100 THE LEGEND OF THE ABBEY TOWER. 



in speculative difficulties, and become themselves ^ creatures of dark 

 imagining ;' with a world of love, yet no love for the world ; born 

 to do good and be happy, yet determined to do nothing and be 

 miserable; growing gray, * but not with years' and exhibiting a 

 solemn and early spectacle of dilapidation, like a newly-erected 

 artificial ruin. 



Not that my hero was in this class of misery manufacturers : but 

 that this is a class in a great measure generated by the perusal of 

 such poems as those of lord Byron, and such histories as that of 



young Baldwin de . And here, you may reasonably ask, 



why I proceed to relate, what, according to my own shewing, 

 had better be suppressed ? The answer is merely tliis : — For as 

 many as receive injury from such things, there are as many more 

 who derive from them much benefit in a limited excitement of the 

 imagination and feelings, and a temporary suspension of the severer 

 duties of life, which, in their never-ceasing pressure, are just as hurt- 

 ful to the mind, the temper, and the heart, as an uninterrupted 

 course of romance. It is proportional adjustment, not suppression, 

 that is required. The abuse of things, not their existence, should 

 be opposed. Heaven forbid the rational part of the community 

 should be deprived of recreation, lest a few sensitive simpletons 

 should render themselves disgusting ; that such a man as the re- 

 nowned James Watt should be denied the enjoyment of Waverley 

 or Childe Harold, because some idle apprentice inlagines himself 

 to be a personation of either the one or the other. 



And, now, to the picture of my hero. He enters upon the scene 

 in the twenty-first year of his age, usually, though most vnrongly 

 termed, of discretion : for it is precisely the time when the constitu- 

 ent particles of the brain are in their most violent stage of fermenta- 

 tion, boiling and bubbling to the perfect exclusion of those desirable 

 qualities which constitute what we acknowledge as a moral fitness 

 to manage our own affairs. Young Baldwin inherited from his 

 mother a more than sufficient share of sensibility, which he amply 

 fed with repeated banquets at the hand of * The Man of Feeling,' 

 * Julia de Roubigny,' * Poor Maria,' and * Charlotte and Werter.* 

 From his father he could never expect to inherit more than a fine 

 estate, swelling fortune, and ancient title — trifles which, of course, 

 weighed nothing in the scale against * the pleasures of melancholy* 

 and woman's disinterestedness. * 



But I have said he differed from that class of artificial miserables, 

 who, with nothing genuine or original in their conduct, exhibit only 

 the freaks of sentimental dandyism. Young Baldwin's character 



