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132 in melancholy reveries. "I hope," continued she, "he will not resume those downcast moods again, but be ever as he has been to-day."

She looked at Oriana, who would have said, "lively, agreeable, intelligent," but checking the words ere they escaped her, she flung aside her work, and fled to the occupations of her garden. Philimore possessed by nature a temper warm and inflammable, perhaps ungovernable; yet by an intense application to the duties of a profession loved with ardour, the one of his choice, and for which the enthusiasm of his character had led him to qualify himself, he had induced his natural disposition to yield to the control of reason's dictates, and to the mild discipline of true Christian rules. By his frequent study and contemplation of the sublime truths of Christianity, he had restrained every inferior principle of the mind within its due bounds, and often practised a rigid austerity in constraining himself to an habitual and scrutinizing review of his actions, that so he might subdue every inclination which was not strictly sanctioned by enlightened reason.

The preaching of Christianity he wisely considered a species of profanation, were he not to illustrate by his own example the sacredness of those precepts he enforced. This world, thought