I would not, if I could, here or to-day, embody a record of my later years of unspeakable misery, and unpardonable crime.  This epoch —­ these later years —­ took unto themselves a sudden elevation in turpitude, whose origin alone it is my present purpose to assign.  Men usually grow base by degrees.  From me, in an instant, all virtue dropped bodily as a mantle.  From comparatively trivial wickedness I passed, with the stride of a giant, into more than the enormities of an Elah-Gabalus.  What chance —­ what one event brought this evil thing to pass, bear with me while I relate.  Death approaches; and the shadow which foreruns him has thrown a softening influence over my spirit.  I long, in passing through the dim valley, for the sympathy —­ I had nearly said for the pity —­ of my fellow men.  I would fain have them believe that I have been, in some measure, the slave of circumstances beyond human control.  I would wish them to seek out for me, in the details I am about to give, some little oasis of fatality amid a wilderness of error.  I would have them allow —­ what they cannot refrain from allowing —­ that, although temptation may have erewhile existed as great, man was never thus, at least, tempted before —­ certainly, never thus fell.  And is it therefore that he has never thus suffered?  Have I not indeed been living in a dream?  And am I not now dying a victim to the horror and the mystery of the wildest of all sublunary visions?

I am the descendant of a race whose imaginative and easily excitable temperament has at all times rendered them remarkable; and, in my earliest infancy, I gave evidence of having fully inherited the family character.  As I advanced in years it was more strongly developed; becoming, for many reasons, a cause of serious disquietude to my friends, and of positive injury to myself.  I grew self-willed, addicted to the wildest caprices, and a prey to the most ungovernable passions.  Weak-minded, and beset with constitutional infirmities akin to my own, my parents could do but little to check the evil propensities which distinguished me.  Some feeble and ill-directed efforts resulted in complete failure on their part, and, of course, in total triumph on mine.  Thenceforward my voice was a household law; and at an age when few children have abandoned their leading-strings, I was left to the guidance of my own will, and became, in all but name, the master of my own actions.

My earliest recollections of a school-life, are connected with a large, rambling, Elizabethan house, in a misty-looking village of England, where were a vast number of gigantic and gnarled trees, and where all the houses were excessively ancient.  In truth, it was a dream-like and spirit-soothing place, that venerable old town.  At this moment, in fancy, I feel the refreshing chilliness of its deeply-shadowed avenues, inhale the fragrance of its thousand shrubberies, and thrill anew with undefinable delight, at the deep hollow note of the church-bell, breaking, each hour, with sullen and sudden roar, upon the stillness of the dusky atmosphere in which the fretted Gothic steeple lay imbedded and asleep.