intensely upon its own hopes and thoughts, remembrances and
associations, and sheds over them, from that one feeling which it
cherishes the most, a blending and a mellowing hue.

It was at night that I re-entered Paris. I did not tarry long at my
hotel, before (though it was near upon midnight) I conveyed myself to
Lord Bolingbroke's lodgings. Knowing his engagements at St. Germains,
where the Chevalier (who had but a very few weeks before returned to
France, after the crude and unfortunate affair of 1715), chiefly
resided, I was not very sanguine in my hopes of finding him at Paris. I
was, however, agreeably surprised. His servant would have ushered me
into his study, but I was willing to introduce myself. I withheld the
servant, and entered the room alone. The door was ajar, and Bolingbroke
neither heard nor saw me. There was something in his attitude and
aspect which made me pause to survey him, before I made myself known.
He was sitting by a table covered with books. A large folio (it was the
Casaubon edition of Polybius) was lying open before him. I recognized
the work at once: it was a favourite book with Bolingbroke, and we had
often discussed the merits of its author. I smiled as I saw that that
book, which has to statesmen so peculiar an attraction, made still the
study from which the busy, restless, ardent, and exalted spirit of the
statesman before me drew its intellectual food. But at the moment in
which I entered his eye was absent from the page, and turned
abstractedly in an opposite though still downcast direction. His
countenance was extremely pale, his lips were tightly compressed, and an
air of deep thought, mingled as it seemed to me with sadness, made the
ruling expression of his lordly and noble features. "It is the torpor
of ambition after one of its storms," said I, inly; and I approached,
and laid my hand on his shoulder.