please the fancy or to touch the heart
Dark but not awful dismal but yet mean,
With anxious bustle moves the cumbrous scene,
Presents no objects tender or profound,
But spreads its cold unmeaning gloom around

Parish Register

'Your majesty,' said Mannering, laughing, 'has solemnised your abdication
by an act of mercy and charity. That fellow will scarce think of going to
law.'

'O, you are quite wrong,' said the experienced lawyer. 'The only
difference is, I have lost my client and my fee. He'll never rest till he
finds somebody to encourage him to commit the folly he has predetermined.
No! no! I have only shown you another weakness of my character: I always
speak truth of a Saturday night.'

'And sometimes through the week, I should think,' said Mannering,
continuing the same tone.

'Why, yes; as far as my vocation will permit. I am, as Hamlet says,
indifferent honest, when my clients and their solicitors do not make me
the medium of conveying their double-distilled lies to the bench. But
oportet vivere! it is a sad thing. And now to our business. I am glad my
old friend Mac-Morlan has sent you to me; he is an active, honest, and
intelligent man, long sheriff-substitute of the county of--under me, and
still holds the office. He knows I have a regard for that unfortunate
family of Ellangowan, and for poor Lucy. I have not seen her since she
was twelve years old, and she was then a sweet pretty girl, under the
management of a very silly father. But my interest in her is of an early
date. I was called upon, Mr. Mannering, being then sheriff of that
county, to investigate the particulars of a murder which had been
committed near Ellangowan the day on which this poor child was born; and
which, by a strange combination that I was unhappily not able to trace,
involved the death or abstraction of her only brother, a boy of about
five years old. No, Colonel, I shall never forget the misery of the house
of Ellangowan that morning! the father half-distracted--the mother dead
in premature travail--the helpless infant, with scarce any one to attend
it, coming wawling and crying into this miserable world at such a moment
of unutterable misery. We lawyers are not of iron, sir, or of brass, any
more than you soldiers are of steel. We are conversant with the crimes
and distresses of civil society, as you are with those that occur in a
state of war, and to do our duty in either case a little apath