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instant. The visits of the ladies at length became irksome to him; and determining to rid himself of their importunity, he one morning bade them carelessly farewell, and set out for London.

Here he found that some of his old associates had been obliged, from different causes, to decamp; but some he still found hovering round those infamous sinks of lust and misery to which men of pleasure resort to kill time and escape from themselves: to those pests of society, and those haunts of dissipation, he now attached himself.

The shock he had sustained by his father's death had greatly impaired his health, and the mode of life he now absurdly made choice of was rapidly destroying his constitution. After several months passed in the senseless bustle, and deeply engaged in the important nothings which occupy so much of a rake's time, he applied to me with a mind and body both wofully diseased.

I must here beg to obtrude myself, not through any motive of personal vanity, but an anxious desire faithfully to depict the errors that caused the ruin of my once excellent and happy friend. Knowing the expectations he had raised, and the engagements he was under to the lady whom his uncle had recommended, I inquired whether he had made any definitive arrangements: to this he replied, "My engagements with her and every other woman will last while I can feel myself happy in their society, and not an hour longer." He freely acknowledged, that his mind was made up never to marry, but that he neither could nor would relinquish E. I expostulated with him se

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riously on the enormity of seducing any virtuous woman; but any injury done to E. would in my opinion be the most heinous crime he could commit, and one which, I was convinced, God would never pardon.

My arguments produced very little effect; for he gravely replied, "I have long been moving in a magic circle, and however full the poisoned cup might have been which the enchantress Pleasure offered, I always drank to the bottom. My soul is dead, and what have I now to fear?" Our acquaintance had been of some standing, and my friendship for him was sincere and disinterested. During the period of his cure I generally conversed with him every day on the cruelty of his design, and the unqualified execration with which the world would load the author of such wanton barbarity; but nothing could turn him from his stern and cruel purpose. "The die," he said, "is cast;" and more than once did he declare that, should it cost him an eternity of perdition, E. must and should be his on his own terms.

While confined to his house by ill health, he regularly corresponded with the young lady through his mother, both whom it was equally his wish to deceive. His health being restored, he disclosed to me his deep plan for the destruction of E., whose confidence in him was unlimited; and as the assistance of a confidential friend would be indispensable, he now implored my good offices. I assured him that I was very ready to do him any good in my power, and that I would now give a proof of my friendship by laying the whole matter before his mother and E. that very evening; and this pledge I carefully redeemed.

In my letter to his mother, the scheme he had formed to entrap the innocent and confiding E. was fully developed, and they were of course confounded and ashamed at its baseness. His plan was, to invite them both to town, having furnished a house fit for their reception, where, under his own roof, under the protecting eye of his amiable mother, the laws of hospitality, the ties of heaven, and the sacred commands of God, were to be violated and profaned. Unwilling to believe, yet hardly knowing how to doubt my statement, they were consulting what step was most proper to be taken, when they received a letter from F., couched in the most dutiful and affectionate terms, inviting them both to town. This tended to confirm. their suspicions, and they decided on inclosing to him my letter, with a request that he would explain its meaning.

On this occasion his self-possession entirely forsook hitn. He called on me with the letter, and used the most unjustifiable language. Led away by the fury of disappointed passion, he would not listen to reason; his behaviour became indecently insulting, and I determined on withdrawing my friendship, and discontinuing his acquaintance. Almost immediately after this, professional avocations in the service of my country called me out of England, and I lost sight of him for upwards of four

years.

The following remarks, which I think were written about the same time, stand in his journal: "Never was meanness equal to mine-never was contempt expressed with more poignant insult. This is the damning consequence of unlawful pleasure.-Pleasure do I

call it ?--It is pain equal to the severest torture of hell. How intolerably slavish are the galling chains with which sin binds her hopeless victims!"

Amid the multitude of vices by which his life was so foully stained, and his heart so deplorably corrupted, still there were some traits in his character that strongly demonstrated original nobleness of mind. When brutal passion was not to be gratified, he was feelingly alive to the tale of sorrow, and his purse was ever open to relieve the distressed, and administer comfort to the afflicted. His style of living was proportioned to his ample fortune, and in money matters he was always open, liberal, and generous, sometimes so even to profuse extravagance. But his mind, long neglected and vitiated, was now incapable of entertaining a single virtue, or even a shattered remnant of self-dignity. His disposition became so entirely changed, that the original intention of nature appears to have been inverted. That generosity which formerly excited admiration, gave place to the most niggardly and despicable turn of mind, so that he could not bear the idea of parting with money even to discharge his lawful debts.

Those ephemeral friends to whom crime only had attached him, now treated him with coolness, and in many instances with the most cutting contempt. Despised by all his former acquaintances, both sober and dissipated, he exhibited the melancholy picture of a man possessing an excellent understanding, a mind amply stored with elegant and useful knowledge, and a princely fortune, isolated in the world, and scornfully driven, by the common consent of mankind, from

that society of which, had he made a right use of his natural endowments, he would have been a distinguished ornament.

Meanness, marked by dishonesty, was strongly exemplified in his refusing to honour a bill which the unhappy girl he left in Scotland, as he supposed on a death-bed, had drawn to discharge the expense of the lodgings he had procured for her. The physician's bill, too, he refused to discliarge. The poor forsaken creature wrote to him, describing her situation in terms that ought to have moved the most obdurate heart; but his, now completely imbruted, was dead to the description of her misery, and deaf to her entreaties. She wrote again, but he would not pay the postage of her letter. The family in which he had placed her, trusting to the debt thus incurred for the payment of their rent, which they could not in any other way make up, were turned out of doors, and with them the wretched patient, now in the last stage of consumption, without a penny to procure a

morsel of bread.

In this deplorable condition, with no shelter but the canopy of heaven, she must have perished, had not the compassion of a poor waggoner been moved and extended to her. Through the means of this humble and humane individual she was enabled to reach London, where languid and sinking she sought the abode of her father, once her happy home, the scene of youthful innocence and joy. But, alas! what a sad change!-No home was there. Her father's dwelling-house was now a prison! After her elope

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