ak of, doubted not that the
excess of his attachment, the various acquisitions of his mind, his
many and amiable qualities, had overcome the natural horror which
his destined bride must have entertained at an exterior so dreadfully
inauspicious."

"And did they judge truly?" said Isabella.

"You shall hear. He, at least, was fully aware of his own deficiency;
the sense of it haunted him like a phantom. 'I am,' was his own
expression to me,--I mean to a man whom he trusted,--'I am, in spite
of what you would say, a poor miserable outcast, fitter to have been
smothered in the cradle than to have been brought up to scare the world
in which I crawl.' The person whom he addressed in vain endeavoured to
impress him with the indifference to external form which is the natural
result of philosophy, or entreat him to recall the superiority of mental
talents to the more attractive attributes that are merely personal.
'I hear you,' he would reply; 'but you speak the voice of cold-blooded
stoicism, or, at least, of friendly partiality. But look at every book
which we have read, those excepted of that abstract philosophy which
feels no responsive voice in our natural feelings. Is not personal form,
such as at least can be tolerated without horror and disgust, always
represented as essential to our ideas of a friend, far more a lover?
Is not such a mis-shapen monster as I am, excluded, by the very fiat
of Nature, from her fairest enjoyments? What but my wealth prevents
all--perhaps even Letitia, or you--from shunning me as something foreign
to your nature, and more odious, by bearing that distorted resemblance
to humanity which we observe in the animal tribes that are more hateful
to man because they seem his caricature?'"

"You repeat the sentiments of a madman," said Miss Vere.

"No," replied her conductor, "unless a morbid and excessive sensibility
on such a subject can be termed insanity. Yet I will not deny that this
governing feeling and apprehension carried the person who entertained
it, to lengths which indicated a deranged imagination. He appeared
to think that it was necessary for him, by exuberant, and not always
well-chosen instances of liberality, and even profusion, to unite
himself to the human race, from which he conceived himself naturally
dissevered. The benefits which he bestowed, from a disposition naturally
philanthropical in an uncommon degree, were exaggerated by the influence
of the goading reflection, that