paper will tell you enough. It is drawn out by Mr. Raper,
and is minutely exact. There is not a strong point of the case omitted,
nor a weak one forgotten. Read it over carefully; mark the points in
which you trace resemblance to your own life; study well where any
divergence or difficulty may occur; and, lastly, draw up a brief
memoir in the character of Jasper Carew, with all your recollections of
childhood: for remember that up to the age of twelve or thirteen, if not
later, you were domesticated with this Countess de Gabriac, and educated
by Raper. After that you are free to follow out what fancy, or reality,
if you like it better, may suggest. When you have drawn up everything,
with all the consistency and plausibility you can, avoid none of the
real difficulties, but rather show yourself fully aware of them, and
also of all their importance. Let the task of having persuaded you to
address Messrs. Bickering and Ragge be left to me; I have already held
correspondence with them, and on this very subject. I give you three
days to do this; meanwhile I start at once for Brussels, where I can
consult a lawyer, an old friend of mine, as to our first steps in the
campaign."

The man who stoops once to a minute dissection of his life must perforce
steel his heart against many a sense of shame, since even in the story
of the good and the upright are passages of dark omen, moments when the
bad has triumphed, and seasons when the true has been postponed by the
false. It is not now that, having revealed so much as I have done of
my secret history, I dare make any pretensions to superior honesty,
or affect to be one of the "unblemished few." Still, I have a craving
desire not to be judged over harshly,--a painful feeling of anxiety that
no evil construction should be put upon those actions of my life
other than what they absolutely merit. My "over-reachings" have been
many,--my "shortcomings" still more; but, with all their weight and
gravity before me, I still entreat a merciful judgment, and hope that
if the sentence be "guilty," there will be at least the alleviation of
"attenuating circumstances."

I am now an old man; the world has no more any bribe to my ambition than
have I within me the energy to attempt it. The friendships that warmed
up the late autumn of my life are departed; they lie in the churchyard,
and none have ever replaced them. In these confessions, therefore,
humiliating as they often would seem, there are