Afterwards having formed a tender domestic connection, the ramification from which, drew him not unwilling to the metropolis; his family engagements threw him abruptly, and in the heat of the American war, amidst “a croud of patriots,” many of whose names have before been mentioned. Young and inexperienced, dazzled with the name of liberty, confounded by subtleties of argument, which, if he could not accurately analyze, he was still unable to confute; and lastly, with the prospect placed before him of ease and independence, can it excite surprise, that he should get entangled in a net, of which the meshes were at the same time so fine, as to elude detection, and too strong to allow of escape? Politics, however, was not the subject for which he was best qualified, nor did they ever interest his affections, or exercise the better powers of his mind. He was rather the instrument than the operator, and he confesses that he has often looked back with a sort of shame and compunction, at having been, sometimes, the means of circulating ingredients, of the full tendency of which he was then unconscious, but which he has since ascertained to have developed some of those poisonous seeds, the pernicious effects of which, Europe, nay the whole world, has for the last five and twenty years experienced. He derives, however, some consolation from the hope, indeed the confident belief, that many of those individuals, to whom a chain of fortuitous circumstances thus introduced him, were not themselves aware of the ultimate consequences of their conduct. The spirit of distrust and suspicion, which, in our free country, always follows with unremitting vigilance, the measures and the ministers of government, the emotions of wounded pride, of disappointed ambition, and, in some instances of personal enmity, combined to form the stimulus which actuated the conduct of many of the best and ablest characters among them. Many also, it is apprehended, discovered the illusion in time, and retracted their errors, before they had operated to the injury of their country. Be the above as it may, the whole of the junta has disappeared like “the baseless fabric of a vision,” and of the individuals more particularly alluded to, the writer of these pages was, when this was recorded, the “only rack which was left behind.” It may not be altogether unentertaining to say a little on some of these worthies, the result of personal knowledge. What variety of herbs soever are shuffled together in the dish, yet the whole mass is swallowed up in one name of sallet. In like manner, under the consideration of names, I will make a hodge-podge of differing articles. CHAPTER IV.