a mode of conduct, that would for ever have
damned their fame, had they been innocent, seduced girls. These
particularly stood aloof.--Had she remained with her husband, practising
insincerity, and neglecting her child to manage an intrigue, she would
still have been visited and respected. If, instead of openly living with
her lover, she could have condescended to call into play a thousand
arts, which, degrading her own mind, might have allowed the people who
were not deceived, to pretend to be so, she would have been caressed and
treated like an honourable woman. "And Brutus[138-A] is an honourable
man!" said Mark-Antony with equal sincerity.

With Darnford she did not taste uninterrupted felicity; there was a
volatility in his manner which often distressed her; but love gladdened
the scene; besides, he was the most tender, sympathizing creature in the
world. A fondness for the sex often gives an appearance of humanity to
the behaviour of men, who have small pretensions to the reality; and they
seem to love others, when they are only pursuing their own
gratification. Darnford appeared ever willing to avail himself of her
taste and acquirements, while she endeavoured to profit by his decision
of character, and to eradicate some of the romantic notions, which had
taken root in her mind, while in adversity she had brooded over visions
of unattainable bliss.

The real affections of life, when they are allowed to burst forth, are
buds pregnant with joy and all the sweet emotions of the soul; yet they
branch out with wild ease, unlike the artificial forms of felicity,
sketched by an imagination painful alive. The substantial happiness,
which enlarges and civilizes the mind, may be compared to the pleasure
experienced in roving through nature at large, inhaling the sweet gale
natural to the clime; while the reveries of a feverish imagination
continually sport themselves in gardens full of aromatic shrubs, which
cloy while they delight, and weaken the sense of pleasure they gratify.
The heaven of fancy, below or beyond the stars, in this life, or in those
ever-smiling regions surrounded by the unmarked ocean of futurity, have
an insipid uniformity which palls. Poets have imagined scenes of bliss;
but, fencing out sorrow, all the extatic emotions of the soul, and even
its grandeur, seem to be equally excluded. We dose over the unruffled
lake, and long to scale the rocks which fence the happy valley of
contentment, though serpe