n when apparently gayest.'"

To these faults and sources of faults inherent, in his own sensitive
nature, he added also many of those which a long indulgence of self-will
generates,--the least compatible, of all others, (if not softened down,
as they were in him, by good nature,) with that system of mutual
concession and sacrifice by which the balance of domestic peace is
maintained. When we look back, indeed, to the unbridled career, of which
this marriage was meant to be the goal,--to the rapid and restless
course in which his life had run along, like a burning train, through a
series of wanderings, adventures, successes, and passions, the fever of
all which was still upon him, when, with the same headlong recklessness,
he rushed into this marriage,--it can but little surprise us that, in
the space of one short year, he should not have been able to recover
all at once from his bewilderment, or to settle down into that tame
level of conduct which the close observers of his every action required.
As well might it be expected that a steed like his own Mazeppa's,

"Wild as the wild deer and untaught,
With spur and bridle undefiled--
'Twas but a day he had been caught,"

should stand still, when reined, without chafing or champing the bit.

Even had the new condition of life into which he passed been one of
prosperity and smoothness, some time, as well as tolerance, must still
have been allowed for the subsiding of so excited a spirit into rest.
But, on the contrary, his marriage (from the reputation, no doubt, of
the lady, as an heiress,) was, at once, a signal for all the arrears and
claims of a long-accumulating state of embarrassment to explode upon
him;--his door was almost daily beset by duns, and his house nine times
during that year in possession of bailiffs[95]; while, in addition to
these anxieties and--what he felt still more--indignities of poverty,
he had also the pain of fancying, whether rightly or wrongly, that the
eyes of enemies and spies were upon him, even under his own roof, and
that his every hasty word and look were interpreted in the most
perverting light.

As, from the state of their means, his lady and he saw but little
society, his only relief from the thoughts which a life of such
embarrassment brought with it was in those avocations which his duty, as
a member of the Drury Lane Committee, imposed upon him. And here,--in
this most unlucky connection with the theatre,--one of the