Note 2 — Personal Sketches of His Own Times, Vol. I.

I have seen in a new novel a minute recital of a very affecting soliloquy pronounced with appropriate gesticulation by a fine young man while he was “pacing about” a large room in a castle; the thunder meanwhile roaring, and the rain pattering at the casements. In this castle there was at the time no other living person; and the soliloquy was so spoken as his dying words immediately before he shot himself. As there was nobody else in the castle during the catastrophe, his affecting words were never divulged till this novel made its appearance—leaving the ingenious reader to infer the many invisible spies and tell-tales that survey our most secret movements.