creature, whom he had
seduced and abandoned to want, but who had succeeded to a small property
on the death of a distant relation, remembered her first, her only love,
when all the rest of the world were willing to forget him; and she it
was who had him conveyed thither, herself sitting in the boat with her
arm round the unconscious idiot, who now vegetates on the charity of her
whom he betrayed. For fifteen years he has continued to exist in the
same state, and you may pronounce his name on the busy Exchange of the
city where he flourished and fell, and haply the person you speak to
shall have entirely forgotten it.

The evils genius sometimes brings to its possessor have often been said
and sung, perhaps with exaggerations, but not always without truth. It
is found frequently apart from prudence and principle; and in a world
constituted like ours, how can it fail to reap a harvest of misery or
death? A fine genius, and even a high, had been bestowed on One who is
now an inmate of that cottage-cell, peering between these two rocks. At
College he outstripped all his compeers by powers equally versatile and
profound--the first both in intellect and in imagination. He was a poor
man's son--the only son of a working carpenter--and his father intended
him for the church. But the youth soon felt that to him the trammels of
a strict faith would be unbearable, and he lived on from year to year,
uncertain what profession to choose. Meanwhile his friends, all inferior
to him in talents and acquirements, followed the plain, open, and
beaten path, that leads sooner or later to respectability and
independence. He was left alone in his genius, useless, although
admired--while those who had looked in high hopes on his early career,
began to have their fears that they might never be realised. His first
attempts to attract the notice of the public, although not absolute
failures--for some of his compositions, both in prose and verse, were
indeed beautiful--were not triumphantly successful, and he began to
taste the bitterness of disappointed ambition. His wit and colloquial
talents carried him into the society of the dissipated and the
licentious; and, before he was aware of the fact, he had got the
character of all others the most humiliating--that of a man who knew not
how to estimate his own worth, nor to preserve it from pollution. He
found himself silently and gradually excluded from the higher circle
which he had once adorned, an