of applying to the king; pride and shame for a while withheld him; and, before his necessities became so imperious as to compel him to some kind of exertion, he died.  For one brief interval before this catastrophe, he looked forward to the future, and contemplated with anguish the desolate situation in which his wife and children would be left.  His last effort was a letter to the king, full of touching eloquence, and of occasional flashes of that brilliant spirit which was an integral part of him.  He bequeathed his widow and orphans to the friendship of his royal master, and felt satisfied that, by this means, their prosperity was better assured in his death than in his life.  This letter was enclosed to the care of a nobleman, who, he did not doubt, would perform the last and inexpensive office of placing it in the king’s own hand.

He died in debt, and his little property was seized immediately by his creditors.  My mother, pennyless and burthened with two children, waited week after week, and month after month, in sickening expectation of a reply, which never came.  She had no experience beyond her father’s cottage; and the mansion of the lord of the manor was the chiefest type of grandeur she could conceive.  During my father’s life, she had been made familiar with the name of royalty and the courtly circle; but such things, ill according with her personal experience, appeared, after the loss of him who gave substance and reality to them, vague and fantastical.  If, under any circumstances, she could have acquired sufficient courage to address the noble persons mentioned by her husband, the ill success of his own application caused her to banish the idea.  She saw therefore no escape from dire penury:  perpetual care, joined to sorrow for the loss of the wondrous being, whom she continued to contemplate with ardent admiration, hard labour, and naturally delicate health, at length released her from the sad continuity of want and misery.

The condition of her orphan children was peculiarly desolate.  Her own father had been an emigrant from another part of the country, and had died long since:  they had no one relation to take them by the hand; they were outcasts, paupers, unfriended beings, to whom the most scanty pittance was a matter of favour, and who were treated merely as children of peasants, yet poorer than the poorest, who, dying, had left them, a thankless bequest, to the close-handed charity of the land.

I, the elder of the two, was five years old when my mother died.  A remembrance of the discourses of my parents, and the communications which my mother endeavoured to impress upon me concerning my father’s friends, in slight hope that I might one day derive benefit from the knowledge, floated like an indistinct dream through my brain.  I conceived that I was different and superior to my protectors and companions, but I knew not how or wherefore.  The sense of injury, associated with the name of king and noble,