ly within
him, but their agencies were crude and undeveloped. Sometimes, through
the native acuteness of his intellect, he apprehended truths quickly
and truly as a man; then, again, through the warm haze of undisciplined
tenderness, or the raw mists of that sensitive pride in which objects,
small in themselves, loom large with undetected outlines, he fell back
into the passionate dimness of a child's reasoning. He was intensely
ambitious; Quixotic in the point of honour; dauntless in peril: but
morbidly trembling at the very shadow of disgrace, as a foal, destined
to be the war-horse and trample down levelled steel, starts in its
tranquil pastures at the rustling of a leaf. Glowingly romantic, but not
inclined to vent romance in literary creations, his feelings were the
more high-wrought and enthusiastic because they had no outlet in poetic
channels. Most boys of great ability and strong passion write verses--it
is Nature's relief to brain and heart at the critical turning age. Most
boys thus gifted do so; a few do not, and out of those few Fate selects
the great men of action,--those large luminous characters that stamp
poetry on the world's prosaic surface. Lionel had in him the pith
and substance of Fortune's grand nobodies, who become Fame's abrupt
somebodies when the chances of life throw suddenly in their way a noble
something, to be ardently coveted and boldly won. But I repeat, as yet
he was a boy; so he sat there, his hands before his face, an unreasoning
self-torturer. He knew now why this haughty Darrell had written with so
little tenderness and respect to his beloved mother. Darrell looked
on her as the cause of his ignoble kinsman's "sale of name;" nay, most
probably ascribed to her not the fond girlish love which levels all
disparities of rank, but the vulgar cold-blooded design to exchange her
father's bank-notes for a marriage beyond her station. And he was the
debtor to this supercilious creditor, as his father had been before him.
His father! till then he had been so proud of that relationship! Mrs.
Haughton had not been happy with her captain; his confirmed habits of
wild dissipation had embittered her union, and at last worn away her
wifely affections. But she had tended and nursed him in his last illness
as the lover of her youth; and though occasionally she hinted at his
faults, she ever spoke of him as the ornament of all society,--poor,
it is true, harassed by unfeeling creditors, but the finest o