ABSTRACT
Eleven years had now elapsed since I first received the letter from Cloudesley, which threatened me with what I regarded as the consummation of mortal evils. That comsummation did not arrive. But in what respect was I the better? The expectation of what is tremendous is perhaps more dreadful than the event. He who is cast prostrate to the earth can fall no lower. If I had been driven from the society of my fellow men, if I had inhabited a wretched hovel on a barren heath, if I had / had nothing to subsist on but the roots that my own hand had cultivated, if I had known that, wherever my name was repeated among the inhabitants of the earth, I was regarded as a monster, betraying the most sacred trust, and perpetrating the most cold-hearted villainy, I should then have known the worst. There is a principle in human nature, by which the sufferer in almost all cases reconciles himself to what is inevitable, is complete, and cannot be reversed. He looks round, and considers rather what he has left, than what he has lost. He gathers up the fragments of the wreck; he arranges them along the walls of his cell; he says to himself, This is my dowry and inheritance for the remainder of my existence; he desperately adapts himself to the hardness of his fortune, and considers how he shall make the best of it.
