confidence. The husband renounces him with dignified composure;
and he falls at once from the romantic pride of his
virtue. He then seeks the company of the dissipated and
gay, and ruins his health and fortune without regaining his
tranquillity. When in gaol and miserable, he is relieved by
an unknown hand, and traces the benefaction to the friend
whose former kindness he had so ill repaid. This humiliation
falls upon his proud spirit and shattered nerves with an
overwhelming force, and his reason fails beneath it. He is
for some time a raving maniac, and then falls into a state of
gay and compassionable imbecility, which is described with
inimitable beauty in the close of this story."

Jeffrey's abstract is fairly accurate, save in one particular. Edward
Shore can hardly be said to feel an "ardent love of virtue." Rather is
he perfectly confident of his respectability, and bitterly contemptuous
of those who maintain the necessity of religion to control men's unruly
passions. His own lofty conceptions of the dignity of human nature are
sufficient for himself:

"'While reason guides me, I shall walk aright,
Nor need a steadier hand, or stronger light;
Nor this in dread of awful threats, design'd
For the weak spirit and the grov'ling mind;
But that, engaged by thoughts and views sublime,
I wage free war with grossness and with crime.'
Thus looked he proudly on the vulgar crew,
Whom statutes govern, and whom fears subdue."

As motto for this story Crabbe quotes the fine speech of Henry V. on