SECTION XX. "Is there a murderer here? No! Yes! I am." I WAS sitting in my chamber, pleased with many things I had seen, displeased with few, and, on the whole, much satisfied with my tour, which I thought had afforded more variety than London could have supplied,-when my door was opened by a servant whom I knew to have been Fawknor's, and who delivered me a packet folded in the deepest mourning paper. As he placed it in my hand, the tears gushed into his eyes, and he exclaimed, " O, Sir, my poor master! I suppose you have heard." Portentous as these words were, I did not altogether suspect the truth, though it was evident. there had been death. The valet, who loved his master, who, in truth, was good to his servants, tried to stammer out the particulars, but gave it up, and referred me to the packet. It was in dorsed, "To be delivered to Mr. Fielding after my death." It contained many directions of no consequence to relate, and a feeling letter to myself, which I also withhold. But it also contained a paper, exhibiting his dying feelings, as it were, in his dying words. They need little comment, as no one can read them but with the same reflections. They seem to have been written but a few hours before the fatal act; as he was found with life extinct at six in the morning. The paper was as follows: : "The bell is now beating two-probably the last I shall ever hear; for having finished the little business I had left, I may be said to have done with time, and finished life. My lamp sinks; it glimmers through the chamber I am about to quit for ever, with a flickering light, every minute fainter and fainter; sad emblem of my sinking self, who, like it, have blazed, am exhausted, and shall soon be extinguished. But welcome total darkness! It is better than the mockery of fruitless efforts to recover. My dread resolve I feel to be right:-it is unalterable. Better to take an everlasting leave by my own will, than submit to be driven with scorn from the place I have filled. Yes! I will die; but that mortification shall never reach me. Yet my life has been a continued error, and I deserve contempt. I owe much to my fellows; and, above all, to those whom my example may have seduced into the same career of false glitter, perhaps to close it as I am about to do. I will not, therefore, from a shame that would be criminal, forbear to give them the warning of my life. I will rehearse the weaknesses, the faults of that life, before I quit it. I will recount the mischiefs of vanity, encouraged when it ought to have been rooted out; their gradual swelling into high-blown pride, until what I thought triumph almost deprived me of my reason. I had seen my error, indeed, but it had become too inveterate to remedy. To-morrow's dawn will, at least, end it. "Few people know my real origin, nor from how little noted, I had almost said, how low a sta tion, my towering aspirations had arisen. The man who for years was one of the leaders in the highest society; who was the avowed friend of one of the highest nobles (alas! that he ever changed, to consign me to self-destruction!); who thought himself the glass of fashion, in which his superiors dressed ;-who would think that this man was the son of one who had been a clerk, and almost a servant? A gambling speculation in the funds made him master of a few, a very few thousands, which eventually came to me. But before that he had commenced gentleman, though in so harmless and obscure a way, that, luckily for me, nothing was known of him, and that bar (for such it would have been) to the position I coveted, never interposed between me and my faté. In sta "From my earliest childhood I was vain and ostentatious. At school I was thought promising as a scholar, but the vanity this might have inspired was not that which possessed me. Would that it had, instead of that which did. tion I was inferior to one half of my schoolfellows yet among my superiors, I made an early distinction between those whose fathers were engaged in commerce, or had no titles, and those who had ranked or sprung from the landed gentry. From the latter, and those only, I chose my friends; and those who were not of this class, though many of them were full of talent and personal merit, and are now far beyond me in the world, I utterly disregarded. "We lived in a small suburban villa, a few miles from town. I could not bear it, because it was in a neighbourhood full of shopkeepers, flourishing and happy, but who went backwards and forwards in stage coaches. I myself would never do this, even as a boy, and often spent the last shilling I had left of my pocket-money, in the politer vehicle of a hackney coach. But the first great excitement given to this miserable passion, as it has proved, I felt in a visit I made with a friend to one of those palaces so frequent in England, called Show Houses, which may be viewed for money. The pomp, the elegance, the luxury of the furniture seemed absolutely supernatural; and some of the family whom I happened to see in their chapel gallery hung with crimson and gold, appeared deities; certainly the most felicitous of mortals. I was then but fourteen; but my heart, I well remember, teemed from that moment with the silly ambition that has consumed me. Envy and swollen pride filled me! I nearly shed tears to think of the distance between me and the favoured mortals I had seen; yet (strange to say, as I was aware of that distance) I secretly, in the very instant, resolved to shape all my exertions in life to the acquisition of such a rank and station, as would admit me some day as an equal in that very gallery. What was then begun was completed by my joining a party to see the Drawing-room at Court. There, my whole attention was fascinated and astounded (oh! misery and wretchedness!) because of so many nobles. At the same time I blushed, and was mortified to desperation, because, as a spectator, I was only admitted into an ante-chamber. "Under these dangerous and sickly impressions my father died, and left me at eighteen master of myself and a few hundreds a year. I immediately placed myself at College; and as my income, |