qualities it honours in others. We wed,--we root ourselves to the natures
we so love to contemplate, and their life grows a part of our own. Thus,
when a great man, who has engrossed our thoughts, our conjectures, our
homage, dies, a gap seems suddenly left in the world; a wheel in the
mechanism of our own being appears abruptly stilled; a portion of
ourselves, and not our worst portion, for how many pure, high, generous
sentiments it contains, dies with him! Yes! it is this love, so rare, so
exalted, and so denied to all ordinary men, which is the especial
privilege of greatness, whether that greatness be shewn in wisdom, in
enterprise, in virtue, or even, till the world learns better, in the more
daring and lofty order of crime. A Socrates may claim it to-day--a
Napoleon to-morrow; nay, a brigand chief, illustrious in the circle in
which he lives, may call it forth no less powerfully than the generous
failings of a Byron, or the sublime excellence of the greater Milton.

Lester saw with evident complacency the passion growing up between his
friend and his daughter; he looked upon it as a tie that would
permanently reconcile Aram to the hearth of social and domestic life; a
tie that would constitute the happiness of his daughter, and secure to
himself a relation in the man he felt most inclined, of all he knew, to
honour and esteem. He remarked in the gentleness and calm temper of Aram
much that was calculated to ensure domestic peace, and knowing the
peculiar disposition of Madeline, he felt that she was exactly the
person, not only to bear with the peculiarities of the Student, but to
venerate their source. In short, the more he contemplated the idea of
this alliance, the more he was charmed with its probability.

Musing on this subject, the good Squire was one day walking in his
garden, when he perceived his nephew at some distance, and remarked that
Walter, on seeing him, was about, instead of coming forward to meet him,