As it is not so much the history of other people that I am writing as my own, I must now speak for a few minutes of myself, and of all that had been going on during some years in the little world of my own bosom. During the last six months, a greater change had taken place in my mind and my character than I ever remember to have felt at any other period of my life,--though I suppose that there is no epoch in man's existence, when his feelings and disposition may be considered as so irrevocably fixed as to be unsusceptible, during the rest of his days, of change or modification. The original fabric of the mind, of course, remains the same; but--as education shares with nature in the character of each human being, and as life is but a continual education,--I feel convinced that we go on altering from the cradle to the grave. The tree grows up and spreads, and certainly remains for ever the ash, the elm, or the oak that it first sprouted from the ground; but its form, and appearance, and size, and strength, and beauty are changed by winds, and storms, and circumstances, and accidents, and position, and time; and so, I am convinced, it is with the human heart. We are all change throughout our being; and were it not for a few remaining traits, a few slight traces, of early predilections and original character, it would be very difficult for the old man or the man of middle age to prove, even to himself, from the state of his own mind, his identity with the young man or the boy. The alterations which had taken place in my own mind and feelings, however, within the last six months, had been so great and rapid, that they were even remarkable to myself, and now form, in memory, an epoch from which I date a new and distinct course of being. My corporeal frame, it is true, was also undergoing a change, and rising rapidly, almost prematurely, towards manhood; but my mind was also affected, in a manner totally distinct and apart, by the scenes in which I mingled, by the persons with whom I conversed, and by the deep feelings, strong passions, and awful events, in all of which I took a part. Scarcely a year before, scenes of bloodshed and slaughter, energetic attempts and dangerous enterprises, had passed around me as a sort of pageant in which I acted my part, without any deep or lasting impression--without any great thought or excited passion. It had been all a sort of youthful sport to me, which--although I suffered some inconveniences, felt some sorrows, and encountered many dangers--was, upon the whole, more a matter of amusement than of pain. My first deep grief was occasioned by the death of my father. My first strongly-roused passion was the thirst for vengeance upon the man that had slain him. After that came my connexion with Lord Masterton, and certainly the love and affection that I felt towards him, and the interest I took in his fate and in that of the Lady Emily, prepared the way for what I was now