awakened and re-awakened--hearing the vehemence of his
petitioning outcry to soften her obduracy--Sir Willoughby pursued
Laetitia with solicitations to espouse him, until the inveteracy of his
wooing wore the aspect of the life-long love he raved of aroused to a
state of mania. He appeared, he departed, he returned; and all the
while his imps were about him and upon him, riding him, prompting,
driving, inspiring him with outrageous pathos, an eloquence to move any
one but the dead, which its object seemed to be in her torpid
attention. He heard them, he talked to them, caressed them; he flung
them off, and ran from them, and stood vanquished for them to mount him
again and swarm on him. There are men thus imp-haunted. Men who,
setting their minds upon an object, must have it, breed imps. They are
noted for their singularities, as their converse with the invisible and
amazing distractions are called. Willoughby became aware of them that
night. He said to himself, upon one of his dashes into solitude: I
believe I am possessed! And if he did not actually believe it, but only
suspected it, or framed speech to account for the transformation he had
undergone into a desperately beseeching creature, having lost
acquaintance with his habitual personality, the operations of an impish
host had undoubtedly smitten his consciousness.

He had them in his brain: for while burning with an ardour for
Laetitia, that incited him to frantic excesses of language and
comportment, he was aware of shouts of the names of Lady Busshe and
Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, the which, freezing him as they did, were
directly the cause of his hurrying to a wilder extravagance and more
headlong determination to subdue before break of day the woman he
almost dreaded to behold by daylight, though he had now passionately
persuaded himself of his love of her. He could not, he felt, stand in
the daylight without her. She was his morning. She was, he raved, his
predestinated wife. He cried, "Darling!" both to her and to solitude.
Every prescription of his ideal of demeanour as an example to his class
and country, was abandoned by the enamoured gentleman. He had lost
command of his countenance. He stooped so far as to kneel, and not
gracefully. Nay, it is in the chronicles of the invisible host around
him, that in a fit of supplication, upon a cry of "Laetitia!" twice
repeated, he whimpered.

Let so much suffice. And indeed not without reason do the multitudes o