, and the
routine of ship-board--the military duty--the new acquaintances, both of his
comrades in arms, and of the officers of the fleet--served to cheer and
occupy his mind, and waken it out of that selfish depression into which
his late unhappy fortunes had plunged him. He felt as if the ocean
separated him from his past care, and welcomed the new era of life which
was dawning for him. Wounds heal rapidly in a heart of two-and-twenty;
hopes revive daily; and courage rallies, in spite of a man. Perhaps, as
Esmond thought of his late despondency and melancholy, and how
irremediable it had seemed to him, as he lay in his prison a few months
back, he was almost mortified in his secret mind at finding himself so
cheerful.

To see with one's own eyes men and countries, is better than reading all
the books of travel in the world: and it was with extreme delight and
exultation that the young man found himself actually on his grand tour,
and in the view of people and cities which he had read about as a boy. He
beheld war for the first time--the pride, pomp, and circumstance of it, at
least, if not much of the danger. He saw actually, and with his own eyes,
those Spanish cavaliers and ladies whom he had beheld in imagination in
that immortal story of Cervantes, which had been the delight of his
youthful leisure. 'Tis forty years since Mr. Esmond witnessed those
scenes, but they remain as fresh in his memory as on the day when first he
saw them as a young man. A cloud, as of grief, that had lowered over him,
and had wrapped the last years of his life in gloom, seemed to clear away
from Esmond during this fortunate voyage and campaign. His energies seemed
to awaken and to expand, under a cheerful sense of freedom. Was his heart
secretly glad to have escaped from that fond but ignoble bondage at home?
Was it that the inferiority to which the idea of his base birth had
compelled him, vanished with the knowledge of that secret, which though,
perforce, kept to himself, was yet enough to cheer and console him? At any
rate, young Esmond of the army was quite a different being to the sad
little dependant of the kind Castlewood household, and the melancholy
student of Trinity Walks; discontented with his fate, and with the
vocation into which that drove him, and thinking, with a secret
indignation, that the cassock and bands, and the very sacred office with
which he had once proposed to invest himself, were, in fact, but marks of
a serv