SUCH, dear R——, is the account which our old friend has bequeathed to us of that early part of his life, concerning which neither you nor I ever heard him speak. With the exception of a few passages, which I have found it necessary to strike out of the last two or three chapters, [especially the last of all,] you have the Memoir exactly as he left it in his cabinet.

Why he finished so abruptly, his letter does not say. Whether he did so in consequence of having been painfully agitated in the composition of the concluding pages which you have just read, and therefore fearing to proceed farther; or whether the many years of which he has said nothing had really appeared to him, in his morbid retrospect, incapable of furnishing us with any materials, either of amusement or instruction, I am somewhat at a loss to determine. You are quite as well qualified to make guesses upon the matter as I am.

I think you will now have little difficulty in confessing that I was right, and you wrong, in the dispute we have so frequently renewed concerning him. I certainly had formed at first, and retained for a considerable time, an opinion pretty much the same with your own. That a man who possessed health and bodily strength to an extent so very uncommon in people of his years, who took so much exercise daily, who almost every year travelled several thousands of miles, and to the last thought little more of a trip to Paris than of a walk into the city—and, above all, who was, whenever any of us met him in society, the soul of the party,—light, buoyant, airy, and cheerful, to the distancing, not unfrequently, even of our own boyish spirits—that this man should have been in reality the habitual victim of the darkest and most melancholy reflections, was, undoubtedly, a thing not likely to be suspected by observers so young and thoughtless as we both were when we first knew Mr Wald.