He is a negative thinker without a creed of his own. He is a pungent commentator on the errors and scandals of the christian world, a sparkling derider of whatever age has hallowed, or experience has approved a creature dieted on cavils, and existing only by the spirit of opposition-fit to coast only the lower regions of logic-never to ascend beyond mere analysis, because incapable by mental defects of embracing a large synthesis. For the conception of a great truth is not an affair of the head merely, there must be sympathy to give perception-to vivify the nature of a being employed in the discovery of a moral truth."

St. Leger surprised me with the keen remarks he made. I was afterwards sorry that I did not then pay more attention than I then did to his comments upon Foss. But

novelty is a very fascinating thing to every youthful mind. And I fancied that I had got hold of a strong original thinker in Foss, little supposing, that in point of fact, he was only Bolingbroke modernized-Tom Paine improved and varnished.

In those days, the whigs were abused by the advanced reform party as latitudinarian, and as being a party destitute of profound convictions. My family had since the revolution been whig, and my uncle had bred me up in his own ideas of a loose liberalism. The plausible generalities, the artful sarcasms and the vigorous rhetoric of Foss, stronger than his logic, imposed on me for the time, and the pungent critic on all parties, imposed on my mind as the expositor of intellectual democracy.

That I was for the time carried away by

Foss I trace to the following causes-to my own mental laxity, from the unsystematic mode of my own education, and also to the careless habit I had acquired from my uncle, who was a pupil of the Scotch school in mental philosophy. If I had been more addicted to the study of moral subjects, and more accustomed to fixed habits of conduct, I could not have been misled by the artificial eloquence, and sophistical Socinianism of Foss.

I continued for some time regularly to attend his chapel, and candidly record that I was the worse man for doing so. He destroyed many wholesome prejudices that I possessed, (more truths associated with traditions) and put nothing in their place. His teaching removed from my mind that sense of awful accountability to the Almighty which is the most solemn and grand truth that man pos

sesses. The practical consequences of his Sunday lectures, was to destroy the principle of reverence, and leave me afloat on a sea of speculation, where he who had cast me adrift, neither offered me a compass to steer by, or cast a rope to tow me into a harbour.

CHAPTER XII.

THE NEW ACTRESS-AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE

UPS AND DOWNS.

My principles having been made worse, or renounced, I had then nothing but my feelings to guide me through life.

At this time, I was in the habit of attending the theatres regularly, and I took special delight in witnessing English comedies; I hardly ever missed "the School for