CONVERSATION THE FOURTH.

CONTAINING L -'s HISTORY.

In order to make allowance for much of the manner and the matter of L's conversation, I must beg the reader to observe how largely the faculties of the imagination enter even into those channels of his mind from which (were the judgment thoroughly sound) all that is merely imaginative would be the most carefully banished. In L's character, indeed, whatever may be his talents, there was always a string

loose, something morbid and vague, which even in perceiving, one could scarcely contemn, for it gave a tenderness to his views, and a glow of sentiment to his opinions, which made us love him better, perhaps, than if his learning and genius had been accompanied with a severer justness of reasoning. For my own part, I, who despise rather than hate the world, and seldom see any thing that seems to me, if rightly analyzed, above contempt, am often carried away in spite of myself by his benevolence of opinion, and his softening and gentle order of philosophy. I often smile, as I listen to his wandering and Platonic conjectures on our earthly end and powers, but I am not sure that the smile is in disdain, even when his reasoning appears the most erratic.

I reminded L, when I next saw him, of his promise, in our last conversation, to give me a sketch of his early history. I wished it to be the history of his mind as well as his adventures; in a word, a literary and moral, as well as actual narrative,-"A MEMOIR OF A STU

DENT." The moment in which I pressed the wish, was favourable. He was in better spirits than usual, and free from pain; the evening was fine, and there was that quiet cheerfulness in the air which we sometimes find towards the close of one of those mild days that occasionally relieve the severity of an English winter.

THE CONFESSIONS OF AN AMBITIOUS STUDENT.

"You know," said L, commencing his story, "that I was born to the advantages of a good name and of more than a moderate opulence; the care of my education, for I was an orphan, devolved upon my aunt, a maiden lady, of some considerable acquirements and some very rare qualities of heart. Good old woman! how well and how kindly I remember her, with her high cap and kerchief, the tortoise-shell spectacles, that could not conceal or injure the gentle expression of her eyes-eyes above which the brow never frowned! How well, too, I remember

the spelling-book, and the grammar, and (as I grew older) the odd volume of Plutarch's Lives, that always lay, for my use and profit, on the old dark table beside her chair. And something better too, than spelling and grammar, ay, and even the life of Caius Marius, with that grand and terrible incident in the memoir which Plutarch has so finely told, of how the intended murderer, entering the great Roman's hidingchamber, (as he lay there, stricken by years and misfortune,) saw through the dim and solemn twilight of the room, the eye of the purposed victim fall like a warning light upon him, while a voice exclaimed, Darest thou, man, to slay Caius Marius?' and how the stern Gaul, all awe-stricken and amazed, dropped the weapon, and fled from the chamber; better, I say, even than spelling and grammar, and these fine legends of old, were certain homely precepts with which my good aunt was wont to diversify the lecture. Never to tell a lie, never to do a mean action, never to forsake a friend, and never to malign a foe; these were the hereditary maxims

of her race, and these she instilled into my mind as something, which if I duly remembered, even the sin of forgetting how to spell words in eight syllables might be reasonably forgiven

me.

"I was sent to school when I was somewhere about seven years old, and I remained at that school till I was twelve, and could construe Ovid's Epistles. I was then transplanted to another, better adapted to my increased years and wisdom. Thither I went with a notable resolution which greatly tended in its consequences to expand my future character. At my first academy, I had been so often and so bitterly the victim of the exuberant ferocity of the elder boys, that I inly resolved, the moment I was of an age and stature to make any reasonable sort of defence, to anticipate the laws of honour, and never put up, in tranquil endurance, with a blow. When, therefore, I found myself at a new school, and at the age of twelve years, I saw (in my fancy) the epoch of resistance and emancipation, which I had so long coveted. The third day of