* The kitchen, or servants’ hall of an Irish country gentleman, is open to all whom distress may lead to its door. Professed indolent mendicants take advantage of this indiscriminating hospitality, enter without ceremony, seat themselves by the fire, and seldom (indeed never) depart with their demands unsatisfied, by the misapplied benevolence of an old Irish custom, which in many instances would be--“more honoured in the breach than the observance.” Although not a man of very superior understanding, yet he evidently possesses that innate grandeur of soul, which haughtily struggles with distress, and which will neither yield to, nor make terms with misfortune; and when, in the dignity of that pride which scorns revelation of its woes, I behold him collecting all the forces of his mind, and asserting a right to a better fate, I feel my own character energize in the contemplation of his, and am almost tempted to envy him those trials which call forth the latent powers of human fortitude and human greatness. H. M. LETTER XXIV. TO J. D. ESQ., M. P. “Tous s’évanouit sous les cieux, Chaque instant varie a nos yeux Le tableau mouvant de la vie.” Alas! that even this solitude where all seems “The world forgetting, by the world forgot.” should be subject to that mutability of fate which governs the busiest haunts of man. Is it possible, that among these dear ruins, where all the “life of life” has been restored to me, the worst of human pangs should assail my full all-confiding heart. And yet I am jealous only on surmise: but who was ever jealous on conviction; for where is the heart so weak, so mean as to cherish the passion when betrayed by the object? I have already mentioned to you the incongruities which so forcibly struck me in Glorvina’s _boudoir_. Since the evening, the happy evening in which I first visited it, I have often stolen thither when I knew her elsewhere engaged, but always found it locked till this morning, when I perceived the door standing open. It seemed as though its mistress had but just left it, for a chair was placed near the window, which was open, and her book and work-basket lay on the seat. I mechanically took up the book, it was my own _Eloisa_, and was marked with a slip of paper in that page where the character of Wolmar is described; I read through the passage, I was throwing it by, when some writing on the _paper mark_ caught my eye; supposing it to be Glorvina’s, I endeavoured to decypher the lines, and read as follows: “Professions, my lovely friend, are for the world. But I would at least have you believe that _my_ friendship, like gold, though not _sonorous_, is indestructible.” This was all I could make out--and this I read a hundred times--the hand-writing was a man’s--but it was not the priest’s--it could not be her father’s. And