astes to the graces and fascination of social life. Now a
new spirit entered within me: the smile faded from my lip, and the jest
departed from my tongue; memory seemed no less treacherous than fancy,
and deserted me the instant I attempted to enter into those contests
of knowledge in which I had been not undistinguished before. I grew
confused and embarrassed in speech; my words expressed a sense utterly
different to that which I had intended to convey; and at last, as my
apathy increased, I sat at my own board, silent and lifeless, freezing
into ice the very powers and streams of converse which I had once been
the foremost to circulate and to warm.

At the time I refer to, I was Minister at one of the small Continental
courts, where life is a round of unmeaning etiquette and wearisome
ceremonials, a daily labour of trifles, a ceaseless pageantry of
nothings. I had been sent there upon one important event; the business
resulting from it had soon ceased, and all the duties that remained
for me to discharge were of a negative and passive nature. Nothing that
could arouse, nothing that could occupy faculties that had for years
been so perpetually wound up to a restless excitement, was left for me
in this terrible reservoir of _ennui_. I had come thither at once from
the skirmishing and wild warfare of a Tartar foe; a war in which, though
the glory was obscure, the action was perpetual and exciting. I had come
thither, and the change was as if I had passed from a mountain stream to
a stagnant pool. Society at this court reminded me of a state funeral:
everything was pompous and lugubrious, even to the drapery--even to
the feathers--which, in other scenes, would have been consecrated to
associations of levity or of grace; the hourly pageant swept on slow,
tedious, mournful, and the object of the attendants was only to entomb
the Pleasure which they affected celebrate. What a change for the wild,
the strange, the novel, the intriguing, the varying life, which, whether
in courts or camps, I had hitherto led! The internal change that came
over myself is scarcely to be wondered at; the winds stood still, and
the straw they had blown from quarter to quarter, whether in anger or in
sport, began to moulder upon the spot where they had left it.

From this cessation of the aims, hopes, and thoughts of life I was
awakened by the spreading, as it were, of another disease: the dead,
dull, aching pain at my heart was succeeded by one ac