What if my father learns the extent of my folly, in the first era too of my probation! Oh! what a spirit of _bizarte_ ever drives me from the central point of common sense, and common prudence! With what tyranny does impulse rule my wayward fate! and how imperiously my heart still takes the lead of my head! yet if I could ever consider the “meteor ray” that has hitherto mis led my wanderings, as a “light from heaven,” it is now, when virtue leads me to the shrine of innocent pleasure; and the mind becomes the better for the wanderings of the heart. “But what,” you will say, with your usual foreseeing prudence--“what is the aim, the object of your present romantic pursuit?” Faith, none; save the simple enjoyment of present felicity, after an age of cold, morbid apathy; and a self resignation to an agreeable illusion, after having sustained the actual burthen of real sufferings (sufferings the more acute as they were self created,) succeeded by that dearth of feeling and sensation which in permitting my heart to lie _fallow_ for an interval, only rendered it the more genial to those exotic seeds of happiness which the vagrant gale of chance has flung on its surface. But whether they will take deep root, or only wear “the perfume and suppliance of a moment,” is an unthought of “circumstance still hanging in the stars,” to whose decision I commit it. Would you know my plans of meditated operation, they run thus:--In a few days I shall avail myself of my professional vocation, and fly home, merely to obviate suspicion in Mr. Clendinning, receive and answer letters, and get my books and wardrobe sent to the Lodge, previous to my own removal there, which I shall effect under the plausible plea of the dissipated neighbourhood of M-------- house being equally inimical to the present state of my constitution and my studious pursuits; and, in fact, I must either associate with, or offend these hospitable Milesians--an alternative by no means consonant to my inclinations. From Inismore to the Lodge, I can make constant sallies, and be in the way to receive my father, whose arrival I think I may still date at some weeks’ distance; besides, should it be necessary, I think I should find no difficulty in bribing the old steward of the Lodge to my interest. His evident aversion to Clendinning, and attachment to the Prince, renders him ripe for any scheme by which the latter could be served, or the former outwitted: and I hope in the end to effect both: for, to unite this old chieftain in bonds of amity with my father, and to punish the rascality of the worthy Mr. Clendinning, is a double “consummation devoutly to be wished.” In short, when the heart is interested in a project, the stratagems of the imagination to forward it are inexhaustible.