But, after all, and notwithstanding his base and ungodly views of life, let us ask, had the baronet no painful visitations of remorse in contemplating the fading form and the silent but hopeless agony of his daughter?  Did conscience, which in his bosom of stone indulged in an almost unbroken slumber, never awaken to scourge his hardened spirit with her whip of snakes, and raise the gloomy curtain that concealed from him the dark and tumultuous fires that await premeditated guilt and impenitence?  We answer, he was man.  Sometimes, especially in the solemn hours of night, he experienced brief periods, not of remorse, much less of repentance, but of dark, diabolical guilt—­conscious guilt, unmitigated by either penitence or remorse, as might have taught his daughter, could she have known them, how little she herself suffered in comparison with him.  These dreadful moments remind one of the heavings of some mighty volcano, when occasioned by the internal stragglings of the fire that is raging within it, the power and fury of which may be estimated by the terrible glimpses which rise up, blazing and smouldering from its stormy crater.

“What am I about?” he would say.  “What a black prospect does life present to me!  I fear I am a bad man.  Could it be possible now, that there are thousands of persons in life who have committed great crimes in the face of society, who, nevertheless, are not responsible for half my guilt?  Is it possible that a man may pass through the world, looking on it with a plausible aspect, and yet become, from the natural iniquity of his disposition and the habitual influence of present and perpetual evil within him, a man of darker and more extended guilt than the murderer or robber?  Is it, then, the isolated crime, the crime that springs from impulse, or passion, or provocation, or revenge?—­or is it the black unbroken iniquity of the spirit, that constitutes the greater offence, or the greater offender against society?  Am I, then, one of I those reprobates of life in whom there is everything adverse to good and friendly to evil, yet who pass through existence with a high head, and look upon the public criminal and felon with abhorrence or affected compassion?  But why investigate myself?  Here I am; and that fact is the utmost limit to which my inquiries and investigations can go.  I am what I am:  besides, I did not form nor create myself.  I am different from my daughter, she is different from me.  I am different from most people.  In what?  May I not have a destined purpose in creation to fulfil; and is it not probable that my natural disposition has been bestowed upon me for the purpose of fulfilling it?  Yet if all were right, how account for these dreadful and agonizing glimpses of my inner life which occasionally visit me?  But I dare say every man feels them.  What are they, after all, but the superstitious operations of conscience—­of that grim spectre which is conjured up by the ridiculous fables of the priest and nurse?  Conscience!  Why, its fearful tribunal is no test of truth.  The wretched anchorite will often experience as much remorse if he neglect to scourge his miserable carcass, as the murderer who sheds the blood of man—­or more.  Away with it!  I am but a fool for allowing it to disturb me at all, or mar my projects.”