osed to use
every means to array against your union with Isora all motives of
ambition, interest, and aggrandizement. "I know Morton's character,"
said he, "to its very depths. His chief virtue is honour; his chief
principle is ambition. He will not attempt to win this girl otherwise
than by marriage; for the very reasons that would induce most men to
attempt it, namely, her unfriended state, her poverty, her confidence in
him, and her love, or that semblance of love which he believes to be the
passion itself. This virtue,--I call it so, though it is none, for there
is no virtue out of religion,--this virtue, then, will place before him
only two plans of conduct, either to marry her or to forsake her. Now,
then, if we can bring his ambition, that great lever of his conduct, in
opposition to the first alternative, only the last remains: I say that
we _can_ employ that engine in your behalf; leave it to me, and I will
do so. Then, Aubrey, in the moment of her pique, her resentment, her
outraged vanity, at being thus left, you shall appear; not as you have
hitherto done in menace and terror, but soft, subdued, with looks all
love, with vows all penitence; vindicating all your past vehemence by
the excess of your passion, and promising all future tenderness by the
influence of the same motive, the motive which to a woman pardons every
error and hallows every crime. Then will she contrast your love with
your brother's: then will the scale fall from her eyes; then will
she see what hitherto she has been blinded to, that your brother, to
yourself, is a satyr to Hyperion; then will she blush and falter, and
hide her cheek in your bosom." "Hold, hold!" I cried "do with me what
you will; counsel, and I will act!"

Here again the manuscript was defaced by a sudden burst of execration
upon Montreuil, followed by ravings that gradually blackened into the
most gloomy and incoherent outpourings of madness; at length the history
proceeded.

"You wrote to ask me to sound our uncle on the subject of your intended
marriage. Montreuil drew up my answer; and I constrained myself, despite
my revived hatred to you, to transcribe its expressions of affection. My
uncle wrote to you also; and we strengthened his dislike to the step
you had proposed, by hints from myself disrespectful to Isora, and an
anonymous communication dated from London and to the same purport. All
this while I knew not that Isora had been in your house; your answer
t