I put my other arm about him—­Save you from what, my dear Belton! said I; save you from what?  Nothing shall hurt you.  What must I save you from?

Recovering from his terror, he sunk down again, O save me from myself! said he; save me from my own reflections.  O dear Jack! what a thing it is to die; and not to have one comfortable reflection to revolve!  What would I give for one year of my past life?—­only one year—­and to have the same sense of things that I now have?

I tried to comfort him as well as I could:  but free-livers to free-livers are sorry death-bed comforters.  And he broke in upon me:  O my dear Belford, said he, I am told, (and I have heard you ridiculed for it,) that the excellent Miss Harlowe has wrought a conversion in you.  May it be so!  You are a man of sense:  O may it be so!  Now is your time!  Now, that you are in full vigour of mind and body!—­But your poor Belton, alas! your poor Belton kept his vices, till they left him—­and see the miserable effects in debility of mind and despondency!  Were Mowbray here, and were he to laugh at me, I would own that this is the cause of my despair—­that God’s justice cannot let his mercy operate for my comfort:  for, Oh!  I have been very, very wicked; and have despised the offers of his grace, till he has withdrawn it from me for ever.

I used all the arguments I could think of to give him consolation:  and what I said had such an effect upon him, as to quiet his mind for the greatest part of the day; and in a lucid hour his memory served him to repeat these lines of Dryden, grasping my hand, and looking wistfully upon me: 

      O that I less could fear to lose this being,
      Which, like a snow-ball, in my coward hand,
      The more ’tis grasped, the faster melts away!

In the afternoon of Sunday, he was inquisitive after you, and your present behaviour to Miss Harlowe.  I told him how you had been, and how light you made of it.  Mowbray was pleased with your impenetrable hardness of heart, and said, Bob.  Lovelace was a good edge-tool, and steel to the back:  and such coarse but hearty praises he gave you, as an abandoned man might give, and only an abandoned man could wish to deserve.

But hadst thou heard what the poor dying Belton said on this occasion, perhaps it would have made thee serious an hour or two, at least.

‘When poor Lovelace is brought,’ said he, ’to a sick-bed, as I am now, and his mind forebodes that it is impossible he should recover, (which his could not do in his late illness:  if it had, he could not have behaved so lightly in it;) when he revolves his past mis-spent life; his actions of offence to helpless innocents; in Miss Harlowe’s case particularly; what then will he think of himself, or of his past actions? his mind debilitated; his strength turned into weakness; unable to stir or to move without help; not one ray of hope darting in upon his benighted soul; his conscience standing in the