heart. His ill health, his long residence at
home, his unfriended and almost orphan situation, his early habits of
solitude and reserve, all these, so calculated to make the spirit shrink
within itself, made him, on his entrance at school, if not unsocial,
appear so: this was the primary reason of his unpopularity; the second
was that he perceived, for he was sensitive (and consequently acute) to
the extreme, the misfortune of his manner, and in his wish to rectify
it, it became doubly unprepossessing; to reserve, it now added
embarrassment, to coldness, gloom; and the pain he felt in addressing or
being addressed by another was naturally and necessarily reciprocal, for
the effects of sympathy are nowhere so wonderful, yet so invisible, as
in the manners.

By degrees he shunned the intercourse which had for him nothing but
distress, and his volatile acquaintances were perhaps the first to set
him the example. Often in his solitary walks he stopped afar off to gaze
upon the sports which none ever solicited him to share; and as the shout
of laughter and of happy hearts came, peal after peal, upon his ear, he
turned enviously, yet not malignantly away, with tears, which not all
his pride could curb, and muttered to himself, "And these, these hate
me!"

There are two feelings common to all high or affectionate natures,--that
of extreme susceptibility to opinion and that of extreme bitterness at
its injustice. These feelings were Mordaunt's: but the keen edge which
one blow injures, the repetition blunts; and by little and little,
Algernon became not only accustomed, but, as he persuaded himself,
indifferent, to his want of popularity; his step grew more lofty, and
his address more collected, and that which was once diffidence gradually
hardened into pride.

His residence at the University was neither without honour nor profit.
A college life was then, as now, either the most retired or the most
social of all others; we need scarcely say which it was to Mordaunt, but
his was the age when solitude is desirable, and when the closet forms
the mind better than the world. Driven upon itself, his intellect became
inquiring and its resources profound; admitted to their inmost recesses,
he revelled among the treasures of ancient lore, and in his dreams of
the Nymph and Naiad, or his researches after truth in the deep wells of
the Stagyrite or the golden fountains of Plato, he forgot the loneliness
of his lot and exhausted the hoa