And yet I confess that it is a painful and bitter task to record the humiliations, the wearing, petty, stinging humiliations, of Poverty; to count the drops as they slowly fall, one by one, upon the fretted and indignant heart; to particularize, with the scrupulous and nice hand of indifference, the fractional and divided movements in the dial-plate of Misery; to behold the refinement of birth, the masculine pride of blood, the dignities of intellect, the wealth of knowledge, the delicacy, and graces of womanhood,--all that ennoble and soften the stony mass of commonplaces which is our life frittered into atoms, trampled into the dust and mire of the meanest thoroughfares of distress; life and soul, the energies and aims of man, ground into one prostrating want, cramped into one levelling sympathy with the dregs and refuse of his kind, blistered into a single galling and festering sore: this is, I own, a painful and a bitter task; but it hath its redemption,--a pride even in debasement, a pleasure even in woe,--and it is therefore that, while I have abridged, I have not shunned it. There are some whom the lightning of fortune blasts, only to render holy. Amidst all that humbles and scathes; amidst all that shatters from their life its verdure, smites to the dust the pomp and summit of their pride, and in the very heart of existence writeth a sudden and “strange defeature,”--they stand erect,--riven, not uprooted,--a monument less of pity than of awe! There are some who pass through the Lazar-House of Misery with a step more august than a Caesar’s in his hall. The very things which, seen alone, are despicable and vile, associated with them become almost venerable and divine; and one ray, however dim and feeble, of that intense holiness which, in the INFANT GOD, shed majesty over the manger and the straw, not denied to those who in the depth of affliction cherish His patient image, flings over the meanest localities of earth an emanation from the glory of Heaven! CHAPTER L. Letters from divers hands, which will absolve Ourselves from long narration.--Tanner of Tyburn. One morning about a fortnight after Talbot’s death, Clarence was sitting alone, thoughtful and melancholy, when the three following letters were put into his hand: LETTER I. FROM THE DUKE OF HAVERFIELD.