had taken place in his feelings. While he was trying to account for
this odd circumstance, the same face passed again--it was the face of
Taylor the spy; and he was longer at a loss to explain the difficulty.
He had before caught only a transient glimpse, a passing side-view of
the face; but though this was not sufficient to awaken a distinct idea
in his memory, his feelings, quicker and surer, had taken the alarm; a
string had been touched that gave a jar to his whole frame, and would
not let him rest, though he could not at all tell what was the matter
with him. To the flitting, shadowy, half-distinguished profile that had
glided by his window was linked unconsciously and mysteriously, but
inseparably, the impression of the trains that had been laid for him by
this person;--in this brief moment, in this dim, illegible short-hand of
the mind he had just escaped the speeches of the Attorney and
Solicitor-General over again; the gaunt figure of Mr. Pitt glared by
him; the walls of a prison enclosed him; and he felt the hands of the
executioner near him, without knowing it till the tremor and disorder of
his nerves gave information to his reasoning faculties that all was not
well within. That is, the same state of mind was recalled by one
circumstance in the series of association that had been produced by the
whole set of circumstances at the time, though the manner in which this
was done was not immediately perceptible. In other words, the feeling
of pleasure or pain, of good or evil, is revived, and acts
instantaneously upon the mind, before we have time to recollect the
precise objects which have originally given birth to it.[2] The
incident here mentioned was merely, then, one case of what the learned
understand by the _association of ideas_: but all that is meant by
feeling or common sense is nothing but the different cases of the
association of ideas, more or less true to the impression of the
original circumstances, as reason begins with the more formal
development of those circumstances, or pretends to account for the