A PHYSICIAN'S TALE. BY HEBERDEN MILFORD. "Maids as well as youths have perished From fruitless love too fondly cherished." Coleridge's "Sibylline Leaves." "We wither from our youth-we gasp away Sick-sick; unfound the boon-unslaked the thirst, Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first- Love, fame, ambition, avarice-'tis the same Each idle-and all ill-and none the worst For all are meteors with a different name, And Death the sable smoke, where vanishes the flame." IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. III. LONDON: HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS, SUCCESSORS TO HENRY COLBURN, 13, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET. 1854. 249. w. 285 A PHYSICIAN'S TALE. CHAPTER I. "There is something to be learnt from the history of every man." FAMILIAR PROVERB. man. Fitzgerald, as it might be inferred from his patronymic, was a thorough-bred IrishHis ancestors had unfortunately pursued that extravagant course which hath brought decay and destruction on many an ancient Hibernian family, and in whose sad destiny, the moral of the divine chastisement pronounced in the decalogue, can be traced, by the sins of the fathers being entailed on VOL. III. B the children to the third and fourth generation. In a solitary ravine, amid one of the mountain ranges of Kerry, and not far from where the sleepless waves of the Great Atlantic, ceaselessly wash the rocky shores of Dingle Bay, might, at no very distant period, have been observed a hoar and dilapidated dwelling, which was the manorhouse of an extensive and sterile territory. When viewed from a distance, the mansion seemed as the special protegé of the huge, towering, bare-shouldered mountains, which on every side arose in wild and desolate grandeur, and which, doubtless, were but little altered in aspect since the world was young. A few straggling oaks, with their sturdy and tortuous limbs, some of which age had deprived of vitality, and was silently rotting to the core, surrounded the irregular pile, like speechless guardians of the dreary waste. Here and there stood a stunted shrub, which in summer put forth its "fresh green leaves," and which had once, by careful hands, been planted on the broad and natural terrace, which environed the southern front. When the eye rested upon this lonely habitation, with its curling columns of smoke ascending from those lichen-covered chimneys, and beheld the still serenity of the surrounding landscape, verily did it suggest the notion that some anchoritic spirit had in days of yore reared a home in the wilderness.-And this was the home of that volatile and traduced, yet not wholly abandoned young man. When a boy, he had roamed free as an eagle over his native hills, and the bracing air, and the daily exercise, had developed a frame into the finest proportions of manly conformation. He was an admirable illustration, of what anthropologists have averred relative to the transmission of physical qualities in our fellows, and nowhere more markedly observed than in Ireland; to wit, that the long-descended gentry, whose ancestors have for generations previously been better fed, better clad, and blessed with more domestic comforts, and who are, though of the same blood and of the same race, so immensely different from those half-starved, |