PREFACE.

If it be true, as Carlyle has somewhere said, that the history of the life of a man is of infinite interest to his fellow-man, I shall be excused for venturing to lay before the public the following biography. The papers which compose it came into my hands by a strange casualty. The principal actors in the story are dead, and there is no one I believe now alive who could feel injured by their publication. To avoid, however, the possibility of such an occurrence, I have carefully changed the names of both persons and places.

These papers-for the book can scarcely be called a biography-represent, with a

certain amount of fidelity, the feelings and

thoughts of a young man of the present time, at the age when the outside world begins to press most forcibly upon him, and his whole inward nature is in revolt and disturbance. As such they may be read

not without interest and instruction, were the latter but of a negative kind.

EDITOR.

ARTHUR MIDDLETON.

CHAPTER I.

"MY DEAR HENRY,-You ask me to give you some account of the life of our friend Arthur Middleton.

As you say, I am perhaps the only person who can do so, and I cannot therefore refuse your request.

It is a painful, and yet a pleasant task: painful, because I must inevitably recall the griefs of days long past, which time has now mercifully overlaid with the thick crust of years; pleasant, because at the same time the task will revive before me many of the hours that I spent in his beloved society,

A.