, and dance
about through the darkness, like sportive wild-fires: Sir Clement in
moody calmness looks prepared for any thing the worst, like a man who
anticipates evil long-deserved; the broken-hearted mother is on her
knees at the cold door-steps, striving to pierce the gloom with her
eyes, and ejaculating distracted prayers: and so the live-long
night--that night of doubt, and dread, and dreariness--through bitter
hours of confusion and dismay, they sought poor Margaret--and found her
not!

"But, with morning's light came the awful certainty. At the end of a
terraced walk, mournfully shaded by high-cropped yews, stood an arbour,
and behind it, half-hidden among rank weeds, was an old half-forgotten
fountain; there, on many a sultry summer night, had Rowland met with
Margaret, and there had she resolved in terrible remorse to perish. With
the seeming fore-thought of reason, and the resolution of a phrensied
fortitude, she had bound a quantity of matted weeds about her face, and
twisted her hands in her fettering garments, that the shallow pool might
not in cruel kindness fail to drown her; she lay scarcely half immersed
in those waters of death; a few lazy tench floating sluggishly about,
appeared to be curiously inspecting their ghastly, uninvited guest; and
the fragments of an enamelled miniature, with some torn letters in the
hand-writing of Rowland Beauvoir, were found scattered on the
overflowing margin of the pool."

* * * * *

Well, unkindly whelp, if your bone has no pickings better than this, not
a cur shall envy you the sorry banquet. Yet, had my genius been better
educated in the science of French cookery, this might have been served
up with higher seasoning as a savoury _ragout_: but you get it in
simplicity, scarce grilled; and in sooth, good world, it is easier to
sneer at a novel than to imagine one; and far more self-complacency may
be gained by manfully affecting to despise the novelist, than by adding
to his honours in the compliment of humble imitation.

* * * * *

Things supernatural have every where and every when exercised mortal
curiosity. Fear and credulity support the arms of superstition, fierce
as city griffins, rampant as the lion and the unicorn; and forasmuch as
no creature, Nelson not excepted, can truly boast of having never known
fear, and no man also--from polite Voltaire, shrewd Hume, Leviathan
Hobbes, and erudite Gib