of all beneath him into the form of his own greatness. There was danger, therefore, that the same magnanimity of selfishness and energetic good sense of interest, which Tyler was certain to display in coming at once to an understanding with those between himself and whom quarrel were an expensive folly, would mould for the nonce, the natural characters of the rest into similarity of feeling. At the best, indeed, the game of benefiting by the mutual animosity of those who stand equally adverse to the external party, is one that requires extreme caution and management; for, as the history of many states exhibits, unity of enmity is a bond of friendship. It would be a matter of primary necessity that in whatever movements I might institute to kindle the dislike of one party against the other, my agency should not appear: for as I could easily gather from the rage which a mere suspicion of protecting me had roused against Tyler, my interests were as incompatible with those of his enemies as with his own. My own excitement of anger was directed almost exclusively against him whom I well knew to be the designer and director of all that my father and myself had suffered. The whole structure of villany which others had aided to elaborate, bore upon its front the marks of his mind and morals: and it roused me to bitter and abiding indignation to behold him in the centre of his schemes sitting in the calmness of his scorn, throned above the influence of either affection or hatred for men, coldly distributing the world around him into the classes of his tools and his tributaries. He had met me neither with the reserve and distrust of conscious guilt, nor with the uneasy courtesy of concealed hatred, but with the independence and indifference of one who had never allowed himself for a moment to take home to his thoughts the recognition of an equal enmity or the reflection that resentment or resistance might be a thing to be thought of, but had deemed the hostility of his victim too vain to provoke even a passing dislike. Another circumstance which gave peculiar determination to my purpose of revenge was the part which I supposed him to have sustained affecting the relation between Emily and myself. What object he had in view in that interference, assuming it to have proceeded from himwhether he merely designed to detach me from a connexion which would separate me necessarily in a good measure from his influence, and engage my time more than would admit of that disposition of it which he was aiming to effect, or whether by some irresistible deviation from his usual system he had in fact been himself interested in her in whose regard I was his chief or only rival,-I had no means of guessing; but I had little cause in either view to love a man who had either sacrificed my happiness to a cold accomplishment of no very important plan of his own, or had resorted to unfounded calumny to supplant me in the hopes which I most dearly cherished. There are some suggestions which to hear is to adopt,-to know is to be persuaded of; and this of Tyler's having been the author of what reports had reached the ears of Emily and wrought so strange a transformation in her manner, was one which struck me from the moment that it occurred to me with this kind of convincing force. And in that duty of strife which was before me, it gave courage to my spirit and confidence to my resolution that I should thus be vindicating myself from imputations which had injured me, and restoring the esteem and peace which had been alike disturbed. In the darkness of our lonely struggles against defeat, or cheerless contests for gain, a ray of expected sympathy in a moment flashes our strivings into strength, and thrills our frame with a pleasure which is power. Those outward difficulties of execution which had seated themselves in our minds as inward doubts, and had perplexed the plainness of our mental sight, are in an instant thrown down from the equality with which they had seemed to cope our powers, and become again the passive path through which a sober eye can find an easy way. In the solitude of an uncompanioned heart, our thoughts turn to insects which annoy, and our fears to worms which prey upon, our being; and we become the living victim of a living foe. When, then, our loneliness is changed to glad society of soul, and in the healthy daylight of fellowship we escape from the dusky cloud of petty troubles which had shaded our composure, we feel a vigour of purpose and a renewed vividness of hope which is the advanced refraction of success. The thought that the full enjoyment, of whose broad depth I had gained a glimpse in those hours in which I had indulged in visions of a life of love, might yet be mine, and that the rich peace of satisfied desire, for which the sufferings of a solitary life had wrought my wishes into one longing sigh, was a shaded island in a sunny sea, whose shelter might be won, made my breast bound with a throb of gladness, and my bosom heave with the might of joy. It was late on the evening of the second day of my journey that I reached the city. Wishing to avoid any possibility of my return being discovered by those who were doubtless on the alert for the observation of my movements, I dismissed my horse at the edge of the town and entered a hackney-coach which was standing unemployed in the street. I ordered the coachman to drive me into the street adjoining the one in which I lived, and I got out there and walked on to my own door with as much secrecy as possible. CHAPTER VII. Struggling and strife-these are the doom of man; MARLOWE. THE almost entire ignorance under which I laboured of the character, of those in reference to whom I was called upon to take some speedy action, placed a stumbling-block in the very commencement of my progress and rendered me unable to decide with certainty what first step it were most expedient to adopt. I was not sure of even the persons and identity of more than one or two who constituted the party. I had indeed taken notice of many individuals at the supper-table of the self-styled club, whom I would again be able to recognize at any time, and perhaps to trace; but I could not be certain that any given one of the whole number was actually a confidant with those who had established the society and was not, like myself and Seward, either an accidental visiter or an intended dupe. Several of the party who were assembled around the table on the evening which I have already described were persons whom I had met familiarly in society, and although I could not recal any instance in which they were men whose family I knew, or whose history I could tell any thing about, yet the presumption in every case was very strongly against their being actors of a double part. The majority, too, of the others who surrounded the board, were men who, both in accomplishment of mind and refinement of manner, bore far too gentlemanly a seeming to permit me to decide with any confidence in favour of their titles, to be classed with that company whose habitual system I suspected had in it as much of rudeness and violence as it had of craftiness and guile. Yet if they were in fact, or if any of them were possessed of that depth of dissimulation which I thus hesitated to impute, there would be nothing which any one familiar with the characters of men could deem impossible, and nothing which I, after the unexpected and extraordinary discoveries which had recently come before me, was at all inclined to consider improbable. They might all very easily have been whatever the worst and most hidden member of the set could be; for we can be as little certain of any other man in the present as we can be of ourselves in the future. The doubt which was thus presented to my mind was more perplexing than the least satisfactory assurance would have been; for while this would have left me safe upon one side or the other, and would have made my future plans clear, if narrow, the suspense of suspicion in which I was now detained, forbade my proceeding upon any alternative, and perplexed my deliberations with a double contingency. If I could ascertain the residence, or even was confident of identifying the figure of any one who unquestionably belonged to this secret association, I felt no distrust of my ability to address him in such a way as to win what aid of knowledge I might wish; for if interest can unite men for the establishment of a system it may divide them for its destruction. The acquisition of a few precise particulars, upon points which I was now compelled to guess at darkly, would have thrown a world of light and of encouragement upon, was now profoundly dark and intricate. As matters stood I could be certain of the honesty and safeness of no one around me. My own |