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The hasty determination had been the impulse of a mind obedient

to its habitual feelings, the consequence of a thousand previous

deeds; and from an examination of the motives which had led him

to commit a single deed, he was led to the retrospection of his

whole life.

In looking back from year to year, from enterprise to enterprise,

from crime to crime, from blood to blood, each one of his actions

appeared abstracted from the feelings which had induced their

perpetration, and therefore exposed in all their horrible

deformity, but which those feelings had hitherto veiled from his

view. They were all his own, he was responsible for all; they

comprised his life; the horror of this thought filled him with

despair; he grasped his pistol, and raised it to his head-but at

the moment in which he would have terminated his miserable

existence, his thoughts rushed onwards to the time that must

continue to flow on after his end. He thought of his disfigured

corpse, without sense or motion, in the power of the vilest men;

the astonishment and confusion which would take place in the

castle, the conversation it would excite in the neighbourhood and

afar off, and, more than all, the rejoicing of his enemies.