case was one of unusual difficulty. In the first place, her meekness and
extreme sweetness of temper rendered it almost impossible in a family
where her own qualities predominated, to find any deviation from
duty which might be seized upon without harshness as a pretext for
inculcating those precautionary principles that were calculated to
strengthen the weak points which her character may have presented.
Even those weak points, if at the time they could be so termed, were
perceptible only in the exercise of her virtues, so that it was a matter
of some risk, especially in the case of one so young, to reprove an
excess on the right side, lest in doing so you checked the influence of
the virtue that accompanied it. Such errors, if they can be called so,
when occurring in the conduct of those whom we love, are likely to call
forth any thing but censure. It is naturally supposed, and in general
with too much truth, that time and experience will remove the excess,
and leave the virtue not more than equal to the demands of life upon
it. Her mother, however, was, as the reader may have found, by no means
ignorant of those traits a the constitution of her mind from which
danger or happiness might ultimately be apprehended; neither did he
look on them With indifference. In truth, they troubled him much, and
on more than one occasion he scrupled not fully to express his fears of,
their result. It was he, the reader perceives, who on the evening of her
first interview with Osborne, gave so gloomy a tone to the feelings
of the family, and impressed them at all events more deeply than they
otherwise would have felt with a vague presentiment of some unknown evil
that was to befall her. She was, however, what is termed, the pet of
the family, the centre to which all their affections turned; and as she
herself felt conscious of this, there is little doubt that the extreme
indulgence, and almost blameable tenderness which they exercised towards
her, did by imperceptible degrees disqualify her from undergoing with
firmness those conflicts of the heart, to which a susceptibility of the