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THE TRUTH AT ALL COSTS.

pretenders are simply dishonest traders upon an instinct which helps the training of the race.

But it is wonderful to think that, doubtless, the moral odds in this matter are evened, if you take things on a large scale. Say, if you will, that Tennyson is over-praised to-day; how do you know that the balance will not be righted in the next generation, when some hero shall be over-worshipped, whose heroism came of a touch upon his mother's heart, before he breathed, from reading a noble line in Tennyson? Ah, Sirs, let us be patient! Il-y-a fagot et fagot; and, as that same Tennyson says "This grand old world is yet in its go cart-there is a Hand which guides."

THE TRUTH AT ALL COSTS !

LET us venture to reproduce at length an old story for the sake of a new moral-new, I mean, with reference to the story :

Sixty or seventy years ago, an American surgeon, named Perkins, appeared in London, professing to cure all diseases by means of what he called "Metallic Tractors." These were two small pieces of metal, strongly magnetised, applied externally to the afflicted part, and moved gently over the surface; they were warranted to cure gout, palsy, rheumatism, and almost every disease the human frame is subject to. Stories of the most marvellous cures thus performed soon came into circulation; and in the course of a few months thousands had availed themselves of the wonderful tractors, at five guineas a pair. But this price putting it out of the power of many to avail themselves of Perkins's blessed means of cure, a hospital, called the l'erkinsonian Institution, was

actually built by subscription, in which all comers might be

magnetised free of cost. There were, however, some few sober men left in London. Dr. Haygarth, an eminent physician at Bath, remembering the influence of imagination in the cure of disease, hit upon an experiment to try the real value of the tractors. Perkins's cures, it ought to be said, were undoubted. Under the influence of his tractors, the lame really had walked, gout, rheumatism, headache, toothache fled at the approach of the little steel plates; and this it was useless to deny. Dr. Haygarth, therefore, in connexion with a Dr. Falconer, had some wooden plates painted, to represent Perkin's tractors, and resolved to see whether the same effects could not be produced by them. Five patients were chosen from the hospital at Bath upon whom to operate. Four of them suffered severely from rheumatism in the ankle, knee, wrist, and hip; and the fifth had been

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afflicted for several months with gout. On the day appointed for the experiments, Dr. Haygarth and his friends assembled at the hospital, and with much solemnity brought forth the wooden tractors. Four out of the five patients declared that their pains were immediately relieved. One felt his knee warmer, and said he could walk across the room; he tried, and succeeded, although on the previous day he had not been able to stir! The gouty man felt his pains diminish rapidly, and for nine hours enjoyed perfect case! The experiment was again tried in the British Infirmary with the same success. A man there had a rheumatic affection in the shoulder, so severe that he could not move his hand from his knee. In four minutes after the pieces of painted wood had been applied, he lifted his hand several inches without suffering the least pain. Here were most convincing proofs of the ower of imagination. Through the power of imagination, and faith in two pieces of steel, thousands of people were relieved from pain; and the same influence prevailed when, instead of manufactured steel, wood was believed in. Of course, Dr. Haygarth's experiments destroyed all faith in Perkins's tractors, and, consequently, not a soul was cured by their means afterwards.

Casuist, propound! If Perkins's metallic tractors wrought cures, why interrupt their operation with Cui bono? Why is

this reductio ad absurdum? not a cure through the "imagination" as respectable as a cure through quinine? Was this interpellation of Dr. Haygarth's a benevolent onethe gains of Perkins and his motives. being thrown out of the question?

Undoubtedly it was. The whole science of medicine proceeds upon the assumption of direct remedial agencies. The most pious medical fraud is sure to prove, ultimately, a check upon its onward march. But did Dr. Haygarth think of that when he sprang forward with his tractor-demolishing experiment? Casuist, No! Probably, like Lady Jane Grey, when her tutor, Mr. Aylmer, was with her, he "thought nothing"-but, like the rest of us, he had an instinctive propension towards the truth, and could hardly help what he did. Deception, says good old Dr. Beattie, is like walking backwards. Noble minds cannot dispossess themselves of the haunting doubt whether any departure from the truth is, under any circumstances, justifiable. A century hence, it will, perhaps, be a subject of wonder that noble minds could ever entertain such a doubt, and the accommodator of a madman's whim may be pronounced a traitor to the moral sense.

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BROKEN MEMORIES.

Broken memories of many a heart
Woven into one.-Shelley,

CHAPTER V.

"A peal of sweet bells jangled out of tune,'

"A story of a morn of golden promise,

-Shakespeare.

Broken to Hope ere noontide. This wert thou,
A bud on life's great tree, that blossomed only
To bitterness and waste."

I HAVE the weakness, if such it be, of loving to preserve old letters of whatever nature, from the formal letter of the new acquaintance to the affectionate scrawl of the old friend. I have been wading to-night through a mass of such literary lumber, by way of pastime, as is my custom at least once a year, for I find I thus derive much benefit to head and heart. In this way I have on my mind's eye many shadows of life's bygones. There is, of course, in a letter a reality which broken memories like mine of themselves possess not; most men need something tangible whereon to rest ere they wander back into the past. There they lie, those same letters, scattered in "confusion worse confounded," over the table before me; some new, crisp, pink-edged little things, memorials of happy days, indited by fair feminine hands and gentle hearts; others, old, crumpled, dingy scrawls, written years ago by old friends now dead, estranged, or lost to me in distant lands. There lies an angry letter, chronicling in a few, brief, bitter words the death of an early friendship; there, a thin foreign post letter, with its "Camp before Sebastopol" in the corner, evokes sadly sweet memories of a lost friend-as true a heart as ever throbbed under scarlet-a dear friend taken from me in those dreary trenches before beleaguered Sebastopol-a man I loved so brotherly that there seemed a blank created in life never to be filled up since that unforgotten Gazette appeared to tell proud, mournful England that amidst the carnage, flame, and smoke of victory, the souls of her best and bravest had passed away. Fame's halo is shed around that battle-field for evermore; but, after all, poor is that halo to hide from memory's cyes a lost one's soldier-grave. Aye, there ye lie, ye dear old letters, like tombstones to the past. Many lessons do ye teach me many fair examples of truth and tenderness do ye afford-many warnings do ye whisper unto me. There is a life-history already traced out by memory from the ideas hovering around yonder packet of letters, tied up carefully with black ribbon, lying before me; a history of wasted talent, of a life of joyless profligacy, of a bright morn, of a cloudy noon, with its sun going down while it was yet day. Six letters are they, written in a bold, clear, boyish hand, crossed and crossed again, and signed "Your affectionate friend, Edmund Aubrey."

Memory! tell me where is my boyhood's companion, my old form-fellow, my quondam “affectionate friend," now. A very strange history is his-a history approaching more nearly to the improbable than any I have yet narrated to you. Now clearly, as with a dreamer's eye, can I see in imagination the play-fields of the great school I have more than once before alluded to in these retrospective reviews; there can I see the fornis of my old school-fellows gliding across my memory till I am unwilling, through the medium of tobaccosmoke, to deny these phantoms of the past a present existence here. There stands Aubrey, that bright-eyed, handsome, reckless schoolboyat once the Nireus formosus and "admirable Crichton" of the school-the best cricketer, the best writer of Iambics, and the most daring of a daring community. Friends were we, too, in those early days-friends such as men can only be but once, and that in extreme youth. Yet he was considerably my senior, and our tastes differed widely, he being then a boy of strong animal energies and sanguine temperament, endued with a greater share of restless vitality than most of us; but, nevertheless, one who combined withal, in a marvellous manner, the quiet intellectual, and the noisy physical, the silent, loving perusal of classic lore by night, with the excitement of a cricket-match, or some other such athletic exercise by day; while I was of another turn of mind entirely-a lover of river-side rambles on "halfschool days," of solitude and Shelley, and little else, while Aubrey was all this and something more-aliquis in omnibus. Was there a brilliant epigram on an obnoxious schoolfellow, written and handed about school till its unlucky subject would have preferred the pillory to such merciless castigation? Aubrey was the writer thereof. there a leap that none dare take-a "bargee" that none dare encounter? Aubrey must, would, and did take the envied leap, or thrash the plebeian Drawcansir. Was there a Greek chorus whose tangled obscurity had baffled half the form? Aubrey would stand up, and in five minutes would persuade the veriest dunce that its meaning was as clear as the sun at noonday. Was there an obnoxious "Philistine" to be cajoled, threatened, or simply mystified? Aubrey was ever the dux facti, ready to say anything, invent anything, and, if need were, back his tongue with his fists. Oh! brave, brilliant, jovial, handsome Aubrey (by which latter adjective thou wast already greeted by half the fair mauvaesis sujets in the country), what a waste of God's good gifts was thine! our tastes differed, so did our prospects in life. He was heir of entail to one of the finest estates,

Was

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lastic flock. After gaining some prizes, and exhibiting greater general ability than any boy of his years in our school; after perpetrating more practical jokes than were ever chronicled or believed of Theodore Hook; after much that promised a bright future, and more that too truly foreshadowed evil hours in store for the brilliant schoolboy, Aubrey one day received intelligence of his father's death-left the school the next day, and returned thither no more. From that time I heard but rarely from him; but every letter I did receive was unlike the former in tone-enough so to show me that "all that glitters is not gold," and that, notwithstanding his many advantages of talent and social position, he was an unhappy man. From his letters I gathered that, after having run through the regular round of dissipation, which some people now a-days seem to consider incumbent upon the youthful possessor of a fine fortune; having succeeded in finding nothing, save satiety, therein, he had fallen in love with some clever, beautiful, heartless young lady of bon ton-one in every way unworthy of him in spite of his grievous faults-had wasted much time on sorrow -as I believe most of your rejected lovers foolishly do-had rushed madly into vice and dissipation, and had come out of the vortex of worldliness with its stains thick upon his soul, having

for its size, and bore one of the oldest names in the county; while I was then in all, save sorrow, nearly what I am now-heir to little or nothing save a rambling old house, a library of old books, a few acres of meadow-land, and a name by no means remarkable in the anuals of my country or my county. Well might he look forward to a bright future-his path seemed strewn with roses, and if thorns would, in spite of his laissez aller philosophy, occasionally thrust themselves on his convictions, he could always trample them under foot, with that strange, proud smile of his, and that daring heart which, in after years, worldliness, shame, and pain could warp or wound, but never crush. How we two came to be friends I have of late years oft and vainly vexed my brain to conjecture. We were two moral and physical antitheses-as unlike in mind and body as it is possible for any two boys, or men, to be in one country. I, with my quaint, thoughtful turn, and he living entirely in the actual, in the present, taking everything as it came- -a true disciple of the poco curante school, without one careful thought for to-morrow, one remorseful recollection of the wasted yesterday—a brilliant butterfly while the sun shone, a creature of to-day. Tell me not of moral affinities; that such things can and doubtless often do create and cement friendships, I well know from hearsay; but I have, neverthe-acquired much of life's savoir faire, with more less, through life found the reverse to be the rule and not the exception. "Why then were you two friends ?" Why do we find a philosophic Socrates tied for life to a shrewish Xantippe? a Luther to a stupid "my well-beloved Katherine ?" or per contra, a De Stäel to a man in every way her inferior? How does it happen, as I have seen ere now, that the coquette, the most seemingly heartless trifler of her circle, will fall in lovedeeply, purely, and truly, with the most staid, saturnine, lemon-visaged of minkind? Why do we find so often Damon ever in Rotten-row and Kensington-gardens, while Pythias is poring over dusty tomes in the British Museum.

I have great faith in the power of externals, and Aubrey in his own person was one proof of the truth of such a theory. To features almost feminine in their delicately chiselled regularity, redeemed however by his bold, bright, dark eye from any imputation of effeminacy, and glossy raven locks, clustering round a forehead well developed, massive, and as white as marble; a mouth capable of many expressions in an hour, and each of them seemingly the natural one, from the haughty curve to the genial smile, was added the well-knit muscular frame of the finest race of gentlemen on earth-the young Englishmen of our public schools and colleges, nurtured almost from their mothers' knee to manliness by the rough lessons of scholastic life on the river, the cricket-field, and the playground. What wonder then if, while to these personal advantages were added the keenest wit and most subtle intellect, Edmund Aubrey was "the admired of all admirers," the flower of our scho

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loss of principle. Time passed away, and I began
to think Aubrey had forgotten my existence or
our friendship, when one day I received a letter
from him, saying that he was now domiciled in
chambers,
Albany, where he would be
happy to see me whenever I felt disposed to look
in. I happened to be in London one night shortly
after this, and in the vicinity of my old friend;
so, regardless of the unseasonable hour, I “knocked
in," and found him in his chambers reading
Petrarch over a cigar. I confess I was agreeably
surprised by the evidences presented by the ex-
ternals of his domicile. I had heard that he was
a reckless rouè-a gambler, a protector of cory-
phèes,-but I saw no solitary trace of the "man-
about-townishness" (allow me to coin a phrase for
the nonce) I had long ago learned to expect.
Everything in those chambers told of the refined
mind of their occupant-nothing whatever in bad
taste; no portraits of half-nude ballet girls, in the
most graceful of uncomfortable attitudes and the
lightest gossamer, were pendant from Aubrey's walls
to stare a quiet bachelor like myself out of coun-
tenance; not a trace of "fastness" of any kind
in any shape visible-everything in a style of
elegant repose. The well-stored bookcase, too,
was not that of a mere St. James's street lounger,
thought I; Sophocles and Ruff's "Guide to the
Turf" could find no place together on one shelf;
Plato and Paul de Kock, that most prurient of
prurient writers, could never meet in one book-
case. Yet they all did; and in this particular,
Aubrey's bookcase would give a keen observer a
very fair idea of Aubrey's mind; such an incon-

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gruous mixture of good and evil, refinement and sensuality, was he. Who like him could so easily "watch the stars out" in disgraceful orgies, and, returning thence with the flush of day shining in his face to those chambers in the Albany, sit down to read calmly over his cigar, the pure ethics of Socrates as handed down to us by Plato, or, over those matchless dialogues, to revel in "the story of the feast," till a visionary Agathon and Diotima stood before the jaded reveller sick at heart with the coarse follies of last night? Such was Aubrey.

.

There must have been something radically wrong in his composition, or, it may be, his sins were less the result of bad principle than of an utter lack of any one governing principle at all. I dined with him the next night, and when I had listened to his finely-drawn theories, whose value was negatived by his daily practice, for a few hours, as to some pleasant rhapsody of some delightful author which one reads, knowing it to be solely a work of imagination, I proposed a stroll and a cigar. It was a fine July night, and we lounged down Piccadilly together. A very dangerous companion would he have been to any young man who knew less of him than I did; with conversational powers of the highest order he had an earnest, hearty manner, that almost carried conviction along with it, so that, perhaps, as I more than once remarked to him that very night, vice only needed his hand to gild it, and its dross became gold. At last I yielded to his eager persuasions that we should just look in and sup at a notorious gaming house. I am ashamed to own that in less than an hour I found myself standing in a brilliantly-lighted room, with every appliance that art could invent, or luxury dream of, behind Aubrey's chair, watching his play, and wondering, in my innocence, at the passionless face of the croupier, as, amidst the rattle of dice, he paid losses, or "raked in" gains, with the same equal nonchalance. This place has been so frequently before the public in the pages of novelists, and in more veracious police reports, that I need not waste time in dilating on the disgraceful occurrences of that disgraceful night, further than to inform you that sometime after sunrise, Aubrey rose from his chair a loser of some £1,500 or more, and that I could see, from the careless manner in which he gave a cheque for the amount lost, that this was neither his first appearance, nor first loss at the notorious Inferno in J. -street. And so my old friend was, after all, a lost man-a gambler. I had hoped better things-my heart was full, and I saw ruin staring him in the face from that very hour. Silently we walked downstairs into the street, and turned our steps towards Piccadilly; the tide of human beings was fast beginning to roll along that great thoroughfare; there came the drunkard reeling home from the ginpalace of last night to find his sad-eyed wife weary with a solitary vigil, spent in listening nervously to every footfall in the well-nigh deserted street,

till she hears a key click in the lock, and the door opens, and then reels in "the good fellow" of last night-her lord and master-who now meets her inquiring glance and sad questionings with the glazed eye of inebriety, and the coarse oath or brutal blow-there, too, steals along the haggard woman-the hopeless unfortunate, with the bright morning-sun peering through her veil at her pallid face of beauty blighted on the shrine of selfish sin; there come the sturdy waggoners with the market carts the keen-eyed, horny-handed mechanics with their honest faces contrasting strangely with the worn look of those who had spent a sleepless night in pursuit of folly and sin.

"I know not why, S--," said he, “but this fine morning I feel in nowise inclined to go to bed as yet. We both of us need a little fresh air after a night spent in those heated rooms. What say you to a stroll in Hyde Park ?" Though now somewhat sleepy I offered no objections, and in a few minutes we were on the banks of the Serpentine. It was a lovely morning, such as one-half of sleepy London never sees at all. The sky was as clear as the sky seems during my occasional early rambles through the fields around my country home ; the leaves wore that fresh verdure never seen in London many hours after sunrise; the birds carolled merrily their matin-song, as though Hyde Park were Arcadia, and they anything but the dingy little Cockney birds they were. We sat down on a bench, and there, as the shouts of the merry bathers came to us in silvery clear tones over the water, as the sun was shining down through the slowly-rising smoke of the millionpeopled city-as the wild fowl were skimming lazily across the saffron sky-line, he told me the heart-history of his last few years. He told me on that pleasant July morning, with haggard face, and hard, tearless eyes, now with a fervid eloquence that brought back to memory the Aubrey of "lang syne," and now with a cold, epigrammatic cynicism which seemed so sadly new, the history of his ill-requited love, and the disastrous consequences-how he had sought forgetfuluess in travel-how he had striven to crush in dissipation, as if it were possible, the pain-fraught memories of the past-how he had sought to find in a second and unworthy attachment a balm for his wounded heart-but all in vain; for his victim died young, leaving him one child, a girl who gave promise of her mother's loveliness. What more he told me now matters not-I had heard enough to know that he was already drifting, like a dismasted ship, wildly on to ruin, unless aid were at hand. . . .

We strolled homeward and parted, but not before he had elicited from me a promise that I would dine with him the next week at a dinner he intended to give to a few of his acquaintance at the Star and Garter, Richmond. That same dinner influenced his after-fate.

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On the 17th July 18-, Edmond Aubrey drove down a small party of ladies and gentlemen, myself included, in his "drag," to the Star and Garter. I shall proceed curtly to inform you that our party consisted of ten-four ladies and their liege lords, Aubrey and myself. The ladies and gentle men were nothing more or less than the thousand and one ladies and gentlemen anybody can meet anywhere, any day, in society. The only exception to the general sameness was Mdme. de St. Croix, whom I then saw for the first time. I do not remember ever having seen a prettier woman ; nevertheless, hers was a face which by no means improved on nearer inspection-for the expression at times hovering round the thin lips utterly belied the pensive beauty of the dark eyes and lofty brow. She was then twenty-three, and her husband fifty. Monsieur de St. Croix was a French refugee, for political reasons-lived on his means or on other men's, as the world said, for he was an habituè of the house in J-street; the old rouè subsided into the married man when some three years ago he met his future wife in Paris during one of his clandestine visits to his native land. Accomplished, elegant, with mind as refined as was possible for that of any woman who had lived two years under the same roof with that hoary-headed Sybarite, De St. Croix, to be, she loved Aubrey, and was by him loved as men love in his circumstances, when no respect enters into the contract. It is a sad story-too common every day-the history of hundreds of ill-assorted marriages. One day she left her husband's home, and nothing more was heard of her till Aubrey wrote to him, stating in set, cold, courteous terms, that Madame de St. Croix, preferring his, Aubrey's, society to her husband's, was now under his protection, and that he would be happy to offer satisfaction to Monsieur de St. Croix, &c., &c. St. Croix challenged Aubrey, who received his antagonist's fire, and straightway fired into the air. From that time I heard but little of him, and that little was by no means favourable to any friendly ideas I might have conceived during our separation. I heard from an old friend of mine that Aubrey was a ruined man-was a confirmed gambler-had left England for Homburg, taking with him his hapless paramour, and the next thing I heard was, that there, once more meeting with M. de St. Croix at a rouge et noir table, a quarrel had occurred between the injured and the injurer; that the latter was grossly insulted by the former; had called him out, and, a few days after, put a bullet through his heart, after the manner sanctioned by those refined murderers known under the equivocal term of "men of honour." Aubrey was a ruined man long before he left England for Homburg; had now but a pitiful wreck of his fortune left him

whereon to exist; to provide the means of daily extravagance, he had recourse to gaming, and had gained the evil reputation of a chevalier d'industrie. The unfortunate termination of that duel, to use the courteous phraseology of the continental journals, rendered it expedient that Aubrey should leave Homburg, its roulette, rouge et noir, profligate men, and unsexed women. He suddenly disappeared, and was heard of in England once more, where he lived in London, nobody knew exactly, or how, for some time.

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One winter's evening, as I was sitting alone at a late hour in this room, I heard the clatter of a horse's heels on the frosty road, breaking the silence of a December night; it grew nearer, then died away in the distance, as though the rider had changed his mind, and turned his horse's head; then all was still. I went on reading. I heard the same sound again; then I heard the old iron gate at the bottom of the lawn creak as it swayed in the wind; then again all was still. It is only some belated farmer's boy, thought I-when I heard a low sound as of some one tapping at the window. I held my breath and listened-for tales of burglary and midnight violence were just then rife in the county. The tapping grew louder, I laid down my book and my meerschaum, unbarred the shutters, and met the gaze of a pair of eyes peering through the frosted glass. I could not for the life of me imagine who my nocturnal visitor was, so, to satisfy myself of the goodness of his intention at that unseasonable hour, I went to the hall door, opened it, and there stood Aubrey booted and spurred. I said not a word of greeting, for I had never hoped to see that lost man again. But he looked so pale and wan by the flickering light of the lamp I held in my hand, that, when he put out his hand, I could not help grasping it as of old. I took his horse, which was tied to a tree, round to the stable, and returned to my guest. He strode in through the hall to the library where I had been sitting-where he and I in days past had spent many hours in earnest argument, 'from grave to gay, from lively to severe,' took his seat in the arm-chair opposite mine-beckoned to me to close the door, and said, "So, you see, I turn up again, like a bad shilling, at last. I have wandered since we parted, like a restless spirit, over many lands, and have now returned, Satan-like,

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from going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it;' a weary wandering has mine been. Why I have come-listen, and you shall hear. What my life has been-is now-I dare not mention to my oldest friend. Gaze on the rugged lines grief and shame have ploughed across a young man's brow, and read, as from a book, the history of a wasted life." A flask of Cognac stood upon the chimney piece- he pointed towards it— I handed him a tumbler, he half filled it with unsteady hand, and drained it at a draught ere he went on.

"You will recollect our early morning walk in

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