A TALE OF 1688.

BY THE

AUTHOR OF " BRAMBLETYE HOUSE," &c. &c.

Model Swith

Remember, O my friends! the laws, the rights,
The generons plan of power delivered down,
From age to age, by your renown'd forefathers:
O let it never perish in your hands,

But piously transmit it to your children!

IN THREE VOLUMES.

VOL. III.

CATO.

LONDON:

HENRY COLBURN AND RICHARD BENTLEY,

NEW BURLINGTON STREET.

LONDON:

PRINTED BY SAMUEL BENTLEY,

Dorset Street, Fleet Street.

WALTER COLYTON.

CHAPTER I.

Do not weep. What is it?
I had spoke at first, but that

I held it most unfit for you to know :

Faith! do not know it yet.

:

Thou seest my love, that will keep company

With thee in tears: hide nothing then from me.
The Maid's Tragedy.

THE Squire had passed so many years in supine indolence and tranquil enjoyment, both of mind and body; he had been so perfectly indifferent to all the cares and troubles of others, provided his own affairs flourished, and his own personal comforts were secured to him; he had so long and so completely verified the French

man's dictum, that those men pass the most happily through the world, who have a cold heart and a good digestion; that he hardly knew what to make of his own sensations when he was startled out of his habitual equanimity by this unexpected bourrasque. ́A reflected self love attached him to his son Walter, not only because he saw in his soldierly and handsome figure a renewal of his own youth, but because he looked forward to the day when he might become his bottle companion, and as staunch a toper as himself. For Edith he had never felt any very warm attachment; she was too pensive in disposition, and too delicate in health, to please one who had no sympathy with sickness, never being indisposed himself, and who professed an undisguised aversion for a melancholy-looking face. Imminent as they were, therefore, the dangers that threatened Walter `and Edith would probably have made little more than a temporary impression upon him; but when the person that he loved best in the whole world, videlicit Jaspar Colyton, was placed in jeopardy; when, if he even escaped any more

serious infliction, he might be visited with one of those ruinous fines which had lately been imposed upon such people of property as had been convicted of connivance of any sort with the disaffected; when the consequence of this spoliation might deprive him of some or all of his favourite horses and dogs, of his rare claret, of his noon-day spiced Sherry under the crooked pear-tree, and perhaps even of Orchard Place, his danger presented an accumulation of horrors that quite unmanned him. As a soldier, he had been brave even to rashness, but that was when he had little to lose; and where life yields us nothing, we are generally ready to sell it for what it brings us in. It is luxury and indulgence that make cowards of us all; they who have much to hope and to gain are courageous from a natural selfishness; they who have much to fear and to lose, are, for the same reason, pusillanimous ; a trite truth, because it embodies the history of past nations, and yet an instructive one, because it is equally applicable to those that now exist.

Mean as was the Squire's opinion of his