retain that, our losses are but as a grain of sand.' We may be depressed by fortune, but we can only be disgraced by ourselves. As to this seven hundred pounds—

take my jewels-they will sell for more than is required; and if our present misfortunes induce you to fly from Paris, and abandon this fatal pursuit, they will assuredly become the greatest blessings of our life."

No reproach ever passed her lips, or lingered in her eye; nor did I fail to observe the delicacy which, mingling up her own fate with mine, strove to soothe my feelings, by disguising my individual guilt under the cloak of a joint misfortune. Noble-minded woman! Mezentius himself could not have devised a more cruel fate than to tie thee to a soul so dead to shame, and so defunct in gratitude as mine.

Will not the reader loathe and detest me, even worse than I do myself, when I inform him, that, in return for all this magnanimity, I had the detestable baseness to linger in Paris, to haunt the gaming-table, to venture the wretched drainings of my purse in the silver room, to become an habitual borrower of paltry sums under pledges of repayment which I knew I had not the means of redeeming, and to submit tamely to the indignity of palpable cuts from my acquaintance in the public streets? From frequently encountering at the salons, I had formed a slight friendSir G- Wship with Lord T————, Lord FColonel T, and particularly with poor St, before he had consummated the ruin of his fine fortune, and debilitated his frame by paralysis, brought on by anxiety; and I was upon terms of intimacy with others of my countrymen, who, with various success, but much more ample means than myself, were making offerings to the demon of Rouge et Noir. Should this brief memoir fall beneath the eye of any of my quondam friends, they may not impossibly derive benefit from its perusal : at all events, they may be pleased to know that I have not forgotten

their kindnesses. I am aware that I abused their assistance, and wore out their patience; but I never anticipated the horror to which the exhaustion of my own means, and the inability to extort more from others, would reduce me. The anguish of my losses, the misery of my degradation, the of mind with which I reflected upon my agony impoverished wife and family, were nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to the racking torment of being compelled to refrain from gambling. It sounds incredible, but it is strictly true. To sit at the table with empty pockets, and to see others playing, was absolutely insupportable. I envied even the heaviest losers: could I have found an antagonist, I would have gambled for an eye, an arm, a leg, for life itself. A thousand demons seemed to be gnawing at my heart: I believed I was mad: I even hope I was.

Yes; I have tasked myself to detail my moral degradation and utter prostration of character, with a fidelity worthy of Rousseau himself; and I feel it a duty not to shrink from my complete exposure. After a night passed in the state of mind I have been describing, in one of those haunts which I was justly entitled to denominate a hell, I wandered out at day-break towards the Pont de Jena, as if I could cool my parched lips and burning brain by the heavy shower that was then falling. As the dripping rustics passed me on their market-horses, singing and whistling, their happiness, seeming to be a mockery of my wretchedness, filled me with a malignant rage. By the time I had reached the bridge, the rain had ceased: the rising sun, glancing upon the river, threw a bloom over the woods in the direction of Sevres and St. Cloud, and the birds were piping in the air. Ever a passionate admirer of Nature, her charms stole me for a moment from myself; but, presently, my thoughts reverting from the heaven without to the hell within, I gnashed my teeth, and fell back into a double bitterness and despair of soul.

A portrait

I have always been a believer in sudden and irresistible impulses―an idea which will not appear ridiculous to those who are conversant with the records of crime. of Sarah Malcolm, the murderess, which I had seen many years ago in the possession of Lord Mulgrave, leading me to the perusal of her trial and execution, in the Newgate Calendar, induced me to give perfect credit to the averment, that the idea of the crime came suddenly into her head without the least solicitation, and that she felt driven forward to its accomplishment by some invisible power. Similar declarations from many other offenders offer abundant confirmation of the same fact; and it will be in the recollection of many, that the murderer of Mr. and Mrs. Bonar at Chiselhurst, repeatedly declared that he had never dreamt of the enormity ten minutes before its commission, but that the thought suddenly rushed into his mind, and pushed him forward to the bloody deed. Many people cannot look over a precipice without feeling tempted to throw themselves down. I know a most affectionate father, who never approaches a window with his infant child, without being haunted by solicitations to cast it into the street; and a gentleman of unimpeachable honor, who, if he happens, in walking the highway, to see a note-case or handkerchief emerging from a passenger's pocket, is obliged to stop short or cross over the way, so vehemently does he feel impelled to withdraw them. These "toys of desperation," generated in the giddiness of the mind at the bare imagination of any horror, drive it to commit the reality as a relief from the fearful vision, upon the same principle that delinquents voluntarily deliver themselves up to justice, because death itself is less intolerable than the fear of it. Let it not be imagined that I am seeking to screen any of these unhappy men from the consequences of their hallucination; I am merely asserting a singular property of the mind, of which I myself am about to record a frightful confirmation.

Standing on the bridge, and turning away my locks from the landscape in that despair of heart which I have described, my downcast eyes fell upon the waters gliding placidly beneath me. They seemed to invite me to quench the burning fire with which I was consumed: the river whispered to me, with a distinct utterance, that peace and oblivion were to be found in its Lethean bed: every muscle of my body was animated by an instant and insuperable impulse; and within half a minute from its first maddening sensation, I had climbed over the parapet, and plunged headlong into the water. The gushing of waves in my ears, and the rapid flashing of innumerable lights before my eyes, are the last impressions I recollect. Into the circumstances of my preservation I never had the heart to inquire: when consciousness revisited me, I found myself lying upon my own bed, with my wife weeping beside me, though she instantly assumed a cheerful look, and told me that I had met with a dreadful accident, having fallen into the river, when leaning over to examine some object beneath. That she knows the whole truth, I am perfectly convinced; but we scrupulously avoid the subject, by an understood, though unexpressed compact. It is added in her mind to the long catalogue of my of fences, never to be alluded to, and, alas! never to be forgotten. She left my bedside for a moment, to return with my children, who rushed up to me with a cry of joy; and as they contended for the first kiss, and inquired after my health with glistening eyes, the cruelty, the atrocity of my cowardly attempt struck with a withering remorse upon my heart.

SMITH.

THE HEIRESS.

How much of human hostility depends on that circumstance-distance! If the most bitter enemies were to come into contact, how much their ideas of each other would be chastened and corrected! They would mutually amend their erroneous impressions; see much to admire, and much to imitate in each other; and half the animosity that sheds its baneful influence on society would fade away and be forgotten.

It was one day when I was about seven years old, after an unusual bustle in the family mansion, and my being arrayed in a black frock, much to my inconvenience, in the hot month of August, that I was told, my asthmatic old uncle had gone off like a lamb, and that I was heiress of ten thousand per annum. This information, given with an air of infinite importance, made no very great impression upon me at the time; and, in spite of the circumstance being regularly dwelt on, by my French governess at Camden House, after every heinous misdemeanor, I had thought little or nothing on the subject, till, at the age of eighteen, I was called on to bid adieu to Levizac and pirouettes, and hear uncle's will read by my guardian.

It appeared that my father and uncle, though brothers, had wrangled and jangled through life, and that the only subject on which they ever agreed, was, supporting the dignity of the Vavasour family; that, in a moment of unprecedented unison, they had determined, that, as the title fell to my cousin Edgar, and the estates to me, to keep both united in the family, we should marry. And it seemed, whichever party violated these precious conditions was actually dependent on the other for bread and butter. When I first heard of this arrangement, I blessed myself, and Sir Edgar cursed himself. A passionate, overbearing,