“There are few persons who have experienced the force of these special workings of the mind.  The generality of men are only sensible of five or six passions, in the limited round of which they pass their lives, and within which all their agitations are confined.  Remove them from the influence of love and hate, pleasure and pain, hope and fear, and they have no further feeling.  But persons of a finer cast can be affected in a thousand different ways; it would almost seem that they had more than five senses, and that they are accessible to ideas and sensations which far exceed the ordinary faculties of human nature; and, conscious that they possess a capacity which raises them above the common herd, there is nothing of which they are more jealous.  Hence springs their impatience under contempt and ridicule; and hence it is that a sense of debasement is perhaps the most violent of all their emotions.

“I had this melancholy advantage at St. Lazare.  My grief appeared to the governor so excessive, that, dreading the consequences, he thought he was bound to treat me with more mildness and indulgence.  He visited me two or three times a day; he often made me take a turn with him in the garden, and showed his interest for me in his exhortations and good advice.  I listened always attentively; and warmly expressed my sense of his kindness, from which he derived hopes of my ultimate conversion.

“`You appear to me,’ said he one day, `of a disposition so mild and tractable, that I cannot comprehend the excesses into which you have fallen.  Two things astonish me:  one is, how, with your good qualities, you could have ever abandoned yourself to vice; and the other, which amazes me still more, is, how you can receive with such perfect temper my advice and instructions, after having lived so long in a course of debauchery.  If it be sincere repentance, you present a singular example of the benign mercy of Heaven; if it proceed from the natural goodness of your disposition, then you certainly have that within you which warrants the hope that a protracted residence in this place will not be required to bring you back to a regular and respectable life.’

“I was delighted to find that he had such an opinion of me.  I resolved to strengthen it by a continuance of good conduct, convinced that it was the surest means of abridging the term of my confinement.  I begged of him to furnish me with books.  He was agreeably surprised to find that when he requested me to say what I should prefer, I mentioned only some religious and instructive works.  I pretended to devote myself assiduously to study, and I thus gave him convincing proof of the moral reformation he was so anxious to bring about.  It was nothing, however, but rank hypocrisy—­I blush to confess it.  Instead of studying, when alone I did nothing but curse my destiny.  I lavished the bitterest execrations on my prison, and the tyrants who detained me there.  If I ceased for a moment from these