any
passion by indulgence, so did his ardor in favor of the great object
of his affections grow with its growth, and become more manifest as an
ordinary observer would be apt to think the motive of its existence at
all had nearly ceased. This is a moral phenomenon that I have often had
occasion to observe, and which, there is some reason to think, depends
on a principle of attraction that has hitherto escaped the sagacity of
the philosophers, but which is as active in the immaterial, as is that
of gravitation in the material world. Talents like his, so incessantly
and unweariedly employed, produced the usual fruits. He grew richer
hourly, and at the time of which I speak he was pretty generally known
to the initiated to be the warmest man who had anything to do with the
stock exchange.

I do not think that the opinions of my ancestor underwent as many
material changes between the ages of fifty and seventy as they had
undergone between the ages of ten and forty. During the latter period
the tree of life usually gets deep root, its inclination is fixed,
whether obtained by bending to the storms, or by drawing toward the
light; and it probably yields more in fruits of its own, than it gains
by tillage and manuring. Still my ancestor was not exactly the same man
the day he kept his seventieth birthday as he had been the day he kept
his fiftieth. In the first place, he was worth thrice the money at the
former period that he had been worth at the latter. Of course his moral
system had undergone all the mutations that are known to be dependent on
a change of this important character. Beyond a question, during the last
five-and-twenty years of the life of my ancestor, his political bias,
too, was in favor of exclusive privileges and exclusive benefits. I do
not mean that he was an aristocrat in the vulgar acceptation. To
him, feudality was a blank; he had probably never heard the word.
Portcullises rose and fell, flanking towers lifted their heads, and
embattled walls swept around their fabrics in vain, so far as his
imagination was concerned. He cared not for the days of courts leet and
courts baron; nor for the barons themselves; nor for the honors of a
pedigree (why should he?--no prince in the land could more clearly
trace his family into obscurity than himself), nor for the vanities of
a court, nor for those of society; nor for aught else of the same nature
that is apt to have charms for the weak-minded, the imaginative, o