since I lost her; it was the only misery I ever felt; nor can I be too grateful that God, in taking her from me, gave me the grace to be far more impressed with his bounty in sparing her to me so long, than the ingratitude of repining that he chose so soon to remove her."

De Vere, feeling for the emotions he had unintentionally caused, would have turned to other pictures.

"You need not do this," said Mr. Flowerdale. “I, who contemplate that portrait morning, noon, and night, can well bear to talk of it. It is a countenance which speaks to me still, and I can now let others speak of it."

"Your equanimity and resignation do the heart good," said De Vere, much moved. "Would that many of those I have just left behind me could witness and profit by them as. I hope I shall."

Both gentlemen had risen, and De Vere could not help here grasping the hand of his host with a warmth approaching almost to attachment.

"I will not ask," continued he, " after any of the disappointments which you say you have experienced. Bearing this as you have, every thing else must have fallen an easy conquest before that delightful frame of mind which nature seems to have given you, and to be born with which is, I perceive, truer happiness than to be the possessor of millions."

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"Neither wealth nor power," returned Flowerdale, were ever very essential objects with me, though I sought them both. As to the misfortune we have glanced at," continued he, again eying the picture, "a perfect reliance on the wisdom, and perfect submission to the will, of Heaven enabled me alone to support it. Nor did I change my place, or fly from any memorial of her to recover my cheerfulness. On the contrary, it was soothing to me to keep her, in all her avocations, constantly before me. I knew all the sources of her pleasures, and found out all her little charities; and, by making these my own, and perpetually thinking how she loved them-in short, by giving her in idea a perpetual presence, I found that relief which others can only find by banishing such things from their memories. For my part, I felt her enshrined in my heart; and it was not by unseating her there that I found I could make that heart the lighter."

The two companions here again paused, and De Vere, who had begun to conceive a high veneration for his

host, in addition to the good-will he had from the first conciliated, respected him too much to interrupt his reflections.

At length Mr. Flowerdale broke the course of his own thought.

"Come," said he, "you want to know the nature of my disappointments. None of them were very heartbreaking. In love I had succeeded, and of the other great passion of ambition, I had in reality too little to make them even to myself other than what they were to others ridiculous."

"Ridiculous!" exclaimed De Vere. 66 "They are not so held in the places I have left."

"Because," said Flowerdale," the passion as you have witnessed it was probably strong. And there is this peculiarity attending it, that from the impetus it gives to exertion, often generous, always strenuous, what was meant to be a virtue may become a vice, and sometimes a horrible one, before any one, and least of all ourselves, perceive it. When this is so, nothing presses light upon it. Luckily I had so little of it in my composition, or I had schooled myself so well in independence—” He paused.

"Ay!" cried De Vere, "it is that which I want to come to. To bear with dignity the insults, the cajolery, the falsehoods you have met with!"

"I met with nothing of the sort," returned Flowerdale. "I simply did not succeed where, as I took no pains, I perhaps did not deserve to do so. In truth I was indolent, and justly punished."

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"I am eager to learn how you will make this out," said De Vere.

"I like your earnestness," observed Flowerdale, "but you will be disappointed in your expectation of adventures, where I have merely to show my unfitness to undertake them. My brother gave me precepts enough, but I could not follow them; and as I have hinted, the blunders I made were ridiculous. I never could listen to a long story, even from a patron, if I thought it a dull one. A vile fit of yawning on such an occasion lost me one great man's countenance; the asserting my opinion too powerfully in argument, another's. A third, who wished to publish a pamphlet, asked my free criticism of it, and I made so free a one that I was set down as a blockhead ever afterward. What is worse, though

I had been in the habit of dining with him often, I never thenceforward was invited. I complained to my brother, and he talked to me of Voltaire, who lost the friendship of the King of Prussia because (to use his own expression) he was tired of washing dirty linen; by which he meant, correcting the king's bad poetry. My brother prophesied that I should succeed as ill as Voltaire, and he was right. I might, perhaps, have got on in diplomacy but for an unfortunate taste in music and drawing."

"How," cried De Vere, "could such charming faculties interfere with you?"

"I was sent, by my brother's interest, a little secretary to a little German court. One of the princesses was fond of performing in private concerts, and observing that my ear was very true, insisted upon knowing my opinion of her singing. I told her very plainly the truth. She had science, but no voice, and sang out of tune. She never forgave me; but this did me no harm, till her brother, the reigning prince, who had a love for building palaces after his own designs, submitted one to me for examination, and I pointed out a gross fault in perspective. The court reception became immediately cold, and soon after I was recalled, I knew not why."

"What said your brother?" asked De Vere.

"He sent me the history of Lewis XIV., with the leaf doubled down where the rise of Mansard is described. The great architect, it seems, often consulted the king, and sent him beautiful plans and elevations, which would all have been perfect to the minutest particular, except that there was always some one error left, sufficiently gross for the king to correct, and then it came out with a royal emendation. I was not so wise as Mansard. But the abuse of princes, like other general abuse, is a mistake. I have found worth, probity, and even sincerity among courtiers themselves, and the very patrons I had offended had their good qualities, which I did not respect the less because I had blundered myself out of their favour. Was I to condemn them, or all the great together, because they might be vain, like myself and all the rest of the world? No! I had myself no spleen because they were not angels. In fact, I soon discovered that almost all characters were mixed: I laughed at the nonsense, but loved the good which I found in them, and I found a great deal. As I have told you, I was not out of humour with the world."

"Yet you quitted it ?"

"I quitted London, but not the world; and I did this only to take possession of an estate which gave me a life so agreeable, that without the restraint of what would have been a very foolish resolution about the country, I never returned to town. By this time I was married, and my happiness at home made me indifferent to every thing abroad. In my wife's mind I found my own reflected, but I also found that a wife whom I loved, and who loved me, did not add to the activity or ambition of a man not naturally active or ambitious. There was, however, another qualification (if I may so call it) which enabled me to retire without that hankering after what one has left behind, which is sometimes the cause of unaccountable disappointment."

"Your qualifications,” said De Vere.

"I had seen almost all ranks and conditions of men,' answered Flowerdale; "and though I by no means say that they disappointed me, on the contrary, many high characters raised my opinion of them still higher, and it is my delight to pay them this tribute; yet-"

Here he paused, as if doubtful how to express his meaning.

"Yet what?" asked De Vere.

"My curiosity, or rather that restlessness which most of us, or at least most ambitious persons, feel to contemplate the leading characters of the world, this was satisfied."

"So soon?" said De Vere.

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Why, yes! nor set me down either as too presumptuous, or too indifferent on this account. As to presumption, I by no means am of opinion with the insolent, selfadmiring Swift, who used to say, that an acquaintance with great men was only interesting while it was a vanity, and that familiarity, therefore, destroyed its value. Nor do I think with the same cynic, that so little genius is necessary for a statesman, that there ought to be always even something of the alderman in his composition. This is the mere sauciness of a man who was an absolute peacock about courts and nobles; one who, with no natural right to it, was

"Of an unbounded stomach, ever ranking
Himself with princes.""

"And yet," observed De Vere," we may remember a higher man than Swift, even the chancellor of a great

king and great queen, who, in instructing his son, tells him, An nescis, mi fili, quanticula sapientia mundus regitur.' And this sentiment is echoed by the sensible and modest Arbuthnot, who was fond of quoting it.”

"That," replied Flowerdale, " may do in times so easy that they may be said to govern themselves; but in difficulties, nothing so false; and we idlers ought to venerate those wise and active spirits who protect us at the expense of their own peace, with no other reward than their own glory."

De Vere wondered still more, with this opinion of public men, that his host should so soon be satisfied with his acquaintance with them.

"I had, as I observed," replied Flowerdale, "that sort of irritating desire to see and know the great professions, and those who are their ornaments, which, while a man feels condemned by the mere inferiority of his lot to be for ever removed from them, leaves him with I know not what sort of imaginary admiration, almost amounting to envy. This is only aggravated, if his lot be too obscure to render his approach to them easy; and the more generous and aspiring the disposition, the more discontented, perhaps, the spirit which thus languishes. Here, indeed, a voyage of discovery to the unknown land may be of the greatest use, by sending us home again with our imagina tions undeceived."

"You profited, no doubt, by-this interesting voyage," said De Vere.

"I certainly learned," replied Flowerdale, " only to think those men great who were really so from the superiority of their talents and virtues, and those stations dazzling which were administered by such men. I thank Heaven, the country possessed enough of them to command all my admiration; while my proximity to the other varieties of mere show and glitter,-little men like myself, and not at all the greater for office, by teaching me their true value, dispelled all ignorant hankering to mix with them. It was this that fitted me for the quiet, which, without disparaging other tastes, I felt to be mine."

"I understand you," said De Vere. "Had you never emerged from the obscurity of a college, or the haunts of middle life, you might, by thinking that all who were above you were, from that mere circumstance, surrounded with enchantment, have been still restless and unhappy." "Exactly so."

VOL. II.-7

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