So Eric began
again to make good resolutions about all his future life. Ah! how often
he had done so before, and how often they had failed. He had not yet
learned the lesson which David learned by sad experience; "Then I said,
it is mine own infirmity, _but I will remember the years of the right
hand of the Most High_."
That, too, was an eventful night for Montagu. He had grown of late far
more thoughtful than before; under Edwin's influence he had been laying
aside, one by one, the careless sins of school life, and his tone was
nobler and manlier than it had ever been. Montagu had never known or
heard much about godliness; his father, a gentleman, a scholar, and a
man of the world, had trained him in the principles of refinement and
good taste, and given him a high standard of conventional honor; but he
passed through life lightly, and had taught his son to do the same.
Possessed of an ample fortune, which Montagu was to inherit, he troubled
himself with none of the deep mysteries of life, and
"Pampered the coward heart
With feelings all too delicate for use;
Nursing in some delicious solitude
His dainty love and slothful sympathies.
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