Here there was a general wish expressed to have the manuscript read; particularly on the part of the inquisitive gentleman.  So the worthy Baronet drew out a fairly written manuscript, and wiping his spectacles, read aloud the following story: 

THE STORY OF THE YOUNG ITALIAN.

I was born at Naples.  My parents, though of noble rank, were limited in fortune, or rather my father was ostentatious beyond his means, and expended so much in his palace, his equipage, and his retinue, that he was continually straitened in his pecuniary circumstances.  I was a younger son, and looked upon with indifference by my father, who, from a principle of family pride, wished to leave all his property to my elder brother.

I showed, when quite a child, an extreme sensibility.  Every thing affected me violently.  While yet an infant in my mother’s arms, and before I had learnt to talk, I could be wrought upon to a wonderful degree of anguish or delight by the power of music.  As I grew older my feelings remained equally acute, and I was easily transported into paroxysms of pleasure or rage.  It was the amusement of my relatives and of the domestics to play upon this irritable temperament.  I was moved to tears, tickled to laughter, provoked to fury, for the entertainment of company, who were amused by such a tempest of mighty passion in a pigmy frame.  They little thought, or perhaps little heeded the dangerous sensibilities they were fostering.  I thus became a little creature of passion, before reason was developed.  In a short time I grew too old to be a plaything, and then I became a torment.  The tricks and passions I had been teased into became irksome, and I was disliked by my teachers for the very lessons they had taught me.

My mother died; and my power as a spoiled child was at an end.  There was no longer any necessity to humor or tolerate me, for there was nothing to be gained by it, as I was no favorite of my father.  I therefore experienced the fate of a spoiled child in such situation, and was neglected or noticed only to be crossed and contradicted.  Such was the early treatment of a heart, which, if I am judge of it at all, was naturally disposed to the extremes of tenderness and affection.

My father, as I have already said, never liked me—­in fact, he never Understood me; he looked upon me as wilful and wayward, as deficient in natural affection:—­it was the stateliness of his own manner; the loftiness and grandeur of his own look that had repelled me from his arms.  I always pictured him to myself as I had seen him clad in his senatorial robes, rustling with pomp and pride.  The magnificence of his person had daunted my strong imagination.  I could never approach him with the confiding affection of a child.