they are; I cannot write them. Do this as a particular favour to me, and may you be more happy than "PHILIP MASON." Mary, Frederic, and lady Anne, all entered feelingly into the sorrows of the unhappy lover; and it was agreed that they should ride out with Charles to the villa of count Mori, and wait for him, while he fulfilled the commission with which sir Philip had charged him. On his arrival, Charles was immediately admitted to count Mori, and endeavoured to explain to him that his friend could not, for a moment, wish to make a woman his wife, without possessing her heart. He had, however, some difficulty in bringing this home to his comprehension. But at length the count shrugged up his shoulders-swore that the English were the oddest people he ever saw-begged Charles's pardon, but added, by way of a compli ment, ment, that he was more like an Italian than an Englishman; concluding that he had no earthly objection to his daughter marrying colonel P, but that he would have preferred sir Philip MasonFor," said he, "love is a fugitive sort of commodity, but gold is the most durable of all things," Charles agreed in his position, but not in its inference; and heartily sickened of the count's selfish and narrow ideas, took his leave as soon as possible, and rejoined his party, who were waiting for him at a short distance, and who, during his absence, had discovered a very beautiful villa to be let in the neighbourhood, to which lady Anne had taken a most particular inclination, and had already determined in her own mind, to hire it for the rest of their stay at Naples. As soon as Charles joined them, they proceeded to go over the whole house and grounds; and Mr. Melville himself, though he was fearful of assenting to any thing that might protract B 4 their 7 their absence from England, could not but own that nothing could be more romantic and picturesque than its site. It was placed on the extreme of a promontory, which juts out over the blue water, whose waves in the high tides came almost to the foot of the rock, on the summit of which ran a long colonnade or portico of marble, forming the front of the house, and from which a magnificent prospect of the bay and town of Naples presented itself, with Vesuvius forming a dark background to the whole. The promontory on which it stood, surrounded on three sides by sea, was entirely contained within the grounds, the arrangement of which was in a very superior. taste. Landscape gardening has been greatly confined to England; but here, nevertheless, it seemed to have found its way-and there was not a slope in the land, a break in the ground, a rivulet, or a stream, that had not been taken advantage of, in a manner that would have done done credit to Shenstone himself. Few artificial ornaments had been admitted; but every now and then a statue or a temple presented itself exactly in those spots for which they were best adapted, and where the eye (as it were) expected to meet with them. On a spot, where the wood which had been for some way thick and dark, opened suddenly on a beautiful prospect of the burning mountain, an ancient pillar of the simple Doric order had been left standing untouched. No sacrilegious hand had been allowed to disturb the thin green moss with which time had clothed the column; but on a little marble tablet, at its foot, was written from Martial-" Hic est pampineis viridis modo Vesuvius umbriis," seemingly to call the attention to the fine position in which the mountain is here beheld. In different parts of the grounds a great many quotations from Latin and Italian poets were engraved, either on little monuments, B 5 numents, or in the temples with which some places were decorated. But the famous Lybian part, from the Æneid, was the principal, furnishing the best description of the scene around that could have been chosen. Engraved on the centre column of the house, in gilded letters, was written : "Est in secessu longo locus; insula portum Charles wandered through the little Elysium that stretched around him; and with Mary hanging on his arm, in the heart of picturesque beauty, he did not at all wonder at the ancients having called it the Campania Felix. Nor had he an objection to urge against lady Anne's proposal, to take the villa for the rest of their stay; but when it was added, that that stay should be prolonged for another month, he |