mpatient, the offered occasion eagerly.)

Clarence Glyndon was a young man of fortune, not large, but easy and
independent. His parents were dead, and his nearest relation was an
only sister, left in England under the care of her aunt, and many years
younger than himself. Early in life he had evinced considerable promise
in the art of painting, and rather from enthusiasm than any pecuniary
necessity for a profession, he determined to devote himself to a
career in which the English artist generally commences with rapture
and historical composition, to conclude with avaricious calculation and
portraits of Alderman Simpkins. Glyndon was supposed by his friends to
possess no inconsiderable genius; but it was of a rash and presumptuous
order. He was averse from continuous and steady labour, and his ambition
rather sought to gather the fruit than to plant the tree. In common with
many artists in their youth, he was fond of pleasure and excitement,
yielding with little forethought to whatever impressed his fancy or
appealed to his passions. He had travelled through the more celebrated
cities of Europe, with the avowed purpose and sincere resolution of
studying the divine masterpieces of his art. But in each, pleasure had
too often allured him from ambition, and living beauty distracted his
worship from the senseless canvas. Brave, adventurous, vain, restless,
inquisitive, he was ever involved in wild projects and pleasant
dangers,--the creature of impulse and the slave of imagination.

It was then the period when a feverish spirit of change was working
its way to that hideous mockery of human aspirations, the Revolution
of France; and from the chaos into which were already jarring the
sanctities of the World's Venerable Belief, arose many shapeless and
unformed chimeras. Need I remind the reader that, while that was the day
for polished scepticism and affected wisdom, it was the day also for the
most egregious credulity and the most mystical superstitions,--the day
in which magnetism and magic found converts amongst the disciples of
Diderot; when prophecies were current in every mouth; when the salon
of a philosophical deist was converted into an Heraclea, in which
necromancy professed to conjure up the shadows of the dead; when the
Crosier and the Book were ridiculed, and Mesmer and Cagliostro were
believed. In that Heliacal Rising, heralding the new sun before which
all vapours were to vanish, stalked from their graves in th