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PREFACE.

ted by the highest sense of honour, and susceptible of the warmest affections of the heart, is driven by perfidy, and the supposed inhumanity of those most dear to him in life, into a state of confirmed misanthropy and despair. In this situation, he is hurried on to the perpetration of a series of crimes, which find, from their very magnitude and atrocity, a recommendation to his distempered mind. Believing himself an instrument of vengeance in the hand of the Almighty for the punishment of the crimes of others, he feels a species of savage satisfaction in thus accomplishing the dreadful destiny that is prescribed for him. Sensible, at the same time, of his own criminality in his early lapse from the paths of virtue, he considers himself as justly doomed to the performance of that part in life which is to consign his memory to infamy, and his soul to perdition. It will be allowed, that the imagination could not have conceived a spectacle more deeply interesting, more power-

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