About five years ago I came again to England, with the intention of breathing my last in the country which gave me birth. I retired to my family home; I endeavoured to divert myself in agricultural improvements, and my rental was consumed in speculation. This did not please me long: I sought society,—society in Yorkshire! You may imagine the result: I was out of my element; the mere distance from the metropolis, from all genial companionship, sickened me with a vague feeling of desertion and solitude; for the first time in my life I felt my age and my celibacy. Once more I returned to town, a complaint attacked my lungs, the physicians recommended the air of this neighbourhood, and I chose the residence I now inhabit. Without being exactly in London, I can command its advantages, and obtain society as a recreation without buying it by restraint. I am not fond of new faces nor any longer covetous of show; my old servant therefore contented me: for the future, I shall, however, to satisfy your fears, remove to a safer habitation, and obtain a more numerous guard. It is, at all events, a happiness to me that Fate, in casting me here and exposing me to something of danger, has raised up in you a friend for my old age, and selected from this great universe of strangers one being to convince my heart that it has not outlived affection. My tale is done; may you profit by its moral!
When Talbot said that our characters were undergoing a perpetual change he should have made this reservation,—the one ruling passion remains to the last; it may be modified, but it never departs; and it is these modifications which do, for the most part, shape out the channels of our change; or as Helvetius has beautifully expressed it, "we resemble those vessels which the waves still carry towards the south, when the north wind has ceased to blow;" but in our old age, this passion, having little to feed on, becomes sometimes dormant and inert, and then our good qualities rise, as it were from an incubus, and have their sway.
Yet these cases are not common, and Talbot was a remarkable instance, for he was a remarkable man. His mind had not slept while the age advanced, and thus it had swelled as it were from the bondage of its earlier passions and prejudices. But little did he think, in the blindness of self-delusion,—though it was so obvious to Clarence, that he could have smiled if he had not rather inclined to weep at the frailties of human nature,—little did he think that the vanity which had cost him so much remained "a monarch still," undeposed alike by his philosophy, his religion, or his remorse; and that, debarred by circumstances from all wider and more dangerous fields, it still lavished itself upon trifles unworthy of his powers and puerilities dishonouring his age. Folly is a courtesan whom we ourselves seek, whose favours we solicit at an enormous price, and who, like Lais, finds philosophers at her door scarcely less frequently than the rest of mankind!