call our megrims the melancholy of a sublime soul, the yearnings of an
indigestion we denominate yearnings after immortality, nay, sometimes
'a proof of the nature of the soul!' May I find some biographer who
understands such sensations well, and may he style those melting
emotions the offspring of the poetical character,' which, in reality,
are the offspring of--a mutton-chop!"

[Vide Moore's "Life of Byron," in which it is satisfactorily shown
that if a man fast forty-eight hours, then eat three lobsters, and
drink Heaven knows how many bottles of claret; if, when he wake the
next morning, he sees himself abused as a demon by half the
periodicals of the country,--if, in a word, he be broken in his
health, irregular in his habits, unfortunate in his affairs, unhappy
in his home, and if then he should be so extremely eccentric as to
be low-spirited and misanthropical, the low spirits and the
misanthropy are by no means to be attributed to the above agreeable
circumstances, but, God wot, to the "poetical character"!]

"You jest pleasantly enough on your low spirits," said Clifford; "but I
have a cause for mine."

"What then?" cried Tomlinson. "So much the easier is it to cure them.
The mind can cure the evils that spring from the mind. It is only a fool
and a quack and a driveller when it professes to heal the evils that
spring from the body. My blue devils spring from the body; consequently
my mind, which, as you know, is a particularly wise mind, wrestles riot
against them. Tell me frankly," renewed Augustus, after a pause, "do you
ever repent? Do you ever think, if you had been a shop-boy with a white
apron about your middle, that you would have been a happier and a better
member of society than you now are?"

"Repent!" said Clifford, fiercely; and his answer opened more of his
secret heart, its motives, its reasonings, and its peculiarities
than were often discernible,--"repent! that is the idlest word in our
language. No; the moment I repent, that moment I reform! Never can it
seem to me an atonement for crime merely to regret it. My mind would
lead me, not to regret, but to repair! Repent! no, not yet. The older I
grow, the more I see of men and of the callings of social life, the more
I, an open knave, sicken at the glossed and covert dishonesties around.
I acknowledge no allegiance to society. From my birth to this hour, I
have received no single favour from i