I felt my age and my celibacy. Once more I returned to town, a
complaint attacked my lungs, the physicians recommended the air of
this neighbourhood, and I chose the residence I now inhabit. Without
being exactly in London, I can command its advantages, and obtain
society as a recreation without buying it by restraint. I am not fond
of new faces nor any longer covetous of show; my old servant therefore
contented me: for the future, I shall, however, to satisfy your fears,
remove to a safer habitation, and obtain a more numerous guard. It
is, at all events, a happiness to me that Fate, in casting me here and
exposing me to something of danger, has raised up in you a friend for
my old age, and selected from this great universe of strangers one
being to convince my heart that it has not outlived affection. My
tale is done; may you profit by its moral!

When Talbot said that our characters were undergoing a perpetual
change he should have made this reservation,--the one ruling passion
remains to the last; it may be modified, but it never departs; and it
is these modifications which do, for the most part, shape out the
channels of our change; or as Helvetius has beautifully expressed it,
"we resemble those vessels which the waves still carry towards the
south, when the north wind has ceased to blow;" but in our old age,
this passion, having little to feed on, becomes sometimes dormant and
inert, and then our good qualities rise, as it were from an incubus,
and have their sway.

Yet these cases are not common, and Talbot was a remarkable instance,
for he was a remarkable man. His mind had not slept while the age
advanced, and thus it had swelled as it were from the bondage of its
earlier passions and prejudices. But little did he think, in the
blindness of self-delusion,--though it was so obvious to Clarence,