"This brief sight of his sister has sunk deep into him. But I now approach what seems to me the great difficulty of the whole. He is fully anxious to redeem his name--to regain his home. So far so well. But he cannot yet see ambition, except with hard, worldly eyes. He still fancies that all he has to do is to get money and power, and some of those empty prizes in the Great Lottery, which we often win more easily by our sins than our virtues. (Here follows a long passage from Seneca, omitted as superfluous.) He does not yet even understand me--or, if he does, he fancies me a mere bookworm indeed, when I imply that he might be poor, and obscure, at the bottom of fortune's wheel, and yet be one we should be proud of! He supposes that, to redeem his name, he has only got to lacker it. Don't think me merely the fond father, when I add my hope that I shall use you to advantage here. I mean to talk to him to-morrow, as we return to London, of you, and of your ambition: you shall hear the result. "At this moment, (it is past midnight,) I hear his step in the room above me. The window-sash aloft opens--for the third time; would to Heaven he could read the true astrology of the stars! There they are--bright, luminous, benignant. And I seeking to chain this wandering comet into the harmonies of heaven! Better task than that of astrologers, and astronomers to boot! Who among them can 'loosen the band of Orion?'--but who amongst us may not be permitted by God to have sway over the action and orbit of the human soul? "Your ever affectionate father, A. C." Two days after the receipt of this letter, came the following; and though I would fain suppress those references to myself which must be ascribed to a father's partiality, yet it is so needful to retain them in connexion with Vivian, that I have no choice but to leave the tender flatteries to the indulgence of the kind.