deep wells of the Stagyrite or the golden fountains of Plato, he forgot the loneliness of his lot, and exhausted the hoarded enthusiasm of his soul. rectify it, it became doubly unpre- | his dreams of the Nymph and Naïad, possessing; to reserve, it now added or his researches after truth in the 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 no where 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 But his mind, rather thoughtful than imaginative, found no idol like "Divine Philosophy." It delighted to plunge itself into the mazes of metaphysical investigation—to trace the springs of the intellect to connect the arcana of the universeto descend into the darkest caverns, or to wind through the minutest mysteries of nature, and rise, step by step, to that arduous elevation on which Thought stands dizzy and confused, looking beneath upon a clouded earth, and above, upon an unfathomable heaven. Rarely wandering from his chamber, known personally to few, and intimately by none, Algernon yet left behind him at the university the most remarkable reputation of his day. He had obtained some of the highest of academical honours, and by that proverbial process of vulgar minds which ever frames the magnificent from the unknown,-the seclusion in which he lived, and the recondite nature of his favourite pursuits attached to his name a still greater celebrity and interest than all the orthodox and regular dignities he had acquired. There are few men who do not console themselves for not being generally loved, if they can reasonably hope that they are generally esteemed. Mordaunt had now grown reconciled to himself and to his kind. He had opened to his interest a world in his own breast, and it consoled him for his mortification in the world without. But, better than this, his habits as well as studies had strengthened the principles and confirmed the nobility of his mind. He was not, it is true, more kind, more benevolent, more upright than before; but those virtues ( In his travels, Mordaunt encounnow emanated from principle-no emotion and principle to the mind is what a free constitution is to a people without that principle, or that free constitution, the one may be for the moment as good-the other as happy, but we cannot tell how long the goodness and the happiness will continue. tered an Englishman, whose name I will not yet mention; a person of great reputed wealth-a merchantyet a man of pleasure-a voluptuary in life, yet a saint in reputationor, to abstain from the antithetical analysis of a character, which will not be corporeally presented to the reader, till our tale is considerably advanced one who drew from nature a singular combination of shrewd, but false conclusions, and a peculiar philosophy, destined hereafter to contrast the colours, and prove the practical utility, of that which was espoused by Mordaunt. On leaving the university, his father sent for him to London. He staid there a short time, and mingled partially in its festivities; but the pleasures of English dissipation have for a century been the same, heartless without gaiety, and dull without refinement. Nor could Mordaunt, There can be no education in which the most fastidious, yet warm-hearted the lessons of the world do not form of human beings, reconcile either his tastes or his affections to the cold insipidities of patrician society. His father's habits and evident distresses, deepened his disgust to his situation; for the habits were incurable, and the distresses increasing; and nothing but a circumstance, which Mordaunt did not then understand, prevented the final sale of an estate, already little better than a pompous incumbrance. a share. Experience, in expanding Algernon's powers, had ripened his virtues. Nor had the years which had converted knowledge into wisdom failed in imparting polish to refinement. His person had acquired a greater grace, and his manners an easier dignity than before. His noble and generous mind had worked its impress upon his features, and his mien; and those who could overcome the first coldness and shrinking hauteur of his address, found it required no minute examination to discover the real expression of the eloquent eye, and the kindling lip. He had not been long returned, before he found two enemies to his tranquillity-the one was love, the other appeared in the more formidable guise of a claimant to his estate. Before Algernon was aware of the nature of the latter, he went to consult with his lawyer. "If the claim be just, I shall not, of course, proceed to law," said Mordaunt. "But without the estate, sir, you have nothing!" 66 True," said Algernon, calmly. But the claim was not just, and to law he went. In this law-suit, however, he had one assistant in an old relation, who had seen, indeed, but very little of him, but who compassionated his circumstances, and, above all, hated his opponent. This relation was rich and childless; and there were not wanting those who predicted that his money would ultimately discharge the mortgages, and repair the house, of the young representative of the Mordaunt honours. But the old kinsman was obstinate-self-willed-and under the absolute dominion of patrician pride; and it was by no means improbable that the independence of Mordaunt's character would soon create a disunion between them, by clashing against the peculiarities of his relation's temper. It was a clear and sunny morning when Linden, tolerably recovered of his hurt, set out upon a sober and aged pony, which, after some natural pangs of shame, he had hired of his landlord, to Mordaunt Court. Mordaunt's house was situated in the midst of a wild and extensive park, surrounded with woods, and interspersed with trees of the stateliest growth, now scattered into irregular groups, now marshalled into sweeping avenues; while, ever and anon, Linden caught glimpses of a rapid and brawling rivulet, which, in many a slight but sounding waterfall, gave a music strange and spirit-like to the thick copses and forest glades through which it went exulting on its way. The deer lay half concealed by the fern among which they couched, turning their stately crests towards the stranger, but not stirring from their rest; while from the summit of beeches, which would have shamed the pavilion of Tityrus, the rooksthose monks of the feathered people -were loud in their confused, but not displeasing, confabulations. As Linden approached the house, he was struck with the melancholy air of desolation which spread over and around it: fragments of stone, above which clomb the rank weed, insolently proclaiming the triumph of nature's meanest offspring over the wrecks of art; a moat dried up, a railing once of massy gilding, intended to fence a lofty terrace on the right from the incursions of the deer, but which, shattered and decayed, now seemed to ask, with the satirist,— To what end did our lavish ancestors -a chapel on the left, perfectly in ruins,—all appeared strikingly to denote that time had outstript fortune, and that the years, which alike hallow and destroy, had broken the consequence, in deepening the antiquity, of the House of Mordaunt. The building itself agreed but too well with the tokens of decay around it; most of the windows were shut up, and the shutters of dark oak, richly gilt, contrasted forcibly with the shattered panes and mouldered framing of the glass. It was a house of irregular architecture. Originally built in the fifteenth century, it had received its last improvement, with the most lavish expense, during the reign of Anne; and it united the Gallic magnificence of the latter period with the strength and grandeur of the former; it was in a great part overgrown with ivy, and, where that insidious ornament had not reached, the signs of decay, and even ruin, were fully visible. The sun itself, bright and cheering as it shone over nature, making the green sod glow like emeralds, and the rivulet flash in its beam, like one of those streams of real light, imagined by Swedenborg in his visions of heaven, and clothing tree and fell, brake and hillock, with the lavish hues of infant summer; the sun itself only made more desolate, because more conspicuous, the venerable fabric, which the youth ful traveller frequently paused more to Mordaunt, he expressed a wish to accurately to survey, and its laughing and sportive beams playing over chink and crevice, seemed almost as insolent and untimeous as the mirth of the young, mocking the silent grief of some grey-headed and solitary mourner. Clarence had now reached the porch, and the sound of the shrill bell he touched rung with a strange note through the general stillness of the place. A single servant appeared, and ushered Clarence through a screen hall, hung round with relics of armour, and ornamented on the side opposite the music gallery with a solitary picture of gigantic size, exhibiting the full length of the gaunt person and sable steed of that Sir Piers de Mordaunt who had so signalised himself in the field in which Henry of Richmond changed his coronet for a crown. Through this hall Clarence was led to a small chamber clothed with uncouth and tattered arras, in which, seemingly immersed in papers, he found the owner of the domain. "Your studies," said Linden, after the salutations of the day, "seem to harmonise with the venerable antiquity of your home;" and he pointed to the crabbed characters and faded ink of the papers on the table. "So they ought," answered Mordaunt, with a faint smile; "for they are called from their quiet archives in order to support my struggle for that home. But I fear the struggle is in vain, and that the quibbles of law will transfer into other hands a possession I am foolish enough to value the more from my inability to maintain it." Something of this Clarence had before learnt from the communicative gossip of his landlady; and, less desirous to satisfy his curiosity than to lead the conversation from a topic which he felt must be so unwelcome see the state apartments of the house. With something of shame at the neglect they had necessarily experienced, and something of pride at the splendour which no neglect could efface, Mordaunt yielded to the request, and led the way up a staircase of black oak, the walls and ceiling of which were covered with frescos or Italian art, to a suite of apartments in which time and dust seemed the only tenants. Lingeringly did Clarence gaze upon the rich velvet, the costly mirrors, the motley paintings of a hundred ancestors, and the antique cabinets, containing, among the most hoarded relics of the Mordaunt race, curiosities which the hereditary enthusiam of a line of cavaliers had treasured as the most sacred of heirlooms, and which, even to the philosophical mind of Mordaunt, possessed a value he did not seek too minutely to analyse. Here was the goblet from which the first prince of Tudor had drunk after the field of Bosworth. Here the ring with which the chivalrous Francis the First had rewarded a signal feat of that famous Robert de Mordaunt, who, as a poor but adventurous cadet of the house, had brought to the "first gentleman of France" the assistance of his sword. Here was the glove which Sir Walter had received from the royal hand of Elizabeth, and worn in the lists upon a crest which the lance of no antagonist in that knightly court could abase. And here, more sacred than all, because connected with the memory of misfortune, was a small box of silver which the last king of a fated line had placed in the hands of the grey-headed descendant of that Sir Walter after the battle of the Boyne, saying, "Keep this, Sir Everard Mordaunt, for the sake of one who has purchased the luxury of gratitude at the price of a throne!" As Clarence glanced from these relics to the figure of Mordaunt, who | heir; and this expectancy, by the by, stood at a little distance leaning joined to the mortgages on the proagainst the window, with arms folded perty, made the sum given ridiculously on his breast, and with eyes abstract- disproportioned to the value of the edly wandering over the noble woods estate. I must confess that the news and extended park, which spread be- came upon me like a thunder-bolt. low, he could not but feel that if I should have yielded up possession birth had indeed the power of setting immediately, but was informed by its seal upon the form, it was never my lawyers that my father had no more conspicuous than in the broad legal right to dispose of the profront and lofty air of the last de- perty; the discussion of that right scendant of the race by whose me- forms the ground of the present lawmorials he was surrounded. Touched suit. But," continued Mordaunt, by the fallen fortunes of Mordaunt, proudly, yet mournfully, "I am preand interested by the uncertainty pared for the worst; if, indeed, I which the chances of law threw over should call that the worst which can his future fate, Clarence could not affect neither intellect, nor health, resist exclaiming, with some warmth nor character, nor conscience." and abruptness— "And by what subterfuge, or cavil, does the present claimant of these estates hope to dislodge their rightful possessor?" Why," answered Mordaunt, "it is a long story in detail, but briefly told in epitome. My father was a man whose habits greatly exceeded his fortune, and a few months after his death, Mr. Vavasour, a distant relation, produced a paper, by which it appeared that my father had, for a certain sum of ready money, disposed of his estates to this Mr. Vavasour, upon condition that they should not be claimed, nor the treaty divulged, till after his death; the reason for this proviso seems to have been the shame my father felt for his exchange, and his fear of the censures of that world to which he was always devoted." "But how unjust to you!" said Clarence. "Not so much so as it seems," said Mordaunt, deprecatingly; "for I was then but a sickly boy, and according to the physicians, and I sincerely believe according also to my poor father's belief, almost certain of a premature death. In that case Vavasour would have been the nearest Clarence was silent, and Mordaunt, after a brief pause, once more resumed his guidance. Their tour ended in a large library filled with books, and this, Mordaunt informed his guest, was his chosen sitting room. An old carved table was covered with works which for the most part possessed for the young mind of Clarence, more accustomed to imagine than reflect, but a very feeble attraction; on looking over them, he, however, found, half hid by a huge folio of Hobbes, and another of Locke, a volume of Milton's poems: this paved the way to a conversation, in which both had an equal interest, for both were enthusiastic in the character and genius of that wonderful man, for whom "the divine and solemn countenance of Freedom" was dearer than the light of day, and whose solitary spell, accomplishing what the whole family of earth once vainly began upon the plain of Shinar, has built of materials more imperishable than "slime and brick," "a city and a tower whose summit has reached to heaven." It was with mutual satisfaction that Mordaunt and his guest continued their commune, till the hour of dinner was announced to them by |