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changes) to this idolater of honour, this man of unswerving rectitude, this consummate hero, and accomplished gentleman, that pious humility, and meek resignation, which she had learned while languishing on the bed of pain, or suffering in silence the mental tortures of undeserved reproach, heart-wounding disappointment, and contemptuous neglect. Without the means of solacing her griefs by the reflected pleasures of beneficence, restrained from justifying her fame by her own high sense of duty to her guilty mother and dissipated sister, too independent in her character to solicit from others that pecuni- ary assistance which, from the cir cumstances of her birth, she believed she had justly lost, she prayed and suffered for three and twenty years, alternately accused as an abominable branch whom society had justly cast

out as an avaricious worldling, who refused to distribute the hoards her mother had accumulated, and as a capricious, fretful being, whose only affliction was a wretched temper, fostered in moody solitude, till it became utterly irreconcilable with the habits of the world.

No particular malevolence gave birth to these censures. Sorrow had not warped the natural gentleness of her temper; and though her limited circumstances restrained her bounty, her heart overflowed with good-will for every living creature, and the few comforts which she enjoyed resulted from her endeavours to make others happy. Yet, thus it is that the world often treats a character of Selina's stamp, not from enmity, but garrulity. We have, generally speaking, a strong dislike to being kept in the dark, and whenever there is something

mysterious in the conduct of our neighbours, we are apt uncharitably to conclude, that it arises from a disgraceful cause. Hence the success of specious characters; hence the general failure of timidity and unobtrusive worth. Lady Selina lived in what is called a sociable neighbourhood, among the rich and prosperous, with whose habits hers did not accord, and to whose festivities she could contribute no additional zest, except that of stating that they visited a right honourable. Most of them had sailed down the stream of life so smoothly as never to have experienced personal affliction, and as they possessed the philosophical quality (so often called good-nature) of bearing the sorrows of their friends and connections with easy indifference, nothing but the severe visitings of bodily disease, or the failure of the Bank, could have convinced

them that "man is made to mourn." People thus circumstanced, who never voluntarily visit the house of sorrow as a preparatory school for themselves, are firmly persuaded, that every body may if they please be happy, and they entertain the same antipathy to the countenance of melancholy, though illuminated by the seraphic smile of resignation, as Cæsar did to the lean and wrinkled Cassius; for with them unhappy people labour under a threefold ban, they do not contribute to their pleasures, they are apt to ask favours, and they remind them that prosperity is of temporary duration.

In assigning these reasons for Lady, Selina's being unpopular, I wish to serve many worthy people, who, to the anguish of untold grief, find the vexation of undeserved opprobrium unexpectedly superinduced; and I would caution those who pique them

selves on their penetration to be less active in supplying the hiatus which prudence or modesty leaves unfilled. In so doing they often launch into the boundless sea of conjecture, and with no worse motive than a desire to shew their own talents, shape the mist-enveloped character into a demon or a

fury. And yet, perhaps among the cares which haunt the sleepless couches of those possessed by that species of sorrow which is compelled to hide its festering wounds, (and how often does delicate sorrow take that shape) none is more tormenting than the consciousness, that though concealment is their duty, reproach uses it as a covert from whence she may shoot those barbed arrows which most severely wound a susceptible ingenuous mind.

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