I

Thus I spent more than twenty years of my life, continually in search of contentment, which as invariably eluded my pursuit. My disposition was always saturnine. I wanted something, I knew not what. I sought it in solitude and in crowds, in travel and at home, in ambition and in independence. My ideas moved slow; I was prone to ennui. wandered among mountains and rivers, through verdant plains, and over immense precipices; but nature had no beauties. I plunged into the society of the rich, the gay, the witty and the eloquent; but I sighed; disquisition did not rouse me to animation; laughter was death to my flagging spirits.

This disease, which afflicted me at first but in a moderate degree, grew upon me perpetually from year to year. As I advanced in life, my prospects became less gilded with the sunshine of hope; and, as the illusion of the scenes

of

of which I was successively a spectator wore out,. I felt with deeper dejection that I was alone in the world.

It will readily be supposed, that in these twenty years of my life I met with many adventures; and that, if I were so inclined, I might, instead of confining myself as I have done to generals, have related a variety of minute circumstances, sometimes calculated to amuse the fancy, and sometimes to agitate the sympathetic and generous feelings, of every reader. I might have described many pleasing and many pathetic incidents in Merionethshire: Imight have enlarged upon my club of authors, and thus, in place of making my volumes a moral tale, have converted them into a vehicle for personal satire: I might have expanded the story of my political life, and presented the reader with many anecdotes of celebrated characters, that the world has little

H 5

little dreamed of: I might have described the casualties of my travels, and the heart-breaking delusions and disappoint ments of a pretended friendship. It is by no means for want of materials, that I have touched with so light a hand upon this large portion of my life. But I wil lingly sacrifice these topics. I hasten to the events, which have pressed with so terrible a weight on my heart, and have formed my principal motive to become my own historian.

CHAP

CHAPTER XII.

of

age.

I was now near forty-five years Travelling on some factitious occasion near the lakes of Westmorland and Cumberland, and listening, as my custom was, after whatever was extraordinary and interesting (I listened, as the reader has by this time perceived, with vain hope; what was called extraordinary had scarcely the power to excite my attention; what Interested others moved not me),—I was told of a gentleman, by name Macneil, that had resided much in foreign countries, and was supposed particularly to have possessed the confidence of the celebrated Jean Jacques Rousseau, who had been some years an inhabitant. of the banks of the Windermere. He had a family of daughters, to the form

ing

ing whose manners and mind he and his wife had devoted themselves; so that this man who had travelled so much, and whose understanding was so highly cultivated and refined, seemed to have no further business remaining in life, except to provide the children, the offspring of his marriage, with the motives. and means of a virtuous and happy existence.

The history of his wife was somewhat uncommon. She had been born on English ground, but he met with her in the Ecclesiastical Territory in Italy. She had eloped to her present consort, not from her parents, but from a man calling himself her husband. This man, an Italian by birth, had been her instructor in music; he was old, deformed, avaricious and profligate. The father of the lady had considered his exterior as a sufficient security, against any injury to which his daughter might be exposed,

and,