actively felt the mortifying consequences of his poverty. The want of
what he felt ought to have been his position and influence in the county
in which he resided, fretted and galled him; and he cherished a resentful
and bitter sense of every slight, imaginary or real, to which the same
fruitful source of annoyance and humiliation had exposed him. He held,
therefore, but little intercourse with the surrounding gentry, and that
little not of the pleasantest possible kind; for, not being himself in a
condition to entertain, in that style which accorded with his own ideas
of his station, he declined, as far as was compatible with good breeding,
all the proffered hospitalities of the neighborhood; and, from his wild
and neglected park, looked out upon the surrounding world in a spirit of
moroseness and defiance, very unlike, indeed, to that of neighborly
good-will.

In the midst, however, of many of the annoyances attendant upon crippled
means, he enjoyed a few of those shadowy indications of hereditary
importance, which are all the more dearly prized, as the substantial
accessories of wealth have disappeared. The mansion in which he dwelt
was, though old-fashioned, imposing in its aspect, and upon a scale
unequivocally aristocratic; its walls were hung with ancestral portraits,
and he managed to maintain about him a large and tolerably respectable
staff of servants. In addition to these, he had his extensive demesne,
his deer-park, and his unrivalled timber, wherewith to console himself;
and, in the consciousness of these possessions, he found some imperfect
assuagement of those bitter feelings of suppressed scorn and resentment,
which a sense of lost station and slighted importance engendered. Mr.
Marston's early habits had, unhappily, been of a kind to aggravate,
rather than alleviate, the annoyances incidental to reduced means. He had
been a gay man, a voluptuary, and a gambler. His vicious tastes had
survived the means of their gratification. His love for his wife had been