hotly, yet so ineffectually, has flown unsolicited to my
breast.

About five years ago I came again to England, with the intention of
breathing my last in the country which gave me birth. I retired to
my family home; I endeavoured to divert myself in agricultural
improvements, and my rental was consumed in speculation. This did not
please me long: I sought society,--society in Yorkshire! You may
imagine the result: I was out of my element; the mere distance from
the metropolis, from all genial companionship, sickened me with a vague
feeling of desertion and solitude; for the first time in my life I
felt my age and my celibacy. Once more I returned to town, a complaint
attacked my lungs, the physicians recommended the air of this
neighbourhood, and I chose the residence I now inhabit. Without being
exactly in London, I can command its advantages, and obtain society as
a recreation without buying it by restraint. I am not fond of new faces
nor any longer covetous of show; my old servant therefore contented me:
for the future, I shall, however, to satisfy your fears, remove to
a safer habitation, and obtain a more numerous guard. It is, at all
events, a happiness to me that Fate, in casting me here and exposing me
to something of danger, has raised up in you a friend for my old age,
and selected from this great universe of strangers one being to convince
my heart that it has not outlived affection. My tale is done; may you
profit by its moral!

When Talbot said that our characters were undergoing a perpetual change
he should have made this reservation,--the one ruling passion remains
to the last; it may be modified, but it never departs; and it is these
modifications which do, for the most part, shape out the channels of our
change; or as Helvetius has beautifully expressed it, "we resemble those
vessels which the waves still carry towards the south, when the north
wind has ceased to blow;" but in our old age, this passion, having
little to feed on, becomes sometimes dormant and inert, and then our
good qualities rise, as it were from an incubus, and have their sway.

Yet these cases are not common, and Talbot was a remarkable instance,
for he was a remarkable man. His mind had not slept while the age
advanced, and thus it had swelled as it were from the bondage of
its earlier passions and prejudices. But little did