the graceful /badinage,/ or the keen critique; the sparkling flight of the winged words which circled and rebounded from lip to lip, or the deep speculation upon the mysterious and unravelled wonders of man, of Nature, and the world; the light maxim upon manners, or the sage inquiry into the mines of learning, all and each had possessed a link to bind my temper and my tastes to the graces and fascination of social life. Now a new spirit entered within me: the smile faded from my lip, and the jest departed from my tongue; memory seemed no less treacherous than fancy, and deserted me the instant I attempted to enter into those contests of knowledge in which I had been not undistinguished before. I grew confused and embarrassed in speech; my words expressed a sense utterly different to that which I had intended to convey; and at last, as my apathy increased, I sat at my own board, silent and lifeless, freezing into ice the very powers and streams of converse which I had once been the foremost to circulate and to warm. At the time I refer to, I was Minister at one of the small Continental courts, where life is a round of unmeaning etiquette and wearisome ceremonials, a daily labour of trifles, a ceaseless pageantry of nothings. I had been sent there upon one important event; the business resulting from it had soon ceased, and all the duties that remained for me to discharge were of a negative and passive nature. Nothing that could arouse, nothing that could occupy faculties that had for years been so perpetually wound up to a restless excitement, was left for me in this terrible reservoir of /ennui/. I had come thither at once from the skirmishing and wild warfare of a Tartar foe; a war in which, though the glory was obscure, the action was perpetual and exciting. I had come thither, and the change was as if I had passed from a mountain stream to a stagnant pool. Society at this court reminded me of a state funeral: everything was pompous and lugubrious, even to the drapery--even to the feathers--which, in other scenes, would have been consecrated to associations of levity or of grace; the hourly pageant swept on slow, tedious, mournful, and the object of the attendants was only to entomb the Pleasure which they affected celebrate. What a change for the wild, the strange, the novel, the intriguing, the varying life, which, whether in courts or camps, I had hitherto led! The internal change that came over myself is scarcely to be wondered at; the winds stood still, and the straw they had blown from quarter to quarter, whether in anger or in sport, began to moulder upon the spot where they had left it.