We have said already that when the first impression produced by
Mordaunt's apparent pride and coldness wore away, it required little
penetration to discover the benevolence and warmth of his mind. But
none ignorant of his original disposition, or the misfortunes of his
life, could ever have pierced the depth of his self-sacrificing
nature, or measured the height of his lofty and devoted virtue. Many
men may perhaps be found who will give up to duty a cherished wish or
even a darling vice; but few will ever renounce to it their rooted
tastes, or the indulgence of those habits which have almost become by
long use their happiness itself. Naturally melancholy and thoughtful,
feeding the sensibilities of his heart upon fiction, and though
addicted to the cultivation of reason rather than fancy, having
perhaps more of the deeper and acuter characteristics of the poet than
those calm and half-callous properties of nature supposed to belong to
the metaphysician and the calculating moralist, Mordaunt was above all
men fondly addicted to solitude, and inclined to contemplations less
useful than profound. The untimely death of Isabel, whom he had loved
with that love which is the vent of hoarded and passionate musings
long nourished upon romance, and lavishing the wealth of a soul that
overflows with secreted tenderness upon the first object that can
bring reality to fiction,--that event had not only darkened melancholy
into gloom, but had made loneliness still more dear to his habits by
all the ties of memory and all the consecrations of regret. The
companionless wanderings; the midnight closet; the thoughts which, as
Hume said of his own, could not exist in the world, but were all busy
with life in seclusion,--these were rendered sweeter than ever to a
mind for which the ordinary objects of the world were now utterly
loveless; and the musings of solitude had become, as it were, a
rightful homage and offering to the dead. We may form, then, some