with envy, and a bitter
feeling passed through his mind when he recalled the chances of fortune
and of birth, which deprived him of the hope of ever rising to the
command of such a frigate, but which doomed him, seemingly, to the fate
of a privateersman for life.

Nature had intended Raoul Yvard for a much higher destiny than that
which apparently awaited his career. He had come into active life with
none of the advantages that accompany the accidents of birth, and at a
moment in the history of his great nation when its morals and its
religious sentiments had become unsettled by the violent reaction which
was throwing off the abuses of centuries. They who imagine, however,
that France, as a whole, was guilty of the gross excesses that
disfigured her struggles for liberty know little of the great mass of
moral feeling that endured through all the abominations of the times,
and mistake the crimes of a few desperate leaders and the exaggerations
of misguided impulses for a radical and universal depravity. The France
of the Reign of Terror, even, has little more to answer for than the
compliance which makes bodies of men the instruments of the
enthusiastic, the designing, and the active--our own country often
tolerating error that differs only in the degree, under the same blind
submission to combinations and impulses; this very degree, to,
depending more on the accidents of history and natural causes than any
agencies which are to be imputed to the one party as a fault, or to the
other as a merit. It was with Raoul as it had been with his
country--each was the creature of circumstances; and if the man had some
of the faults, he had also most of the merits of his nation and his age.
The looseness on the subject of religion, which was his principal defect
in the eyes of Ghita, but which could scarcely fail to be a material one
with a girl educated and disposed as was the case with our heroine, was
the error of the day, and with Raoul it was at least sincere; a
circumstance that rendered him, with one so truly pious as the gentle
being he loved, the subject of a holy interest, which, in itself, almost
rivalled the natural tenderness of her sex, in behalf of the object of
her affections.

While the short engagement with the boats lasted, and during the few
minutes he was under the fire of the frigate, Raoul had been himself;
the excitement of actual war always nerving him to deeds worthy of his
command and the high name he h