ame de Steel with a finer felicity of phrase. Stripped of the graces
of diction, the substance was but small: "Anxiety for a friend so
beloved--so unhappy--more pitied even than before, now that the Baroness
had been enabled to see how fondly a daughter must idolise a father in
the Man whom the nation revered!--(here two lines devoted to compliment
personal)--compelled by that anxiety to quit even sooner than she had
first intended the metropolis of that noble Country," &c.--(here four
lines devoted to compliment national)--and then proceeding through some
charming sentences about patriot altars and domestic hearths, the writer
suddenly checked herself--"would intrude no more on time sublimely
dedicated to the Human Race--and concluded with the assurance of
sentiments the most _distinguees_." Little thought Darrell that this
complimentary stranger, whom he never again beheld, would exercise an
influence over that portion of his destiny which then seemed to him most
secure from evil; towards which, then, he looked for the balm to every
wound--the compensation to every loss!

Darrell heard no more of Matilda, till, not long afterwards, her death
was announced to him. She had died from exhaustion shortly after giving
birth to a female child. The news came upon him at a moment; when,
from other causes--(the explanation of which, forming no part of his
confidence to Alban, it will be convenient to reserve)--his mind was
in a state of great affliction and disorder--when he had already buried
himself in the solitudes of Fawley--ambition resigned and the world
renounced--and the intelligence saddened and shocked him more than
it might have done some months before. If, at that moment of utter
bereavement, Matilda's child had been brought to him--given up to him to
rear--would he have rejected it? would he have forgotten that it was a
felon's grandchild?

I dare not say. But his pride was not put to such a trial. One day he
received a packet from Mr. Gotobed, enclosing the formal certificates of
the infant's death, which had been presented to him by Jasper, who had
arrived in London for that melancholy purpose, with which he combined a
pecuniary proposition. By the death of Matilda and her only child, the
sum of L10,000 absolutely reverted to Jasper in the event of Darrell's
decease. As the interest meanwhile was continued to Jasper, that widowed
mourner suggested "that it would be a great boon to himself and no
disadvantage to