INTRODUCTORY LETTERS.

THE EARL OF M————

TO THE HONORABLE HORATIO M————, KING’S BENCH.

Castle M————, Leicestershire,

Feb. ——, 17———.

If there are certain circumstances under which a fond father can address an imprisoned son without suffering the bitterest heart-rendings of paternal agony, such are not those under which I now address you. To sustain the loss of the most precious of all human rights, and forfeit our liberty at the shrine of virtue, in defence of our country abroad, or of our public integrity and principles at home, brings to the heart of the sufferer’s dearest sympathising friend a soothing solace, almost concomitant to the poignancy of his afflictions; and leaves the decision difficult, whether in the scale of human feelings, triumphant pride or affectionate regret preponderate.

“I would not,” said the old earl of Ormond, “give up my dead son for twenty living ones.” Oh! how I envy such a father the possession, and even the loss of such a child: with what eagerness my heart rushes back to that period when I too triumphed in my son; when I beheld him glowing in all the unadulterated virtues of the happiest nature, flushed with the proud consciousness of superior genius, refined by a taste intuitively elegant, and warmed by an enthusiasm constitutionally ardent; his character indeed tinctured with the bright colouring of romantic eccentricity, but marked by the indelible traces of innate rectitude, and ennobled by the purest principles of native generosity, the proudest sense of inviolable honour, I beheld him rush eagerly on life, enamoured of its seeming good, incredulous of its latent evils, till fatally fascinated by the magic spell of the former, he fell an early victim to the successful lures of the latter. The growing influence of his passions kept pace with the expansion of his mind, and the moral powers of the man of genius,

gave way to the overwhelming propensities of the man of pleasure. Yet in the midst of those exotic vices (for as such even yet I would consider them,) he continued at once the object of my parental partiality and anxious solicitude; I admired while I condemned, I pitied while I reproved.

The rights of primogeniture, and the mild and prudent cast of your brother’s character, left me no cares either for his worldly interest or moral welfare: born to titled affluence, his destination in life was ascertained previous to his entrance on its chequered scene; and equally free from passions to mislead, or talents to stimulate, he promised to his father that series of temperate satisfaction which, unillumined by those coruscations, your superior and promising genius flashed on the parental heart, could not prepare for its sanguine feelings that mortal disappointment with which you have destroyed all its hopes. On the recent death of my father I found myself possessed of a very large but incumbered property: it was requisite I should make the same establishment for my eldest son, that my father had made for me; while I was conscious that my youngest was in some degree to stand indebted to his own exertions, for independence as well as elevation in life.

You may recollect that during your first college vacation, we conversed on the subject of that liberal profession I had chosen for you, and you agreed with me, that it was congenial to your powers, and not inimical to your taste; while the part I was anxious you should take in the legislation of your country, seemed at once to rouse and gratify your ambition; but the pure flame of laudable emulation was soon extinguished in the destructive atmosphere of pleasure, and while I beheld you, in the visionary hopes of my parental ambition, invested with the crimson robe of legal dignity, or shining brightly conspicuous in the splendid galaxy of senatorial luminaries, you were idly presiding as the high priest of libertinism at the nocturnal orgies of vitiated dissipation, or indolently lingering out your life in elegant but unprofitable pursuits.

It were as vain as impossible to trace you through every degree of error on the scale of folly and imprudence, and such a repetition would be more heart wounding to me than painful to you, were it even made under the most extenuating bias of parental fondness.

I have only to add, that though already greatly distressed by the liquidation of your debts, at a time when I am singularly circumstanced with respect to pecuniary resources, I will make a struggle to free you from the chains of this your present iron-hearted creditor, through the retrenchment of my own expenses, and my temporary retreat to the solitute of my Irish estate must be the result; provided that by this sacrifice I purchace your acquiescence to my wishes respecting the destiny of your future life, and an unreserved abjuration of the follies which have governed your past.

Yours, &c. &c.

M———.

TO THE EARL OF M————

My Lord,

Suffer me, in the fullness of my heart, and in the language of one prodigal and penitent as myself, to say, “I have sinned against Heaven and thee, and am no longer worthy to be called thy son.” Abandon me then, I beseech you, as such; deliver me up to the destiny, that involves me to the complicated tissue of errors and follies I have so industriously woven with my own hands; for though I am equal to sustain the judgment my own vices have drawn down upon me, I cannot support the cruel mercy with which your goodness endeavours to avert its weight.

Among the numerous catalogues of my faults, a sordid selfishness finds no place. Yet I should deservedly incur its imputation, were I to accept of freedom on such terms as you are so generous to offer. No, my Lord, continue to adorn that high and polished circle in which you are so eminently calculated to move; nor think so lowly of one, who, with all his faults, is your son, as to believe him ready to purchase his liberty at the expense of your banishment from your native country.

I am, &c. &c.

King’s Bench. H. M.

TO THE HON. HORATIO M————.

An act to which the exaggeration of your feelings gives the epithet of banishment, I shall consider as a voluntary sequestration from scenes of which I am weary, to scenes which, though thrice visited, still preserve the poignant charms of novelty and interest. Your hasty and undigested answer to my letter (written in the prompt emotion of the moment, ere the probable consequence of a romantic rejection to an offer not unreflectingly made, could be duly weighed or coolly examined) convinces me experience has contributed little to the modification of your feelings, or the prudent regulation of your conduct. It is this promptitude of feeling, this contempt of prudence, that formed the predisposing cause of your errors and your follies. Dazzled by the brilliant glare of the splendid virtues, you saw not, you would not see, that prudence was among the first of moral excellences; the director, the regulator, the standard of them all; that it is in fact the corrector of virtue herself; for even virtue, like the sun, has her solstice, beyond which she ought not to move.

If you would retribute what you seem to lament, and unite restitution to penitence, leave this country for a short time, and abandon with the haunts of your former blameable pursuits, those associates who were at once the cause and punishment of your errors. I myself will become your partner in exile, for it is to my estate in Ireland I banish you for the summer. You have already got through the “first rough brakes” of your profession: as you can now serve the last term of this season, I see no cause why Coke upon Lyttleton cannot be as well studied amidst the wild seclusion of Connaught scenery, and on the solitary shores of the “steep Atlantic,” as in the busy bustling precincts of the Temple.

I have only to add, that I shall expect your undivided attention will be given up to your professional studies; that you will for a short interval resign the fascinating pursuits of polite literature and belles lettres, from which even the syren spell of pleasure could not tear you, and which snatched from vice many of those hours I believed devoted to more serious studies. I know you will find it no less difficult to resign the elegant theories of your favourite Lavater, for the dry facts of law reports, than to exchange your duodecimo editions of the amatory poets, for heavy tomes of cold legal disquisitions; but happiness is to be purchased, and labour is the price; fame and independence are the result of talent united to great exertion, and the elegant enjoyments of literary leisure are never so keenly relished as when tasted under the shade of that flourishing laurel which our own efforts have reared to mature perfection. Farewell! My agent has orders respecting the arrangement of your affairs. You must excuse the procrastination of our interview till we

meet in Ireland, which I fear will not be so immediate as my wishes would incline. I shall write to my banker in Dublin to replenish your purse on your arrival in Ireland, and to my Connaught steward, to prepare for your reception at M———— house. Write to me by return.

Once more farewell!

M————.

TO THE EARL OF M————

My Lord,

He who agonized on the bed of Procrostus reposed on a couch of down, compared to the sufferings of him who in the heart he has stabbed, beholds the pulse of generous affection still beating with an invariable throb for the being who has inflicted the wound.

I shall offer you no thanks, my Lord, for the generosity of your conduct, nor any extenuation for the errors of mine.

The gratitude the one has given birth to—the remorse which the other has awakened, bid equal defiance to expression. I have only (fearfully) to hope, that you will not deny my almost forfeited claim to the title of your son.

H. M.

TO J. D., ESQ., M. P.

Holyhead.

We are told in the splendid Apocrypha of ancient Irish fable, that when one of the learned was missing on the Continent of Europe, it was proverbially said,

“Amandatus est ad disciplinum in Hibernia”

But I cannot recollect that in its fabulous or veracious history, Ireland was ever the mart of voluntary exile to the man of pleasure; so that when you and the rest of my precious associates miss the track of my footsteps in the oft trod path of dissipation, you will never think of tracing its pressure to the wildest of the Irish shores, and exclaim, “Amandatus est ad, &c. &c. &c.”

However, I am so far advanced in the land of Druidism, on my way to the “Island of Saints,” while you, in the emporium of the world, are drinking from the cup of conjugal love a temporary oblivion to your past sins and wickedness, and revelling in the first golden dreams of matrimonial illusion.

I suppose an account of my high crimes and misdemeanours, banishment, &c. &c. have already reached your ears; but while my brethren in transportation are offering up their wishes and their hopes on the shore, to the unpropitious god of winds, indulge me in the garrulity of egotism, and suffer me to correct the overcharged picture of that arch charicature report, by giving you a correct ebauche of the recent circumstances of my useless life.

When I gave you convoy as far as Dover, on your way to France, I returned to London, to

“Surfeit on the same

and yawn my joys——”

And was again soon plunged in that dreadful vacillation of mind from which your society and conversation had so lately redeemed me.

Vibrating between an innate propensity to rights and an habitual adherence to wrong; sick of pursuits I was too indolent to relinqush, and linked to vice, yet still enamoured of virtue; weary of the useless, joyless inanity of my existence, yet without energy, without power to regenerate my worthless being; daily losing ground in the minds of the inestimable few who were still interested for my welfare; nor compensating for the loss, by the gratification of any one feeling in my own heart, and held up as an object of fashionable popularity for sustaining that character, which of all others I most despised; my taste impoverished by a vicious indulgence, my senses palled by repletion, my heart chill and unawakened, every appetite depraved and pampered into satiety, I fled from myself, as the object of my own utter contempt and detestation, and found a transient pleasurable inebriety in the well practised blandishments of Lady C——.

You who alone know me, who alone have openly condemned, and secretly esteemed me, you who have wisely culled the blossom of pleasure, while I have sucked its poison, know that I am rather a méchant par air, than from any irresistible propensity to indiscriminate libertinism. In fact, the original sin of my nature militates against the hackneyed modes of hackneyed licentiousness; for I am too profound a voluptuary to feel any exquisite gratification from such gross pursuits as the “swinish multitude” of fashion ennoble with that name of little understood, pleasure. Misled in my earliest youth by “passion’s meteor ray,” even then my heart called (but called in vain,) for a thousand delicious refinements to give poignancy to the mere transient impulse of sense.

Oh! my dear friend, if in that sunny season of existence when the ardours of youth nourish in our bosom a thousand indescribable emotions of tenderness and love, it had been my fortunate destiny to have met with a being, who—but this is an idle regret, perhaps an idle supposition;—-the moment of ardent susceptibility is over, when woman becomes the sole spell which lures us to good or ill, and when her omnipotence, according to the bias of her own nature, and the organization of those feelings on which it operates, determines, in a certain degree our destiny through life—leads the mind through the medium of the heart to the noblest pursuits, or seduces it through the medium of the passions to the basest career.

That I became the dupe of Lady C——, and her artful predecessor, arose from the want of that “something still unpossessed,” to fill my life’s dreadful void. I sensibly felt the want of an object to interest my feelings, and laboured under that dreadful interregnum of the heart, reason and ambition; which leaves the craving passions open to every invader. Lady C—— perceived the situation of my mind, and—but spare me the detail of a connexion which even in memory, produces a nausea of every sense and feeling. Suffice it to say, that equally the victim of the husband’s villainy as the wife’s artifice, I stifled on its birth a threatened prosecution, by giving my bond for a sum I was unable to liquidate: it was given as for a gambling debt, but my father, who had long suspected, and endeavoured to break this fatal connexion, guessed at the truth, and suffered me to become a guest (mal voluntaire) in the King’s Bench. This unusual severity on his part, lessened not on mine the sense of his indulgence to my former boundless

extravagance, and I determined to remain a prisoner for life, rather than owe my liberty to a new imposition on his tenderness, by such solicitings as have hitherto been invariably crowned with success, though answered with reprehension.

I had been already six weeks a prisoner, deserted by those gay moths that had fluttered round the beam of my transient prosperity; delivered up to all the maddening meditation of remorse, when I received a letter from my father (then with my brother in Leicestershire,) couched in his usual terms of reprehension, and intervals of tenderness; ascertaining every error with judicial exactitude, and associating every fault with some ideal excellence of parental creation, alternately the father and the judge; and as you once said, when I accused him of partiality to his eldest born, “talking best of Edward was most of me.”

In a word, he has behaved like an Angel. So well, that by Heavens! I can scarcely bear to think of it. A spurious half-bred generosity—a little tincture of illiberality on his side, would have been Balm of Gillead to my wounded conscience; but with unqualified goodness he has paid all my debts, supplied my purse beyond my wants, and only asks in return, that I will retire for a few months to Ireland, and this I believe merely to wean me from the presence of an object which he falsely believes still hangs about my heart with no moderate influence.

And yet I wish his mercy had flowed in any other channel, even though more confined and less liberal.

Had he banished me to the savage desolations of Siberia, my exile would have had some character; had he even transported me to a South Sea Island, or threw me into an Esquimaux hut, my new species of being would have been touched with some interest; for in fact, the present relaxed state of my intellectual system requires some strong transition of place, circumstance, and manners, to wind it up to its native tone, to rouse it to energy, or awaken it to exertion.

But sent to a country against which I have a decided prejudice—which I suppose semi-barbarous, semi-civilized; has lost the strong and hardy features of savage life, without acquiring those graces which distinguish polished society—I shall neither participate in the poignant pleasure of awakened curiosity and acquired information, nor taste the least of those enjoyments which courted my acceptance in my native land. Enjoyments did I say! And were they indeed enjoyments? How readily the mind adopts the phraseology of habit, when the sentiment it once clothed no longer exists. Would that my past pursuits were even in recollection, the aspect of enjoyments. But even my memory has lost its character of energy, and the past, like the present, appears one unwearied scence of chill and vapid existence. No sweet point of reflection seizes on the recollective powers. No actual joy woos my heart’s participation, and no prospect of future felicity glows on the distant vista of life, or awakens the quick throb of hope and expectation; all is cold, sullen and dreary.

Laval seems to entertain no less prejudice against this country than his master, he has therefore begged leave of absence until my father comes over. Pray have the goodness to send me by him a box of Italian crayons, and a good thermometer; for I must have something to relieve the tedium vitae of my exiled days; and in my articles of stipulation with my father, chemistry and belles lettres are specially prohibited. It was a useless prohibition, for Heaven knows, chemistry would have been the last study I should have flown to in my present state of mind. For how can he look minutely into the intimate structure of things, and resolve them into their simple and elementary substance, whose own disordered mind is incapable of analyzing the passions by which it is agitated, of ascertaining the reciprocal relation of its incoherent ideas, or combining them in different proportions (from those by which they were united by chance,) in order to join a new and useful compound for the benefit of future life? As for belles lettres! so blunted are all those powers once so

“Active and strong, and feelingly alive,

To each fine impulse,”

that not one “pansee coleur de rose” lingers on the surface of my faded imagination, and I should turn with as much apathy from the sentimental sorcery of Rosseau, as from the volumnious verbosity of an High German doctor; yawn over “The Pleasures of Memory,” and run the risk of falling fast asleep with the brilliant Madame de Sevigne in my hand. So send me a Fahrenheit, that I may bend the few coldly mechanical powers left me, to ascertain the temperature of my wild western territories, and expect my letters from thence to be only filled with the summary results of metoric instruments, and synoptical views of common phenomena.

Adieu.

H. M.

LETTER I.

TO J. D. ESQ., M. P.

Dublin, March, ——, 17——