CHAPTER IV.

"The course of true love never did run smooth."

SHAKSPEARE.

WHAT discords are to a well-concerted piece of music, shadows to a beautifully executed picture, and a short, a very short fit of pouting to a lovely woman, is a little dulness to a novel.

Some repose is necessary, some dulness indispensable. The difficulty is, in what shape to serve it up. Modern fiction-writers, in general, throw in more than a fair share of this commendable quality, in the shape of long and unintelligible love speeches. Others have a peculiar facility of being muddily metaphysical; others, immeasurably moral.

The sinfulness of sin is a very good thing to discourse upon, but tedious. The sorrowfulness of sorrow, or in stronger terms still, the wofulness of wo, might serve the purpose; but as I am, for one so aged, of rather a cheerful disposition, I cannot make up my mind to use either of these subjects, so precious unto dulness.

Indeed, I have a very consoling view of every thing. I think that the world has already been at its worst—that

the stream of improvement runs with a current so wide and so resistless, that it must carry mankind forward into the still and blessed lake of happiness that Christianity has, for nearly two thousand years, been preparing for wearied and persecuted humanity.

What are now the impediments that lie in its onward course? A few old turretted prejudices, in which despotism still contrives to find strong holds, and a few principles of levelling destruction, that would undermine its banks-those banks, that the wisdom of ages has thrown up, in order to keep the torrent of human events in its only secure course. These are all that I can discover to prevent this grand consummation. I shall not live to see it, but those who will live immediately after me probably will. That will be the time when men, gloriously imbued with the divine spirit of Christianity, shall forget to hate each other or contend for its forms, and universal humanity, covered, as it were, with a mantle of righteousness, shall go forth rejoicing, seeing in every face happiness, and meeting on every brow the welcome of brotherly love.

I have prophesied-I have done. My fit of dulness is past, at least of that dulness which I meant to be, after the manner of novelists, dull above my ordinary dulness. After this repose, we now resume our narrative.

When the barge arrived on board the Belladonna, the command to let fall, and sheet home the topsails, had just been given. The boat was soon hoisted in, and all sail made to join the squadron, which was now nearly half hull down.

Captain Oliphant, not hoping to come up with his superior officer-who he was, he was at a loss to conjecturethat evening, ordered the best look-outs to be kept, and retired to his cabin, in a very unusual state of mind, a deeply reflecting man. His glaring deficiencies, now for the first time perceived, startled him into a real and wholesome humility. We will leave him in deep rumination, now on the mental, now on the corporeal excellencies of Rosa Belmont, and debating whether he should not, for a time, beg to be superseded in his command, and go to Oxford or to Cambridge for three or four years. Rosa would not have liked him so well if he had done so.

Mr. Rubasore, replete with the worst passions that degrade our common nature, immediately that he found him

self in London, repaired to his attorney, a man who held his confidence, and who, for the proper consideration, was ready to employ all the wiles of the law to aid his client in the accomplishment of any purpose, however nefarious it might be.

To move the Court of Chancery for an injunction upon Captain Oliphant, and to serve his attorney with a notice so shaped that an answer was necessary, in order to bring the Captain into contempt of court, seemed to be the only feasible plan. This, Mr. Sharpus was ready to do at once; but Mr. Rubasore, before he commenced the character of a litigant, determined, once more, to attempt that of a lover, and thus make one grand effort to recover his lost ground. This he determined to commence by an epistle-a love-letter; yes, at forty-eight, Mr. Rubasore sat him down, in a murky coffee-room, to write a love-let

ter.

I pity him. When I was myself young, and was impelled to write to my Seraphina, my Adeline, or my Adelgunda, for those were the three loves of my younger days -when I used to sit down to write to any of these, the glowing thoughts rose in crowds, million-like, as the gnats dance in the rays of the setting sun; and the slow, the tedious pen hobbled after them like a cripple on crutches. For one sentiment written, five hundred were soliloquized away to the unreplying walls. Those were the glorious. times for love compositions; but alas! after my Seraphina, who was a governess in a nobleman's family, had united herself to poverty and his third son; after Adeline, who was an heiress, had married her own too handsome land agent; and, after all this, when, at forty-two, I had to write a letter of congratulation to Adelgunda, who was about to be married to a German baron-at that age, I know how horrible it was to sit down to write on love. I did it, however, making, in the midst of my congratulations, a last appeal for mercy to my breaking heart. I was not consoled; for the baroness had to go and look for the chateau of her husband en Espagne.

Having felt all this, therefore, bad as was the man, I pity him when he was forced, at last, to try, by the eloquence of his pen, to regain a heart that he once, but foolishly, thought he had secured. The reader shall see how he acquitted himself, for I have a copy of his letter.

"ROSA,

"I seem like one standing on a shifting sand. Whilst the tempest is howling above my head, whilst on my righthand and on my left, the waves come rushing around me like monsters of the deep, in order to devour me, even my foothold on the earth seems slipping from beneath me, and an inevitable, a cruel, and undeserved end awaits me.

"And I suffer this-I, who have falsely and foolishly placed my all of happiness in this world upon the sandbank of your principles. O Rosa, you cannot, you dare not, thus destroy me! Think not that I am old—it is a delusion: the customs of the world, the very voice of nature dictate, that some years more experience should be on the side of the husband. Youth is proverbially blind; and, if the blind lead the blind, will there not then be mutual destruction?

"But if you deceive me, Rosa, then, O then, I am old indeed!-then, I shall have nothing more to do in this world than to prepare for the grave. When four years ago, as you lay on my bosom, a sweet combination of love and innocence, when you attested the silver lamp of night, and the innumerable host of the sky-encrusting stars, that I, I only, should share your heart, and, in due time, your blessed hand; you were then just, upright, noble. When the vows that we meant to be eternal were made the more binding in the sanctity of keeping that sweetest of secrets inviolable, till we should, in due time, step before the world as man and wife-were those vows, I ask you, made by your beautiful lips, with all the apparent sincerity of a saint, and all the passion of a devotee-were they made, I repeat, to be shamefully, disgustingly broken, and, with them, my confiding heart?

"But I will,-I do believe,-that you were entrapped by the wiles of a man, I hesitate not to say, practised in the arts of seduction. Believing this, I forgive it. But our solemn, our loving contract, though now no longer a secret, is still binding upon us. I will never renounce it

-never!

"When your heart was uncontaminated,-when your soul was as pure as the transparent blue above you, and into which your eyes were so fond to penetrate, then you confessed that loved me that I was your hope, your trust, your happiness! What have I since done to forfeit

you

this felicitous distinction? Have I been a harsh, and unkind guardian? Tax your memory, take back to your very earliest infancy, and then ask yourself, what grievance had you ever unremoved, what joy repelled, what wish ungratified? Could guardian, could brother, could father, have been more kind, more tender? Why this change? Is it that my hair has grown a little more gray, or that time has written upon my countenance the history of three or four more years? What vainest of vanities are these! What, man even amongst the finest of our English youths, than whom in the wide world none are finer,which among them would say he wished to be loved for his person?

"Do you not know, Rosa, that I, as your guardian, have it in my power to remove you wherever I choose, hundreds of miles away from the object of your childish, and, I trust, transient infatuation? But could I do thisor any thing to my Rosa, that would imply harshness? Never!

"You have not changed. You are noble, and therefore change you cannot. You are made for happiness, and great happiness seems made for you. Wherever you appear; wherever you move, existence wears the look of spring, and sorrow and wo seem impossible. Yet with with all these high capabilities in your favour, happiness shall not be yours, nor any one's unless it be sought for by the light of principle.

"If you extinguish that heaven-born light in your bosom, and hereafter you seek for happiness, I tell you, nor youth, nor beauty, nor riches, shall give it you. The spring, with its sweet flowers,-the summer, with her joyous sunshine,the autumn, with her glorious abundance, -and the winter with his harvest of glad hearts,-all, all shall refuse it you.

"Earth will not bestow it upon you, and heaven will deny it; for how, Rosa, could you plead for mercy at the foot of the mercy-seat, when you seek deliberately and perfidiously to destroy your oldest, your best, your only true friend, by a breach of promise, and a violation of principle, that is shocking in every one-in an accomplished and angelic woman like yourself, positively revolting.

Write to me only to say that the film has fallen from your eyes, and that you again see what is consistent with