so great a foe to my assumed disguise as it might otherwise have been. Montreuil supplied all requisite information. I tried (for the first time, with a beating heart and a tremulous voice) the imposition! it succeeded; I continued it. Yes, Morton, yes!--pour forth upon me your bitterest execration, in me, in your brother, in the brother so dear to you,--in the brother whom you imagined so passionless, so pure; so sinless,--behold that Barnard, the lover, the idolatrous lover--the foe, the deadly foe,--of Isora d'Alvarez! Here the manuscript was defaced for some pages by incoherent and meaningless ravings. It seemed as if one of his dark fits of frenzy had at that time come over the writer. At length, in a more firm and clear character than that immediately preceding it, the manuscript continued as follows:-- I loved her, but even then it was with a fierce and ominous love (ominous of what it became). Often in the still evenings, when we stood together watching the sun set; when my tongue trembled, but did not dare to speak; when all soft and sweet thoughts filled the heart and glistened in the eye of that most sensitive and fairy being; when my own brow perhaps seemed to reflect the same emotions,--feelings which I even shuddered to conceive raged within me. Had we stood together in those moments upon the brink of a precipice, I could have wound my arms around her and leaped with her into the abyss. Everything but one nursed my passion; nature, solitude, early dreams, all kindled and fed that fire: Religion only combated it; I knew it was a crime to love any of earth's creatures as I loved. I used the scourge and the fast;* I wept hot, burning tears; I prayed, and the intensity of my prayer appalled even myself, as it rose from my maddened heart, in the depth and stillness of the lone night: but the flame burned higher and more scorchingly from the opposition; nay, it was the very knowledge that my love was criminal that made it assume so fearful and dark a shape. "Thou art the cause of my downfall from Heaven!" I muttered, when I looked upon Isora's calm face: "thou feelest it not, and I could destroy thee and myself,--myself the criminal, thee the cause of the crime!" * I need not point out to the novel-reader how completely the character of Aubrey has been stolen in a certain celebrated French romance. But the writer I allude to is not so unmerciful as M. de Balzac, who has pillaged scenes in "The Disowned" with a most gratifying politeness.