was! how utterly incomprehensible seemed the reply he received!—dictated in the most poignant and bitter invectives, upbraiding him as the cause of bringing his father to a premature grave, in the perpetual sorrows, mortifications, and disappointments he had, throughout his life, burthened him with,—ending at length her dreadful charges and accusations by the passionate exclamation, "Might she never have the misery to see him cross her path again!"
Tried as the General already had been by the melancholy occurrence of his father's death, it was with increased perturbation of feeling he perused this phrensied epistle. From what motive could it proceed? Could the heart of the writer coincide in what her pen had expressed? Came it from that overwhelming grief, causing those wanderings, those delusions of reason, portrayed in ideas so enormous, so torturing to the feelings of a son? Could he for one moment suppose that such sentiments derived their existence from the least shadow of truth?
And how was he answerable for his father's death, since, according to her Ladyship's account, admitting even that the mind of Sir Aubrey had
