things--not, perhaps, with constant success; for what practice can always
embody theory?--but still, at least his endeavour at success was
constant. This, perhaps, it was which had ever kept him from the
excesses to which exuberant and liberal natures are prone, from the
extravagances of pseudo-genius.

"No man, for instance," he was wont to say, "can be embarrassed in his
own circumstances, and not cause embarrassment to others. Without
economy, who can be just? And what are charity, generosity, but the
poetry and the beauty of justice?"

No man ever asked Maltravers twice for a just debt; and no man ever once
asked him to fulfil a promise. You felt that, come what would, you might
rely upon his word. To him might have been applied the witty eulogium
passed by Johnson upon a certain nobleman: "If he had promised you an
acorn, and the acorn season failed in England, he would have sent to
Norway for one!"

It was not, therefore, the mere Norman and chivalrous spirit of honour,
which he had worshipped in youth as a part of the Beautiful and the
Becoming, but which in youth had yielded to temptation, as a _sentiment_
ever must yield to a passion, but it was the more hard, stubborn, and
reflective _principle_, which was the later growth of deeper and nobler
wisdom, that regulated the conduct of Maltravers in this crisis of his
life. Certain it is, that he had never but once loved as he loved
Evelyn; and yet that he never yielded so little to the passion.

"If engaged to another," thought he, "that engagement it is not for a
third person to attempt to dissolve. I am the last to form a right
judgment of the strength or weakness of the bonds which unite her to