“I am thin and in exercise.  During the spring or summer I trust we shall meet.  I hear Lord Ruthyn leaves Newstead in April.  As soon as he quits it for ever, I wish much you would take a ride over, survey the mansion, and give me your candid opinion on the most advisable mode of proceeding with regard to the house. Entre nous, I am cursedly dipped; my debts, every thing inclusive, will be nine or ten thousand before I am twenty-one.  But I have reason to think my property will turn out better than general expectation may conceive.  Of Newstead I have little hope or care; but Hanson, my agent, intimated my Lancashire property was worth three Newsteads.  I believe we have it hollow; though the defendants are protracting the surrender, if possible, till after my majority, for the purpose of forming some arrangement with me, thinking I shall probably prefer a sum in hand to a reversion.  Newstead I may sell;—­perhaps I will not,—­though of that more anon.  I will come down in May or June.

“Yours most truly,” &c.

The sort of life which he led at this period between the dissipations of London and of Cambridge, without a home to welcome, or even the roof of a single relative to receive him, was but little calculated to render him satisfied either with himself or the world.  Unrestricted as he was by deference to any will but his own,[91] even the pleasures to which he was naturally most inclined prematurely palled upon him, for want of those best zests of all enjoyment, rarity and restraint.  I have already quoted, from one of his note-books, a passage descriptive of his feelings on first going to Cambridge, in which he says that “one of the deadliest and heaviest feelings of his life was to feel that he was no longer a boy.”—­“From that moment (he adds) I began to grow old in my own esteem, and in my esteem age is not estimable.  I took my gradations in the vices with great promptitude, but they were not to my taste; for my early passions, though violent in the extreme, were concentrated, and hated division or spreading abroad.  I could have left or lost the whole world with, or for, that which I loved; but, though my temperament was naturally burning, I could not share in the common-place libertinism of the place and time without disgust.  And yet this very disgust, and my heart thrown back upon itself, threw me into excesses perhaps more fatal than those from which I shrunk, as fixing upon one (at a time) the passions which spread amongst many would have hurt only myself.”

Though, from the causes here alleged, the irregularities he, at this period, gave way to were of a nature far less gross and miscellaneous than those, perhaps, of any of his associates, yet, partly from the vehemence which this concentration caused, and, still more, from that strange pride in his own errors, which led him always to bring them forth in the most conspicuous light, it so happened that one single indiscretion,