he stillness of the night our
hearts shrink at the sound of its coming footstep. Well is it for those
who fall into the hands of the Lord rather than into the hands of men;
but worst of all is it for him who has hereafter to mingle the gall of
remorse with the cup held out to him by his doom.

Mr. Wilkins took his ease and his pleasure yet more and more every year
of his life; nor did the quality of his ease and his pleasure improve; it
seldom does with self-indulgent people. He cared less for any books that
strained his faculties a little--less for engravings and
sculptures--perhaps more for pictures. He spent extravagantly on his
horses; "thought of eating and drinking." There was no open vice in all
this, so that any awful temptation to crime should come down upon him,
and startle him out of his mode of thinking and living; half the people
about him did much the same, as far as their lives were patent to his
unreflecting observation. But most of his associates had their duties to
do, and did them with a heart and a will, in the hours when he was not in
their company. Yes! I call them duties, though some of them might be
self-imposed and purely social; they were engagements they had entered
into, either tacitly or with words, and that they fulfilled. From Mr.
Hetherington, the Master of the Hounds, who was up at--no one knows what
hour, to go down to the kennel and see that the men did their work well
and thoroughly, to stern old Sir Lionel Playfair, the upright magistrate,
the thoughtful, conscientious landlord--they did their work according to
their lights; there were few laggards among those with whom Mr. Wilkins
associated in the field or at the dinner-table. Mr. Ness--though as a
clergyman he was not so active as he might have been--yet even Mr. Ness
fagged away with his pupils and his new edition of one of the classics.
Only Mr. Wilkins, dissatisfied with his position, neglected to fulfil the
duties thereof. He imitated the pleasures, and longed for the fancied
leisure of those about him; leisure that he imagined would be so much
more valuable in the hands of a man like himself, full of intellectual
tastes and accomplishments, than frittered away by dull boors of
untravelled, uncultivated squires--whose company, however, be it said by
the way, he never refused.

And yet daily Mr. Wilkins was sinking from the intellectually to the
sensually self-indulgent man. He lay late in bed, and hated Mr. Dunster