but yet what a heaven of a luxury it would have been in the way of revenge--to have stung him with some neat epigram, that I might have composed in our walk to the gallows, or while the ropes were getting into tune, on the generosity and magnanimity of Bonaparte! Perhaps, in a sober estimate, hanging might be too heavy a price for the refutation of a single error; yet still, at times, when my moral sense is roused and provoked by the obstinate blindness of Professor Wilson to the meanness and _parvanimity_[45] of Bonaparte (a blindness which in him, as in all other worshippers of false idols, is connected at the moment with intense hatred for those who refuse to partake in it), a wandering regret comes over me that we should have missed so fine an opportunity for gathering in our own persons some of those redundant bounties which the Corsican's 'magnanimity' at that time scattered from his cornucopia of malice to the English name upon all his unfortunate prisoners of that nation. [Footnote 45: I coin this word _parvanimity_ as an adequate antithesis to _magnanimity_; for the word _pusillanimity_ has received from usage such a confined determination to one single idea, viz. the defect of spirit and courage, that it is wholly unfitted to tie the antipode to the complex idea of magnanimity.] But enough of this; an event soon occurred in Mr. Wilson's life which made it a duty to dismiss for ever all travelling schemes that were connected with so much hazard as this. The fierce _acharnement_ of Bonaparte so pointedly directed to everything English, and the prostration of the Continent, which had enabled him absolutely to seal every port of Europe against an Englishman, who could now no longer venture to stray a mile beyond the range of the ship's guns, which had brought him to the shore, without the certainty of being arrested as a spy,--this unheard-of condition of things had at length compelled all English gentlemen to reconcile themselves for the present to the bounds of their own island; and, accordingly, in the spring of 1809, we three unhanged friends had entirely weaned our minds from the travelling scheme which had so completely occupied our thoughts in 1808. Mr. Wilson in particular gave himself up to the pleasures and occupations furnished by the neighbourhood of Windermere, which at that time were many and various; living myself at a distance of nine miles from Elleray, I did not see much of him through this year 1809; in 1810 he married a young English lady, greatly admired for her beauty and the elegance of her manners, who was generally supposed to have brought him a fortune of about ten thousand pounds. In saying _that_, I violate no confidence at any time reposed in me, for I rely only on the public voice--which, in this instance, I have been told by well-informed persons, was tolerably correct. Be that as it may, however, in other respects I have the best reasons for believing that