from the slumber of the night of ages at the revival of the arts, under the sceptre of the great ancestors of Nunziata.

I trusted to this congeniality of spirit to create a friendship, such as that of Alfieri for Madame d'Albany. But when Nunziata sometimes burst forth in his presence, into one of those gushes of enthusiasm with which the skies and soil of Italy appear to endow her children, as the Alpine heights generate the beauteous streams destined to convey fertility and joy to the vales below, the mind's-ear of Danby listened,—but his heart stopped its ears.-He, to whom the sternness of Dante, the sweetness of Petrarca, the simplicity of Boccaccio, were familiar as household words, seemed as though he did not recognize the currency of that affluence of language, an inheritance to this lovely woman from the immortal fathers of her land's language.

His spirit was far away. His spirit was in

the past. His spirit was in the old library at Ormington Hall, with a fair child clinging to his knees, whose mind was nourished by the pelican-like outpourings of his own. He remembered what his daughter had been;-how sweet, how duteous, how full of promise. He remembered all he had trusted she would become,

Polite as all her life in courts had been,

Yet good as she the world had never seen :

contemplating, with the indulgence of high enlightenment, the weaknesses of human nature; yet sharing in its mercy and charity, as as if undistinguished from the throng.-And to turn from such contemplations to think of her as a toy of a thoughtless boy,—to be loved and laid aside with fifty others when the gloss of novelty was worn away!-To have had his own devotedness, his own paternal adoration, set at nought for the caprice of a Frank Walsingham! And worse than all this, to reflect on all she might become as the companion of

the frivolous women and soul-less men, his

chosen associates ;

The thousand sacrilegious cursed hours

Which such a marriage

might have in store !

No wonder the father's cheek was so wan;no wonder he turned so careless an ear to the exalted words or soothing whispers of the dear kind Princess!-my attention more and more painfully directed to his infirmities, by whose anxious interposition, I soon began to see that his noble mind was, at times, almost overthrown. After long reveries and solitary walks, his smile became almost ghastly, nor were his words always coherent.

I trembled to perceive it !—I was alone with him there, in that obscure spot of a foreign country. As if utterly to divorce himself from thoughts of home, he had chosen at Paris to send back to England his personal attendant and engage a foreign servant. Should any mischance betide him, what might not be said,

what might not be surmised, at the instigation of those two hard-hearted old people, Lord Ormington and his own man, who had so little scrupled to heap suppositious crimes upon my head!

From the moment this dreadful idea entered my mind, my life became a penance. If I lost sight of Danby for an hour, I became terrified to a degree that rendered me far more infirm of judgment than himself. At times, I was almost frantic. I watched him and watched him, yet apprehended nothing so much as that he should suppose me on the watch. My eye was ever upon him, as though I anticipated hereafter the dread interrogatory that struck terror to the soul of Cain !" WHERE IS THY BROTHER!"

It would not have been so, but for my shameful position in Lord Ormington's family! This also, even this last and bitter curse,was entailed upon me by the fault of my mother!

CHAPTER III.

Beneath a row

Of lemon trees, which there did proudly grow,

And with bright stores of golden fruit repay

The light they drank from the sun's neighbouring ray, (A small but artful Paradise) they walked.

Intus et in jecore agro

Nascuntur Domini.

COWLEY.

PERSIUS.

IT is strange enough that I should have discovered in the unusual restlessness of Lord Ormington, demonstrated in setting his house in order, and perpetually travelling from Lancashire to town and home again as a mere relief to his irritability of mind,-symptoms of a final break up of his constitution; yet that it should be from directly contrary indications I inferred mischief for my brother!—