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232 visit some of the most fashionable resorts of England, whose salubrious springs had been recommended to him; and where he renewed his intimacy with several of his former associates, although he was now no longer to be drawn by them into those dissipated habits which seemed to form so great a portion of their happiness.

The world no longer spread before his gaze the delicious banquet of voluptuous enjoyment; its transient, its alluring pleasures were at an end: he was no longer to be enchained by its fatal and delusive charms. In the first dejected state of his mind upon the loss of Ellina, the future had presented but a sterile waste; a tranquil but languid repose at best seemed to await him—a torpid existence, a miserable endurance of life, when the soul, susceptible of an aching void, resigns itself to the supineness of apathy. After a time, however, he became more sensible of the reviving influence proceeding from renewed energy; luxurious indolence had for ever lost to him its goût; swayed by principles of reason only, with that firmness and self-command which of late years had formed so predominating a part of his character, he had continued to nurture with assiduity the active powers of his understanding, and by such means had more and more confirmed in himself the pure precepts of exalted wisdom.

Often drawn into fashionable life, he could not forbear reflecting upon the insipidity of such scenes, the vanity or weakness of the women, the many