 fearfully forerun him.
I have hitherto thought my sister's fate more consummately wretched than even my own, but how is every evil lightened by comparison!—Beloved Matilda, born as you were to woe, you saw but one bounded prospect of the infinitude the globe presents to us; the horrors of this were unknown to you—uncomforting is the pillow of her who sleeps within the sound of a drum, and fancies its every stroke is fate.—Is this to live? Ah no! it is to be continually dying.

This country so nearly allied to our own, yet offers to our view a kind of new world; divided into petty states, inveterately hating each other, it knows not the benefit of society, except when necessity combines the various parties against a common enemy; yet, though necessity unites, it cannot blend them; the least cessation of general danger awakens all their narrow partialities and prejudices, which continually break out with bloody violence. The advantages of commerce, the charms of literature, all the graces of civilization, which at once enrich the mind and form, the manners, are almost unknown to this people; with a savage pride they fancy their very wants virtue, and owe to their poverty an unregulated valor, which often enables them to contend with well-disciplined troops, whom they sometimes defeat by mere want of knowledge; at others, on the contrary, they obstinately pursue an unequal contest, while speculating reason turns away from the bloody scene, vainly conscious that their mangled bodies strew the earth, only because no benevolent

being has yet deigned to attempt the conquest of their minds.
How deeply must such reflections operate on a heart bound up in the life of the accomplished leader! endued but with the common powers of humanity, exposed with the rest, alike to the sword and to the elements, he, even he, must one day perish; and while I weep the wretches every hour deprives of their beloved protectors, I know not but I may at the same moment be added to the number.—Ah, if despair should impel Essex, —his natural heroism needs no such incentive, —should he fall, unconscious of my yet surviving, to that fatal though well designed artifice I should forever impute his loss, and die for having seigned to do so.
A wild fancy has taken strange possession of my mind—Lady Southampton says it is madness; perhaps it really is so, but I can think of nothing else; she, however, is too timid to judge—she will pass her whole life here I really believe.

Were I but for a moment to behold that expressive
