Said Darrell, irresistibly allured on, but with a tinge of his grave irony: "You have the true genius of the pulpit, and I concede to you its rights. I will listen with the wish to profit--the more susceptible of conviction because freed from the necessity to reply." GEORGE MORLEY.--"You vindicate the object which has been the main ambition of your life. You say 'not an ignoble object.' Truly! ignoble objects are not for you. The question is, are there not objects nobler, which should have attained higher value, and led to larger results in the soul which Providence assigned to you; was not the proper place of the object you vindicate that of an auxiliary--a subordinate, rather than that of the all-directing, self-sufficing leader and autocrat of such various powers of mind? I picture you to myself--a lone, bold-hearted boy--in this ancient hall, amidst these primitive landscapes, in which old associations are so little disturbed by the modern--in which the wild turf of waste lands, vanishing deep into mazes of solemn wood, lends the scene to dreams of gone days--brings Adventure and Knighthood, and all the poetical colours of Old, to unite the homage due to the ancestral dead with the future ambition of life;--Image full of interest and of pathos--a friendless child of a race more beloved for its decay, looking dauntless on to poverty and toil, with that conviction of power which is born of collected purpose and earnest will; and recording his secret vow that singlehanded he will undo the work of destroying ages, and restore his line to its place of honour in the land!" George paused, and tears stood in Darrell's eyes. "Yes," resumed the scholar--"yes, for the child, for the youth, for the man in his first daring stride into the Action of Life, that object commands our respectful sympathies. "But wait a few years. Has that object expanded? Has it led on into objects embracing humanity? Remains it alone and sterile in the bosom of successful genius? Or is it prolific and fruitful of grander designs--of more widespreading uses? Make genius successful, and all men have the right to say, 'Brother, help us!' What! no other object still but to build up a house!--to recover a line! What was grand at one stage of an onward career, is narrow and small at another! Ambition limited to the rise of a family! "Can our sympathies still hallow that? No! In Guy Darrell successful-- that ambition was treason to earth! Mankind was his family now! THEREFORE Heaven thwarted the object which opposed its own ends in creating you! THERFORE childless you stand on your desolate hearth! THEREFORE, lo! side by side--yon uncompleted pile--your own uncompleted life!" Darrell sate dumb.--He was appalled!