beautiful woman of wealth and fashion was too much for one who possessed but little firmness and an insatiable thirst after distinction.  To jostle men of rank and property out of his path, and to jostle them successfully, when approaching the heart of an heiress, was too much for the vanity of an obscure young man, with only a handsome person and good talents to recommend him.  The glare of fashionable life, and the unexpected success of his addresses made him giddy, and despite an ineffaceable conviction of dishonor and treachery, he found himself husband to a rich heiress, and son-in-law to a baronet.  And now was he launched in fall career upon the current of fashionable dissipation, otherwise called high life.  This he might have borne as well as the other votaries of polished profligacy, were it not for one simple consideration—­he had neither health nor constitution, nor, to do the early lover of Jane Sinclair justice, heart for the modes and habits of that society, through the vortices of which he now found himself compelled to whirl.  He was not, in fact, able to keep pace with the rapid motions of his fashionable wife, and the result in a very short time was, that their hearts were discovered to be anything but congenial—­in fact anything but united.  The absence of domestic happiness joined to that remorse which his conduct towards the unassuming but beautiful object of his first affection entailed upon a heart that, notwithstanding its errors, was incapable of foregoing its own convictions, soon broke down the remaining stamina of his constitution, and before the expiration of three months, he found himself hopelessly smitten by the same disease which had been so fatal to his family.  His physicians told him that if there were any chance of his recovery, it must be in the efficacy of his native air; and his wife, with fashionable apathy, expressed the same opinion, and hoped that he might, after a proper sojourn at home, be enabled to join her early in the following season at Naples.  Up to this period he had heard nothing of the mournful consequences which his perfidy had produced upon the intellect of our unhappy Jane.  His father, who in fact still entertained hopes of her ultimate sanity, now that his son was married, deemed it unnecessary to embitter his peace by a detail of the evils he had occasioned her.  But when, like her brother William, he despaired of her recovery, he considered it only an act of justice towards her and her family to lay before Charles the hideousness of his guilt together with its woful consequences.  This melancholy communication was received by him the day after his physicians had given him over, for in fact the prescription of his native air was only a polite method of telling him that there was no hope.  His conscience, which recent circumstances had already awakened, was not prepared for intelligence so dreadful.  Remorse, or rather repentance seized him, and he wrote to beg that his father would suffer a penitent son to come home to die.