My father, however, by frequent visitations to his Irish estates (within these few years at least,) must afford to his suffering tenantry an opportunity of redress; for who that ever approached him with a _tear_ of suffering, but left his presence with a tear of gratitude! But many, very many of the English nobility who hold immense tracts of land in this country, and draw from hence in part the suppliance of their luxuries, have never visited their estates, since conquest first put them in the possession of their ancestors. Ours, you know, fell to us in the Cromwellian wars, but since the time of General M--------, who earned them by the sword, my father, his lineal descendant, is the first of the family who ever visited them. And certainly, a wish to conciliate the affections of his tenantry, could alone induce him to spend so much of his time here as he has done; for the situation of this place is bleak and solitary, and the old mansion, like the old manor houses of England, has neither the architectural character of an antique structure, nor the accommodation of a modern one. “_Ayant l’air delabri, sans l’air antique_.” On enquiring for the key of the library, Mr. Clendinning informed me his lord always took it with him, but that a box of books had come from England a few days before my arrival. As I suspected, they were all law books--well, be it so; there are few sufferings more acute than those which forbid complaint, because they are self-created. Four days have elapsed since I began this letter, and I have been prevented from continuing it merely for want of something to say. I cannot now sit down, as I once did, and give you a history of my ideas or sensations, in the deficiency of fact or incident; for I have survived my sensations, and my ideas are dry and exhausted. I cannot now trace my joys to their source, or my sorrows to their spring, for I am destitute of their present, and insensible to their former existence. The energy of youthful feeling is subdued, and the vivacity of warm emotion worn out by its own violence. I have lived too fast in a moral as well as a physical sense, and the principles of my intellectual, as well as my natural constitution are, I fear, fast hastening to decay I live the tomb of my expiring mind, and preserve only the consciousness of my wretched state, without the power, and almost without the wish to be otherwise than what I am. And yet, God knows, I am nothing less than contented.