otives. He had formed few
congenial ties with those who were the objects of persecution, and was
disgusted alike by their narrow-minded and selfish party-spirit, their
gloomy fanaticism, their abhorrent condemnation of all elegant studies or
innocent exercises, and the envenomed rancour of their political hatred.
But his mind was still more revolted by the tyrannical and oppressive
conduct of the government, the misrule, license, and brutality of the
soldiery, the executions on the scaffold, the slaughters in the open
field, the free quarters and exactions imposed by military law, which
placed the lives and fortunes of a free people on a level with Asiatic
slaves. Condemning, therefore, each party as its excesses fell under his
eyes, disgusted with the sight of evils which he had no means of
alleviating, and hearing alternate complaints and exultations with which
he could not sympathize, he would long ere this have left Scotland, had
it not been for his attachment to Edith Bellenden.

The earlier meetings of these young people had been at Charnwood, when
Major Bellenden, who was as free from suspicion on such occasions as
Uncle Toby himself, had encouraged their keeping each other constant
company, without entertaining any apprehension of the natural
consequences. Love, as usual in such cases, borrowed the name of
friendship, used her language, and claimed her privileges. When Edith
Bellenden was recalled to her mother's castle, it was astonishing by what
singular and recurring accidents she often met young Morton in her
sequestered walks, especially considering the distance of their places of
abode. Yet it somehow happened that she never expressed the surprise
which the frequency of these rencontres ought naturally to have excited,
and that their intercourse assumed gradually a more delicate character,
and their meetings began to wear the air of appointments. Books,
drawings, letters, were exchanged between them, and every trifling
commission, given or executed, gave rise to a new correspondence. Love
indeed was not yet mentioned between them by name, but each knew the
situation of their own bosom, and could not but guess at that of the
other. Unable to desist from an intercourse which possessed such charms
for both, yet trembling for its too probable consequences, it had been
continued without specific explanation until now, when fate appeared to
have taken the conclusion into its own hands.

It followed, as a conseq