assembly house.

CHAPTER XII.

I shall endeavour to state the remainder of this narrative in the words
of Mr. Collins. The reader has already had occasion to perceive that Mr.
Collins was a man of no vulgar order; and his reflections on the subject
were uncommonly judicious.

"This day was the crisis of Mr. Falkland's history. From hence took its
beginning that gloomy and unsociable melancholy, of which he has since
been the victim. No two characters can be in certain respects more
strongly contrasted, than the Mr. Falkland of a date prior and
subsequent to these events. Hitherto he had been attended by a fortune
perpetually prosperous. His mind was sanguine; full of that undoubting
confidence in its own powers which prosperity is qualified to produce.
Though the habits of his life were those of a serious and sublime
visionary they were nevertheless full of cheerfulness and tranquillity.
But from this moment, his pride, and the lofty adventurousness of his
spirit, were effectually subdued. From an object of envy he was changed
into an object of compassion. Life, which hitherto no one had more
exquisitely enjoyed, became a burden to him. No more self-complacency,
no more rapture, no more self-approving and heart-transporting
benevolence! He who had lived beyond any man upon the grand and
animating reveries of the imagination, seemed now to have no visions but
of anguish and despair. His case was peculiarly worthy of sympathy,
since, no doubt, if rectitude and purity of disposition could give a
title to happiness, few men could exhibit a more consistent and powerful
claim than Mr. Falkland.

"He was too deeply pervaded with the idle and groundless romances of
chivalry, ever to forget the situation, humiliating and dishonourable
according to his ideas, in which he had been placed upon this occasion.
There is a mysterious sort of divinity annexed to the person of a true
knight, that makes any species of brute violence committed upon it
indelible and immortal. To be knocked down, cuffed, kicked, dragged
along the floor! Sacred heaven, the memory of such a treatment was not
to be endured! No future lustration could ever remove the stain: and,
what was perhaps still worse in the present case, the offender having
ceased to exist, the lustration which the laws of knight-errantry
prescribe was rendered impossible.

"In some future period of human improvement, it is probable, that that
calamity will be in a manner u