THE postman knocked. Jean, who was sedulously employed in brushing off what nap remained on my best coat, uttered the exclamation, "Diable!" and walked as deliberately as possible to open the door. He returned to me with a pacquet, and delivering it with a shrug and a grimace which said exactly this

A letter from a madman!" (Jean's homely name for an eccentric person), he retired to his occupation in the wardrobe. From the seal Jean had truly conjectured the author; and the seal was indeed more than enough to condemn any one who used it in the opinion of a sober-minded old domestic, such as Jean Roche; it was-a death's head. I recognized as quickly as Jean, but with a little more charity, my friend's singular emblem, and broke it accordingly. What in the name of Heaven is this?

Amédée. Come hither and see me die. I am at length where I long have wished to be at the door of eternity. One farewell-moment with you, and the demon who has hunted me through this world shall persecute me no longer. Come, while I have breath to say,

yet poverty forbade them to expect obtaining wealth and rank together. Regnault de St. Henry and Ann de Monjoy (he an only son, and she an only daughter) were thus, as it were, driven into each other's arms. Nature certainly, if left to herself, would never have brought them there. They were both young and handsome, at the time of their illfated marriage, but there was little further resemblance between them. A lion and a lamb were as like in outward form and inward disposition. Monsieur St. Henry was a man of profound talents rendered wholly unavailable to any useful purpose by the violence of his passions; he was formed to command others, but would not himself obey any one but his own evil Genius. He was a man honoured and hated, for the abilities of his mind and the unamiableness of his temper. Thirty-three years he lived in haughty obscurity, and was followed, I believe, by his dog, to the grave. His wife had died two years before him. Madame St. Henry was as sweet and amiable a woman as I have ever known. She bore her husband's ill-treatment as saints do their earthly injuries, and made him such a wife as all men desire, but few deserve. She had one-fault, shall I call it? No; it was a weakness: her sensibility of disposition was the grave of her happiness. In the days of her romantic maidenhood she had indulged this passion so fatal to the serenity of human life; so that when the blast of the world came she had no strength to resist it. She had formed an idea of the happiness of married life, such as all women of refined and sensible dispositions will form; and she was disappointed, as all such women assuredly will be. So highly wrought had been her feelings that she found no fortitude within herself to sustain this cruel shock. Soon after having given birth to the subject of this memoir she died, and was perhaps glad to get to her grave.

Nov. 1824.

The son of these parents inherited most of their qualities. He united many of his father's faults with most of his mother's virtues. Vehement in his temper, yet benevolent in his disposition; haughty, yet elegant, in his manners; the fierceness of his father's spirit was softened in him by something of his mother's gentle nature. He resembled however M. de St. Henry chiefly in his abilities, which were powerful and penetrating; though there was still a refinement of soul and a melancholy sweetness about his calmer moments, which frequently reminded me of his better parent. In person too, though nearly filling the noblest mould of his proper sex, there was an elegance and symmetry in his figure which took something from its robustness, and he had a considerable stoop in his shoulders to which I recollect his mother was inclined. I have seen him when he might have sat for his father's picture,-the same dark and sombre expression of countenance, relieved in conversation by a frequent lightening of the eye, or a tremulous curl of the upper lip, according as his spirit flashed into eloquence, or compressed itself into repartee. Yet, in his silent moods, whilst he gazed as he was wont to do on the visions which rose before the eye of his mind, I thought I could often trace the pensive heart-broken smile of the Countess, which gentleness contending with sorrow had taught her to wear, on the features of her son.

Young St. Henry had been educated at the chateau, an old feudal castle, of which a small part was scarcely habitable, and the rest wholly in ruins. His parents both dying whilst he was yet a child, the Count de Monjoy, his mother's father, became his guardian. The Count was a man of but few feelings and no affections. Besides, he had so abstracted himself from the world in the exercise of his religious dutics that the concerns of even his own immediate family had but little interest for him. He took care however to allot the most comfortable suite of rooms in the chateau for the accommodation of a priest, to whose guidance and instruction he had committed his grandson. In doing this he thought he had done all that could be expected from a man so deeply

engaged as he was in preparing himself by fasts and mortifications for an interview with his Judge, when the first question would undoubtedly be,-what he had done to deserve the approbation of his Maker? So many fasts in the week, so many prayers in the day, so many vigils, so many crossings, would of course furnish a satisfactory answer. But the result of this his paternal kindness and attention to young St. Henry was, that Father Ambrose slept all day (with the exception of mealtimes, when he became wakeful and lively to a surprising degree) in an easy arm-chair by the library fire; whilst his pupil roamed at will through his patrimonial domains; neither being perhaps once conscious during the whole time that the other was in existence. I mention these particulars because, although I would not wholly excuse the after-errors of my friend's life on the score of his neglected education, I would, and I think fairly may, endeavour to extenuate them by alluding to it.

That there is much of the human disposition innate, that men are naturally proud or meek, courageous or cowardly, of a buoyant or a grave temperament, is I believe universally granted. That there is much of it factitious, or acquired by the circumstances in which we happen to be placed, is equally incontestable. Both nature and accident concurred in forming St. Henry's character; to have rendered it perfect they should have been exactly at issue. I have already mentioned the qualities of mind and disposition to which his birth made him heir; it is evident that his education and manner of early life should have been such as to modify some of these, repress others entirely, and direct them all to their proper end. Instead of this, he was left like a wild shrub to shoot up into whatever form he would. The choicest flower of the garden if neglected becomes, like a weed of the desert, rather a blemish than a beauty in the soil where it flourishes. Under the tutelage of Father Ambrose, it was no wonder if the luxuriance of St. Henry's mind branched forth into numberless irregularities. But in addition to this, there were other peculiar circumstances which conspired to foster and corroborate

his natural disposition. His childhood from its very earliest period had been spent without a companion. There was little or no notice taken of him in the Count de Monjoy's family, who were mostly grown-up persons, too much occupied with their own affairs to think of a boy. From this cause it probably was, that in my friend St. Henry's disposition there was always rather a tendency to misanthropy, which, although in a great measure corrected by the natural goodness of his heart, gave his manners frequently an abruptness, and his conversation a tone of severity, by no means calculated to win him that degree of general favour which most men desire, but which he very possibly despised. It will not appear extraordinary that, on a mind thus disposed both by nature and education, the slightest coinciding cause had a powerful effect. The "Wilderness," as his paternal estate had been called for many years, was one of the grandest scenes of nature, but one of the gloomiest. It lay amongst the Helvetian Alps, where sublimity rarely melted into beauty, and the heart almost sank under the awful pleasure with which the majesty of Nature is beheld. A foaming, impetuous, deep-channeled stream rushed down from the hills, and swept with a deafening roar through the valley which formed the chief part of St. Henry's domain. This turbulent child of the clouds kept the whole neighbourhood in a continual earthquake. I have often stood at the foot of the cataract where the descending flood tumbled from the last cliff down upon the level, and have grown almost dizzy with the motion of the banks, the dashing of the spray, and the tremendous din which was unceasingly raised by the waves. Echo was here in a state of perpetual clamour. Many a time have I endeavoured to shout above the noise of the stream, but I could scarcely hear myself whilst in its vicinity. This was St. Henry's favourite retreat. It was shut out from the view even of his own desolate mansion, and not a living creature beheld his meditations but the eagle that soared silently above him, the Alpine fox that looked out from the rocky caverns on the mountain sides, or the rooks that

haunted a forest of tall larch-trees some distance from the fall. It was pleasant to stand near this wood and hear the cawing of these birds mingle with the distant roar of the torrent; but I remarked that St. Henry always drew nearer to the linn whose perpetual agitation and noise seemed to afford him a strange satisfaction. It was possibly but the yearning of a bold and magnanimous spirit for a scene of action where it could display itself. Circumstances, however, not permitting this, the eternal contemplation of such a scene fed his passions till they became nearly as ungovernable as the billows themselves, and exalted his imagination to a pitch of enthusiasm which might well be mistaken for madness. It was impossible but that the daily beholder of such a magnificent yet tempestuous object, as this Alpine fall presented, must imbibe something of its unruly spirit as well as of its grandeur. The remainder of his grounds corresponded with this. They were all rock and river, glen and precipice. They were also for the most part covered with a thick wood of enormous pines, larch, and other lofty trees; so that when a storm blew roughly over them, to a person looking down from the surrounding heights the valley had somewhat the appearance of a sea of dark-green billows raging round a few scattered islands that heaved up their rocky heads through the waste of waters. This was another point of view which St. Henry frequently chose when the day was blustry-the top of a pinnacle from which he could see the whole sheet of foliage in commotion heaving and rolling like a lake in a storm. When we walked at the bottom of the valley, the darkness occasioned by these trees being so closely matted overhead was in some places so profound that the ground could scarcely be discerned till you actually trod on it, and a stranger might possibly conjecture that he was threading some vaulted passage far below the surface of the earth. One precipitous descent seemed to lead down to the Shades themselves which poets have feigned to exist near the centre. Along the base of this declivity, and in the lowest part of the valley, the river, here only distinguishable by its noise, and con