ould sink even her
strong-headed parent to the grave. Yet, what tidings had I to give?
Whether her young soldier was shot in the attempt to escape from St
Lazare, or thrown into some of those hideous dungeons, where so many
thousands were dying in misery from day to day, was entirely beyond
my power to tell. It was better that she should be roving over the
bright hills, and breathing the fresh breezes of Switzerland, than
listening to my hopeless conjectures at home; trying to reconcile
herself to all the chances which passion is so painfully ingenious in
creating, and dying, like a flower in all its beauty, on the spot
where it had grown.

But the letter contained nothing of the _one_ name, for which my
first glance had looked over every line with breathless anxiety.
There was not a syllable of Clotilde! The father's cares had absorbed
all other thoughts; and the letter was to me a blank in that
knowledge for which I panted, as the hart pants for the fountains.
Still, I was not dead to the calls of friendship; and that night's
mail carried a long epistle to Mordecai, detailing my escapes, and
the services of his kindred in France; and for Mariamne's ear, all
that I could conceive cheering in my hopes of that "wandering
creature, Lafontaine."

But I was forced to think of sterner subjects. I had arrived in
England at a time of the most extraordinary public excitement. Every
man felt that some great trial of England and of Europe was at hand;
but none could distinctly define either its nature or its cause.
France, which had then begun to pour out her furious declamations
against this country, was, of course, generally looked to as the
quarter from which the storm was to come; but the higher minds
evidently contemplated hazards nearer home. Affiliated societies,
corresponding clubs, and all the revolutionary apparatus, from whose
crush and clamour I had so lately emerged, met the ear and the eye on
all occasions; and the fiery ferocity of French rebellion was nearly
rivalled by the grave insolence of English "Rights of Man." But I am
not about to write the history of a time of national fever. The
republicanism, which Cicero and Plutarch instil into us all at our
schools, had been extinguished in me by the squalid realities of
France. I had seen the dissecting-room, and was cured of my love for
the science. My spirit, too, required rest. I could have exclaimed
with all the sincerity, and with all the weariness too, of t