ABOUT this time the thought took strong possession of John Twiller's mind that he ought to explain him. self.

This is not uncommonly a wish forerunning death. With Twiller it was the precursor to that thing, vaguely understood, at least in prospect, which is signified in the general term--ruin.

Men who have substance to leave for their babes, make a Will,

Those whose whole substance consists in babes, like to explain themselves,

Hence, an explanation emanating from one who is on the verge of ruin, or death without assets, may be considered as a sort of negative will, in which a minus property is bequeathed, and the empty compliment of adminis tration left to the relative-or the parish-which will have to provide for the orphans. One expense is savedthat of probate. Twiller had been overpersuaded by his friends to prove his Aunt Glossop's will, though he had taken nothing by it but a rusty key. This was because pounds, shillings, and pence were named in it. He felt that he would not cause any trouble or expense on this score.

Considering the amount of property involved, it is wonderful to what a length these explanations commonly run, They are sometimes the history of a life.

If a man has twenty thousand pounds, he may dispose of it by a stroke of his pen. If he has spent it, or never earned it, it takes a vast deal more testamentary labour to satisfy himself or others, as to how all that came about.

Poor Twiller felt urged to make a will of this sort, by a powerful impulse. Not that he utterly despaired, or indeed deemed it necessary to make any apology for his difficulties. That he was born a poet, he held to be a sufficient reason quo minus sufficiens existit to any worldly exchequer--why, in short, he should live a pauper, and die an insolvent. He con

VOL. XLXI.-NO. CCLXXXXI.

sidered it as an hereditary indefeasible right, to be miserable; and, it must be confessed, stored up many a privation, annoyance, and grief, with a magnanimous fortitude, placing them with a smile to the account of that peculiar lot which in his case was to render his career interesting to posterity, and affectingly so to those who loved his memory. If he now sought to explain himself, it was not for the purpose of apology, but of vindicating his history against misrepresentation. All he wanted was to exhibit outward circumstances reduced to their true subordination to inward motives, principles, powers and passions.

He enjoyed other consolations besides; though unluckily they were not calculated to have the effect of setting his shoulder to the wheel of fortune. His past experience was all in favour of wonderful and unhopedfor deliverances. Just in proportion as it was devoid of hard prudential lessons, was it full of blind encouragement of this kind. It showed him how futile were his own efforts-how magnificent the rescues of Providence. He figured, as he looked back, a perpetual Paris, always exercised in an endless combat, exposed to constant danger, from whence a permanent cloud uniformly delivered him.

This was bad for Twiller: for although he had so often turned the corner of ruin without an upset, still he had made but small way upon the highroad of life. Any man but a poet, who saw himself in the condition of John Twiller, would have given in. With our hero, though certainly a pang would occasionally shoot through his delusions, like the 'unkindly knock" of "hot water" against a morning dream, significative of waking cares and a wiry beard, still confidence prevailed-confidence in the future, cheering the present by a retrospect of the past.

How differently he might have reflected upon his condition! Suppose, even, that all his wonder

F

ful escapes were as wonderful as his imagination pictured them to be, what confidence should that give him for the future? Instead of assuring him, such repeated immunity ought only to make him tremble. He had been like an over-indulged child, that must be taught, sooner or later, the lesson of life, and all the more bitterly for not having gone to school at the usual age. Let him read his Bible, and turn over the lives of good and great men, or mark the career of those who were good without being great; will he discover a law of exception applying to them? On the contrary, he will find disappointment, and woe, and want, and sickness, and madness, and death singling them out, it would appear, as if by some malignant instinct, for their prey. Or, if he refuse to recognize this, he must at least allow that they come in for their due share of mortal ills. Why should he form an exception? In truth, every year he is spared, to the apprehensive glance, only stores up the future with the accumulation of what he, in common with his kind, is doomed to. The stream of time, as it approaches the ocean, must receive more than its tribute of sorrows

And, darker as it downward bears,
Be stained with past and present tears.

Not a bit of it. Twiller was sadalmost melancholy-by a constitutional temperament ; but he never for a moment quitted hold of the favourite idea, that some day or another he was to come in to his fortune.

It is hard to record this against Twiller, there is something so ridiculous in it but so it was.

It mattered little that he had no hereditary expectations. That even the usual complement of monied and childless relatives was wanting. That there was no assignable source whence the golden future was to flow. The fixed point was, that he was destined, by some means or other, to have an 66 uprising," " and either to come into an estate, or be left a thundering legacy, or to be suddenly pitchforked into a high office of trust, or to "awake and find himself famous ;" and every incongruity and difficulty was made, by the oiling of his prepossession, to revolve smoothly round the soft axle" of hope.

To complete the absurdity, this faith was always associated in his mind with a post-chaise.

Yes-a post-chaise.

There were other accompaniments -a wrinkled little man in black-a box of papers-red tape-dust. But the post-chaise was ever in the foreground; and so close did the fancy stick to him, that he seldom heard the sound of wheels grating on the minute gravel before his door, without an instant's recurrence to the original idea that had taken hold upon him, and a glance to satisfy himself whether it could be the post-chaise at last.

This whole baseless fabric-continually canopied over his existence as it was- Twiller might have been more harshly censured for lounging under, but for one circumstance-a peculiarity in his lot which probably the whole world had forgotten but himself, even of the very few who could ever have known or guessed it -he had never known what is called the happiness of youth. As a schoolboy-in college-commencing his profession, he felt that the springtime of life had been passed over without the bud and the green leaf; and though in the strong effort which the mind makes to reconcile itself to what is, he had been in the habit of looking with a glance that might have been ascribed to stoicism upon that rich expansiveness which characterizes in others the years between childhood and complete maturity, still it was the grinding of disappointment upon pride, and told stories of secret aspirations, and happiness ever deferred, which set his own teeth upon edge.

One would think that there must be something ineffably exquisite in the mere fact of being young, — so might the harsh notes be interpretedapart from the outward lot, to set the whole grown-up world chorussing regrets for the departure of their own adolescence

Give me, oh give me back the days When I-I too, was young!

There is scarcely a chicken in existence that does not envy the snail its power of withdrawing at will into its own shell. The boldest wave of the flood-tide seems irresistibly resorbed by the ebb it has overflowed. Ob

jects above which the sun is yet high, stretch their thoughtful shadows back towards the east, in search of a lost morning, and all the more longingly and lengthily the nearer the decline of day.

What does all this point to?

Here he could get no farther. The plane had run against a knot-experience did not explain the mystery -and nothing else could.

He could tell the very day the door of happiness was shut in his face-it was the day he first went to school. Up to that hour he was an innocent, ignorant, indulged child - afflicted, perhaps, with some uneasiness inseparable from a stinted allowance of green fields and blue air; but, in the main, happy.

From that date, the shadow passed upon him. Thenceforward all was distaste, disability, disgust, sickness and terror. The coarseness and vigour of his companions equally overmastered him; the idea of being actually responsible to a visible governor was a sword over his head. He fled home, each day, not to study for the next, but to recruit his jaded body and harassed mind, if possible, with rest-rest, including forgetfulness of everything-his studies, companions, and himself. Music was the sweetest restorative, and this he often enjoyed; but then there was the nightly retirement to the lonely attic, howled up to by the night cries of a metropolis, and down to by the four winds of heaven, in which his slumbers were unrefreshing and portentous; and where morning after morning saw him relinquish all hope of facing the duties of the day, for the weak delusion of half death-like rest offered to him on his miserable couch. Oh! with what unutterable relief would he escape, when he could, to a certain grassy bank in the suburbs, overhung by a few ordinary trees, and washed by an ordinary stream, which had no recommendation on earth except that there he could be alone! There, in the sun, would he stretch his enervated limbs, and bask away his shivering wretchedness till he could almost fancy what tranquillity

meant.

Even then his dream was of the past. "Too late" was his motto, when with his comates it would have been

still "too early." The life he had once led, a homebred child, was the only life he wished to recognize as his own. All the now was compulsory, distasteful, unreal. In these longdrawn reveries, ineffable visions of sublimity would waft their wings above him, out of reach. Images which are snatched at in their lowest swoops by the bound of mature genius, often brush the shadowy vastness of their wings across the face of childhood, turned up in awe and wonder towards the glorious vision. At all events it was in retrospect alone he lived. For even hope that great fulcrum on which the supple arm of youth lays its lever, and lifts life out of its quarry-was for him out of reach. He lay down at the foot of it, and looked the other way.

It is not, then, so much to be wondered at, perhaps, if Twiller, now emancipated to a certain degree from this morbid condition of existence, and able to speculate upon himself under other phases, should contrive to draw some consolation from the cheerless retrospect. Others would have said that he had passed a tranquil, easy, eventless life. He knew better; and he felt that the Reader of all hearts knew better too. And, coupling this with his belief that happiness and misery are in general doled out to mortals in tolerably even proportions, he counted on the probability of time continuing to do what it had already commenced to do, and adding to the amount of his pleasures as it wore on. He fancied this theory of his was justified by the words of the third chapter of the Lamentations. He was, he argued, to have his youth out; not in external triumphs and fierce transports, but in the disappearance of shadows, the tranquil clearing of his existence to the unclouded beam of peace.

This creed of his, however, could not altogether banish the fact that ruin now stared him in the face. With all his reliance on the compensating dispensations of Providence, he felt it absolutely necessary to envisage the state of his affairs, and make the sort of minus will already adverted

to.

He had no notion of descending into particulars.

It was on this wise he began.

1. Because I made my wishes my expectations, and consequently converted the ordinary chances of life into successive disappointments.

2. Because my body was seldom sufficiently at ease to enable me to feel it as anything else than an incum

brance.

3. Because mental labour enfeebled my body.

4. Because I felt that a bodily force was wanting to the exercise of the free powers of my mind. And hereon I will enlarge by and by.

5. Because the road of life was too rough for me, and dislocated the limbs of my spirit.

So far of my abilities. Now of later peculiarities of temperament, disabling me from worldly success.

6. Because I never could feel sufficiently carried away by the spirit of the party I happened to be among, to adopt all their sentiments.

7. Because I never could bring myself to join in the homage paid to an object of general adulation.

8. Because I never could conceal my disgust at the occasional goodhumour of an ill-tempered person.

9. Because I never could flatter without feeling so like the old serpent, that my smile became a grin.

10. Because I wanted the energy or the vanity to endeavour to please people I did not care much aboutbeing the majority of those I fell in

with.

11. Because if I had an object to gain, I fancied it was seen through the moment I broached the subject,and was, therefore, unable to press it without embarrassment.

12. Because of a general difficulty in the presence of strangers of saying

anything without thinking more of the manner of saying it, than of what I was saying.

13. Because I have ever felt a nervous uneasiness in looking in the face of an indifferent person, or being looked at while speaking or being spoken to.

14. Because I constantly found myself paying the most particular attentions to the most neglected person in

company.

15. Because I never could so detach myself from a present sense of what was fair, just, and true, as to act a part which might afterwards prove advantageous.

16. Because the knowledge that my memory is treacherous made me habitually avoid entering into particulars or courting argument, even on the subjects I was most conversant with.

17. Because my impulses (including my moral intentions) had always to pass through a retarding medium before they reached the surface of action. Hence I early came to know that I was not to judge of what I could do by what I thought I could do; and so, losing confidence in myself, I became at last reconciled to being under-estimated.

18. Because my experience has proved that if a favorable impression of me was made on a person I had never seen, the effect was sure to be visibly impaired by the first meeting, and not always mended by after intercourse. Not a favorite in society, I do not blame scciety for this; were I to meet myself in company, I should not like myself.

19. Because I seldom could arrogate to myself the functions of a rigid moral judge, even when I felt it incumbent on me to act. The pitiable present circumstances of a guilty party were sure to disarm me of the sword, because I felt that to use it was to give, as it were, a weapon to Omnipotence against myself, holding, as I knew I did, my being and blessings through the clemency, not the justice, of heaven.

20. Because I was as easily fatigued,