“No,” replied Ratcliffe; “disgust with the world has operated his retreat from it without assuming the veil of superstition.  Thus far I may tell you—­he was born to great wealth, which his parents designed should become greater by his union with a kinswoman, whom for that purpose they bred up in their own house.  You have seen his figure; judge what the young lady must have thought of the lot to which she was destined—­Yet, habituated to his appearance, she showed no reluctance, and the friends of—­of the person whom I speak of, doubted not that the excess of his attachment, the various acquisitions of his mind, his many and amiable qualities, had overcome the natural horror which his destined bride must have entertained at an exterior so dreadfully inauspicious.”

“And did they judge truly?” said Isabella.

“You shall hear.  He, at least, was fully aware of his own deficiency; the sense of it haunted him like a phantom.  ‘I am,’ was his own expression to me,—­I mean to a man whom he trusted,—­’I am, in spite of what you would say, a poor miserable outcast, fitter to have been smothered in the cradle than to have been brought up to scare the world in which I crawl.’  The person whom he addressed in vain endeavoured to impress him with the indifference to external form which is the natural result of philosophy, or entreat him to recall the superiority of mental talents to the more attractive attributes that are merely personal.  ‘I hear you,’ he would reply; ’but you speak the voice of cold-blooded stoicism, or, at least, of friendly partiality.  But look at every book which we have read, those excepted of that abstract philosophy which feels no responsive voice in our natural feelings.  Is not personal form, such as at least can be tolerated without horror and disgust, always represented as essential to our ideas of a friend, far more a lover?  Is not such a mis-shapen monster as I am, excluded, by the very fiat of Nature, from her fairest enjoyments?  What but my wealth prevents all—­perhaps even Letitia, or you—­from shunning me as something foreign to your nature, and more odious, by bearing that distorted resemblance to humanity which we observe in the animal tribes that are more hateful to man because they seem his caricature?’”

“You repeat the sentiments of a madman,” said Miss Vere.

“No,” replied her conductor, “unless a morbid and excessive sensibility on such a subject can be termed insanity.  Yet I will not deny that this governing feeling and apprehension carried the person who entertained it, to lengths which indicated a deranged imagination.  He appeared to think that it was necessary for him, by exuberant, and not always well-chosen instances of liberality, and even profusion, to unite himself to the human race, from which he conceived himself naturally dissevered.  The benefits which he bestowed, from a disposition naturally philanthropical in an uncommon degree, were exaggerated by the influence of the goading reflection,