of heart which are the best and earliest gifts of literature, and more
than counterbalance our deficiencies in the "minor morals" due to
society by their tendency to increase our attention to the greater
ones belonging to mankind. Mr. Mordaunt was a man of luxurious habits
and gambling propensities: wedded to London, he left the house of his
ancestors to moulder into desertion and decay; but to this home
Algernon was constantly consigned during his vacations from school;
and its solitude and cheerlessness gave to a disposition naturally
melancholy and thoughtful those colours which subsequent events were
calculated to deepen, not efface.

Truth obliges us to state, despite our partiality to Mordaunt, that,
when he left his school after a residence of six years, it was with
the bitter distinction of having been the most unpopular boy in it.
Why, nobody could exactly explain, for his severest enemies could not
accuse him of ill-nature, cowardice, or avarice, and these make the
three capital offences of a school-boy; but Algernon Mordaunt had
already acquired the knowledge of himself, and could explain the
cause, though with a bitter and swelling heart. His ill health, his
long residence at home, his unfriended and almost orphan situation,
his early habits of solitude and reserve, all these, so calculated to
make the spirit shrink within itself, made him, on his entrance at
school, if not unsocial, appear so: this was the primary reason of his
unpopularity; the second was that he perceived, for he was sensitive
(and consequently acute) to the extreme, the misfortune of his manner,
and in his wish to rectify it, it became doubly unprepossessing; to
reserve, it now added embarrassment, to coldness, gloom; and the pain
he felt in addressing or being addressed by another was naturally and
necessarily reciprocal, for the effects of sympathy are nowhere so
wonderful, yet so invisible, as in the manners.