CHAPTER I.


I AM the native of a sea-surrounded nook, a cloud-enshadowed land, which,
when the surface of the globe, with its shoreless ocean and trackless
continents, presents itself to my mind, appears only as an inconsiderable
speck in the immense whole; and yet, when balanced in the scale of mental
power, far outweighed countries of larger extent and more numerous
population. So true it is, that man's mind alone was the creator of all
that was good or great to man, and that Nature herself was only his first
minister. England, seated far north in the turbid sea, now visits my dreams
in the semblance of a vast and well-manned ship, which mastered the winds
and rode proudly over the waves. In my boyish days she was the universe to
me. When I stood on my native hills, and saw plain and mountain stretch out
to the utmost limits of my vision, speckled by the dwellings of my
countrymen, and subdued to fertility by their labours, the earth's very
centre was fixed for me in that spot, and the rest of her orb was as a
fable, to have forgotten which would have cost neither my imagination nor
understanding an effort.

My fortunes have been, from the beginning, an exemplification of the power
that mutability may possess over the varied tenor of man's life. With
regard to myself, this came almost by inheritance. My father was one of
those men on whom nature had bestowed to prodigality the envied gifts of
wit and imagination, and then left his bark of life to be impelled by these
winds, without adding reason as the rudder, or judgment as the pilot for
the voyage. His extraction was obscure; but circumstances brought him early
into public notice, and his small paternal property was soon dissipated in
the splendid scene of fashion and luxury in which he was an actor. During