provinces, the wealthy and the powerful might have perpetrated, with little fear of legal retribution, the wildest act of social oppression and delinquency. So long as his more exalted subjects abstained from political indiscretions, neither the king nor his cabinet cared to examine too closely into their private enormities.

On a gravestone in Worcester Cathedral is this emphatic inscription, Miserrimus. No name, date, symbol, text, or comment is appended; nor any clue to the country, station, or career of the individual thus unhappily and terribly distinguished. Whether a clue has or has not been found, and whether the following pages are a genuine or fictitious auto-biography, are questions which

must be submitted to the solution of the

reader; who will, no doubt, decide according to the confidence or suspicion with which Nature has endowed him.

"MISERRIMUS."

On a gravestone in Worcester Cathedral is this inscriptionMiserrimus; with neither name nor date, comment nor text.

THE hand of the fiend was on me at my birth.

Even in extreme infancy I exhibited the utmost violence of character. I was frequently a prey to tempestuous bursts of passion, which intimidated the weak, and inspired the more reflecting with pain and disgust.

It were of little consequence to the interest of the fearful history which I purpose to relate, were I to reveal the names and fortunes of my parents. Even, however, if they had

possessed the celebrity of rank, honour, and station, been ennobled rogues with all the delusions of ancestral splendour and iniquity attached to them, I would not have attempted to palliate my vices beneath the hereditary claim to flagitious indulgence. But, as they were honest and obscure, I will not drag them into infamous notoriety by declaring that they were so unhappy as to give birth to that most wretched being, who, under a name too celebrated, contrived, during a long series of years, to direct the attention of Europe to his talents, his successes, and his delinquencies.

The thoughtless are too prone to undervalue the claims of boyhood to intelligence and energy. To the adult's superficial view of the feelings and perceptions of youth may be attributed the after errors of many a way