SIXTY YEARS OF THE LIFE. OF JEREMY LEVIS. BOOK SEVENTH. CHAPTER I. Vixi puellis nuper idoneus, HOR.-Carm. That thou art my son, I have partly thy mother's word, partly my own opinion; but chiefly, a villainous trick of thine eye, and a foolish hanging of thy nether lip, that doth warrant me. 1st Pt. Hen. IV. COULD I ever love again? It is a question to be answered only by conjecture. I had not yet completed my nine-and-twentieth year, and, by a wise provision of our nature, sorrow for the dead is not of very long continuance; nevertheless, after the loss of Beatriz, 1 never regarded woman with any steady affection, other than that of a mere indolent, bastard sort of friendship. I preserved indeed all my admiration for beauty,-as, I trust, I shall preserve it, till my eyes fail me, or my brain ceases to welcome the impressions transmitted through them; but that was all,- possibly, because, warned by previous suffering, I would not indulge the transient senVOL. II. 29 sation, and cut, as it were, the very fuel to consume me, as, in my more romantic youth, had been perhaps too much the case. Besides there was I confess very little to tempt my heart in Cumana, where I passed the ten remaining years,* that might yet threaten danger from the enemy" mater sæva Cupidinum;" for the only woman that could have roused, to any purpose, my dormant susceptibility-(dormant, because worn to exhaustion by over excitement,-) she, a true woman, irritated by my apparent indifference on the day of the earthquake, would never afterwards acknowledge my acquaintance. I need not tell her name. Premising, then, more from duty than as german to the matter, this piece of information,—that our model of pious chastity, my awful mother-in-law, fell, as became her greatness, amid the convulsions of nature, being knocked down by an image of the Virgin, which she herself had, at her own expense, erected in the church,-I bid thee, dear Reader, take thy leave forthwith of love-scenes; and thy leave too forthwith of women at least as actresses in such scenes; while, for myself, as it is the wont of historians and biographers, by way of finish to their pictures, to sum up the chief points of excellency and defect in the characters they have portrayed, I cannot turn my back upon the whole churchyard of “ 'painted sepulchres," wherein my best and worst hours all lie buried, till I have carved, by way of inscription, over the great gate at which I make my exit, (viz. this 7th book,) the following lines of Edward Clayton's : Dear, teasing woman! charming evil! Vessel of glass! uneasy treasure!— * Men do not love after forty. They marry indeed after that juvenile period, -and so do they after seventy; but, heigho! love and marriage are so very dif ferent! as different as coals and ashes. When most repelling best alluring- What joys, what torments hang about thee! Artful at six, at sixteen snaring, Most false when smoothest feature wearing, 'Tis hard to rest with thee, God knows! But to our task; already is the goal in sight : "Sed jam age, carpe viam, et susceptum perfice munus, It may be remembered that, in the commencement of Book iv., I made mention of the birth of a son by my first wife, Mary Arne, and that, on the death of his mother, I had intrusted the child to the care of that mother's relations, and afterwards, from causes it would shame me to repeat, had totally neglected him for a short period. I owe the reader little thanks for close attention to these pages, if, because I have made no subsequent mention of the boy, he suppose that I could leave the latter dependent on the charity of more distant relatives, while his own father had an arm to support him. After the timely wreck of my fortune, and necessary change of life in a foreign land, I regularly remitted to England, to my un. cle Timothy, a third of my annual income, where with he should disburse the expenses of my son's education, clothing, &c.— first deducting from the amount one small portion for the widow of Captain Berther. When, in * So too says a Greek poet,-though he is not here imitated: Γυνὴ γὰρ οὐδὲν οἶδε, πλὴν ὃ βούλεται. † Imitation of Martial : Nec tecum possum vivere, nec sine te. Lib. xii.-47. I had it afterwards in my power to settle a comfortable annuity on this respectable woman; and, though doubtless it would be more romantic and inter |