worn with anxiety, and at last desponding from my ill success. Yet upon many of the scenes, which took romantic colours from the agitated state of

my mind, I look back with melancholy pleasure, and recollect an hundred little incidents, which, associated with the train of ideas then ruling over my fancy, thrill me, as with a sort of enchantment.

"When I approached a place, which I imagined might contain the dear object of my search, it seemed to be clad in a kind of misty light of etherial softness, and the distant figures appeared like the glancing coruscations of Autumn, too heavenly to be reached. The delusion was destroyed by the reality, only to be renewed the following day.

"My habitual shyness gave way to a stronger feeling; and I made acquaintance wherever I went, in hopes of gaining some intelligence of the lost mistress of my heart. I found many pleasant women, and many beautiful girls; but none like Julia Bruce. In proportion, however, as I was careless and indifferent, they were full of attention and flattery.

"I passed Northward, through a line of country little travelled; and saw many of those recluse beauties of scenery, with which common tourists are utterly unacquainted. Perhaps in the state of passion, under which I was labouring, many objects appeared to me in an imaginary colouring. But I envied those, who seemed separated from the noise and intrigues of the world. In those distant vallies, in which I saw lonely cottages and remote farm-houses, far separated from

human society, I pictured to myself calmness, and peace, and exemption from conflicting and racking desires and sorrows. But I am afraid, that these pictures have not much foundation in reason, truth, and experience. Other passions and feelings, more selfish and sullen than those which society at once stimulates and softens, occupy their place. And that quiet and that silence, which so charm us, when fresh from the clamorous struggles of crowded life, have no interest and no ameliorating effect with the vegetating boor, who has known nothing else.

"But then I drew the charms of Julia endearing and enlightening these scenes of innocent Soltitude. It was in one of the hottest days of July, that, harassed with fatigue of mind and body, I rested, while the sun was at its height, at a small inn, or rather ale-house, on the road, in a most unfrequented part of Herefordshire. I had not sat an hour in the house, when an alarming fever seized me. The first thing I recollect after this critical day, is a small cottage chamber, in which I found myself on an humble but neat bed, with my faithful groom watching on a chair by my side. I asked him anxiously where I was; and what had happened. He told me, that the violence of the fever had rendered it necessary, for the sake of quiet, to remove me to a neighbouring cottage; and that I had been for several days delirious: and that the utmost attention to calmness and silence was still necessary to ensure my recovery.

"This short exertion of reviving faculties was

almost too much for my exhausted strength. I fainted, and again sunk back on my pillow. I recollect but little of what I felt or saw during the remainder of that day. Yet I had a dim fancy, that Julia Bruce sometimes appeared at the foot of my bed; and smiled on me through fear; while her mother, with vengeance in her countenance, shook her distracted locks at me, and cried

'Alas! hard-hearted man!

If one died by thy hand, die thou by mine!'

Then cold perspirations, as it were the waters of death, came upon me; and I lay for hours senseless, and scarcely breathing.

"Another week, after some slight relapses, produced sufficient convalesence to enable me to quit my chamber. I found myself in a beautiful cottage, at the foot of one of those hills, in the neighbourhood of Wigmore, once famed in history for its great possessors, the Mortimers, Earls of March. In sight of my windows was a little parish church of the rudest kind; an old wooden-built gable-ended farm-house on one of the side-hills: and the village embowered in trees on the right.

I was soon permitted to take walks along this romantic valley; and I often rested from the glare of the sun on the bench of the church-porch. One day I obtained the church-key, and explored the rude interior of this humble fane. The broken figure of a recumbent warrior under an arch of the main wall; two or three imperfect brasses; and two or three in

scriptions on the floor, were all the memorials this naked and neglected building contained. Among these were epitaphs for a family of the same name as that, which I recollected to have been the inheritance of Mrs. Bruce. They had been lords of the manor of this parish; but had been extinct here above a century.

"This seemed to give me a clue; but little was known of them; and my anxious enquiries appeared to lead to nothing. No mansion fit for a gentleman had existed here within memory; nor had there even within that time been a resident clergyman. There was, however, at last found an old female peasant, said to be, by some strange series of fortunes, remotely descended from this family. I visited her in a lonely clay-built cottage, in which I found decency and neatness. She was at first reserved, incommunicative, and even suspicious. By degrees I gained her confidence. Her father was in a station little above her own: her grandmother, the wife of a small farmer, was the daughter of a Welsh Curate, who had married one of the children of the Lord of the Manor, a Baronet of a large estate, who then represented the county in parliament.

"The pride of ancestry, which consoles us in poverty and neglect, adhered to this obscure old woman. Cut off from society, with little education, and few books, she had contrived to learn and fix in her memory many curious particulars of those, from whom she was thus descended. Ah, Sir!' she said,

with a triumph suppressed by sighs, 'they were vast powerful gentry, though they be now clean forgotten! When the ancestors of Lord -----, and Sir Thomas - - - - - - that lives yonder, and now look so proud and disdainful upon me, were nothing better than the Steward and the Butler at that old Hall, my great great grandfather was their master there, and lived in a lordly state; and those upstarts, that were fawning and cheating, and licking the dust from his shoes, dared not presume to sit in his presence! But we are fallen on evil days,' Sir, as the great Milton said, while these great ones, as they call themselves, these mushrooms, treat us as if we were of a lower order of existence.

*** How came your ancestors,' said I, ‘to part with this property?—O Sir, that big villain, Lord ----'s grandfather, got hold of it on mortgage, by lending his master his own money, at Jew's interest; money got by selling leases, and timber, and holding back rents! His son then bought a borough; and exchanged it for an Irish peerage; and so climbed to an English one? —-‘But are there none of the family of the same name; none of the male line remaining?' I think there be: but I know little about them,' with a sigh. Did you ever see; or converse with any of them?--I don't know, as I did: be'n't sure: can't tell.'---'Why, sure you can recollect, if you ever did.'---'Don't know, I say; be'n't sure: can't tell-Why, this is odd is there any mystery about them? Don't know, as there is! but I think,