circumstances, is to assure me of a gratuitous absurdity, which you cannot know, and which I shall not believe. It is owing, not to circumstances, but to the force of kind, to the stuff of which our blood and humours are compounded being the same. Why should I and an old hair-brained uncle of mine fasten upon the same picture in a Collection, and talk of it for years after, though one of no particular ‘mark or likelihood’ in itself, but for something congenial in the look to our own humour and way of seeing nature? Why should my cousin L—— and I fix upon the same book, Tristram Shandy,—without comparing notes, have it ‘doubled down and dogeared’ in the same places, and live upon it as a sort of food that assimilated with our natural dispositions?—‘Instinct, Hal, instinct!’ They are fools who say otherwise, and have never studied nature or mankind, but in books and systems of philosophy. But, indeed, the colour of our lives is woven into the fatal thread at our births: our original sins, and our redeeming graces are infused into us; nor is the bond, that confirms our destiny, ever cancelled. Beneath the hills, amid the flowery groves, The generations are prepar’d; the pangs, The internal pangs, are ready; the dread strife Of poor humanity’s afflicted will Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny. The ‘winged wounds’ that rankle in our breasts to our latest day, were planted there long since, ticketed and labelled on the outside in small but indelible characters, written in our blood, ‘like that ensanguined flower inscribed with woe:’ we are in the toils from the very first, hemmed in by the hunters; and these are our own passions, bred of our brain and humours, and that never leave us, but consume and gnaw the heart in our short life-time, as worms wait for us in the grave!