He therefore clung to this wretched life, as
to the edge of a precipice that beetled over the gulph of perdition.
Despair was with him the substitute of repentance. He looked back on his
offences to his King and his friend, convinced that they had exceeded
the bounds of mercy. Often did he deplore the utter impossibility of his
regaining that state of contented innocence, when he and Allan Neville
shared each other's hearts, before the superior qualities and nobler
expectations of his friend excited his envy and ambition. He adverted to
that time when his love for the beautiful Lady Eleanor was pure and
generous, before she had wrought upon him to become the instrument and
participator of her criminal ambition and insatiable rapacity. He had
not the audacity to think a life stained by perfidy and injustice, made
him fitter for the reception of extraordinary grace. The external
propriety of his manners, and the patronage he liberally afforded to the
divines of the Rump-party, had gained him the reputation of a man of
extraordinary piety; but the austerities he practised, and the devotions
in which he joined, afforded no balsam to his woes.
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