The Little- Go. 641 



had sworn to imbrue their hands in the blood of freedom's foe, and fall 

 martyrs in the cause of the world.* 



The gentleman who communicated this to the father, stated that 

 he had made all possible inquiry after his son, but without effect; not 

 a trace of him could be discovered. Even the blood-hounds of the 

 government were at fault, and confessed themselves baffled by a boy. 



From this time forth, nothing more was heard of him until his re- 

 appearance in L shire, when the exile, the wanderer, the lost one, 

 stood for the last time a stranger on his father's threshold an altered 

 man ! Never was such a change so effectually wrought in a human 



mind as in that of M . He left his home a gloomy renegade, 



without a sorrow without a sigh ! He returned to it as a dove to 

 an ark after searching in vain the wide world wherewithal to find 

 rest for the sole of her foot His smile beamed a welcome to all, and 

 upon all ; and they who on his departure had scarce missed his pre- 

 sence from among them, wondered at the miracle of their former in- 

 difference, and deemed themselves in some sort guilty of barbarity 

 in suffering so long the endearments of recollection to remain re- 

 laxed between them and one so well deserving of their kindest regard. 

 There was a life and spirit about his demeanour, a cheerful benevo- 

 lence about his look, and nothing in his outward man which could be- 

 tray the least affinity to his former self, save an unaccountable mo- 

 dest reserve, a fearsome feminine irritability of nerve, and even this 

 was to be perceived only on some occasions ; but then the fit, while 

 it lasted, was more like a paroxysm of fear ; his frame quivered from 

 end to end ; his tongue refused its office ; action became involuntary ; 

 his muscles played by fits and starts ; his limbs moved not they 

 seemed to have no accord with his will. Whether this was the effect 

 of the constant and perpetual dread he must have lived in whilst 

 flying from the pursuit of men seeking his life, or whether proceed- 

 ing from the pangs of remorseful memory, or from constitutional in- 

 firmity brought on by the early and frequent indulgence in over- 

 wrought impulses, to which minds of an imaginative turn are ever 

 prone, from any or which of these it proceeded it would be vain to 

 conjecture ; but such was his sensitiveness, such the filmy nature of 

 his overstrained nerves, that it was to all who knew him worse than 

 torture to be obliged to witness his fine, spare, fragile frame thus 

 stretched on the rack of mental agony and all now loved him too 

 well for any to be the cause of pain to his little finger even. 



M had not been long at home ere he communicated to his fa- 

 ther his desire to enter the church. These were tidings of gladness 

 to the paternal ears. His brothers were all well settled in the world 

 by the help of a small fortune which their father had inherited on the 

 death of a distant relative, and there remained no better means of 

 providing for himself but the prospect of succeeding his parent in the 

 pastorship of his church. No obstacle, therefore, impeded the speedy 

 preparation of his departure for Oxford, in order to his preliminary 

 degree. Doubtless his acquirements, which had been classically di- 



* Kotzebue's Leben. Leipzic, 1795. 

 JUNE, 1837. 2 T 



