former companions, and entered a second time upon those wild irregularities, for which his temporary privations had but given him a keener zest.
Making with some friends an excursion to Bath, he there accidentally became introduced to General De Brooke and his amiable family. Deeply smitten with his youngest daughter, and yielding himself a willing victim to his passion, in order to have frequent occasions of seeing and conversing with the object who thus enslaved him, he fixed his abode in the neighbourhood; existence seeming tolerable only in proportion as the means were granted him for indulging in the presence of her whose image perpetually haunted him. Her radiant beauty wore to him an additional charm, heightened as it was by an association of mental graces he could not distinctly define, but which seemed in their effect matchless.
The general life of Douglas, his gay and unconcerned manners, led some to imagine he was unused to reflection; but such casual observers were mistaken. Possessing by nature a masculine energy, he was formed to think, and enter into the utmost refinements of intellect; his mind, improperly directed, had pursued a different bias; but he had never, even in his most jovial hours, thought lightly of virtue; the contemplation of it awed him,
