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built himself several stately palaces, and Foscolo: "Federigo II esperava a riunire took great pleasure in adorning the prin- l'Italia sotto un solo Principe, una sola cipal cities of his Southern States, more forma di governo, e una sola lingua.” * especially Foggia, Naples, and Palermo. If so, it is very striking to find the great His favourite hunting-seat, Castel del project formed by this far-sighted prince Monte by name, is still standing in Apulia, six centuries ago fulfilled in our own day and nearly perfect, so far as its walls and by his own descendant, King Victor Emchambers are concerned. It is a magnifi- manuel. cent pile, in a rich style of Gothic architecture, built in an octagonal form, with a tower at each angle. Crowning, as it does, the high crest of the Apennines, it overlooks a vast extent of level country to the cities of Barletta and Trani, and the Adriatic Sea beyond them. Mr. Swinburne, who visited the spot in 1777, much admired "the great gate which is of marble, cut into very intricate ornaments, after the manner of the Arabians;' and he further commemorates "two enormous lions of marble that lie on the balustrade of the steps." We observe with regret in Mr. Murray's "Handbook" that this stately castle is utterly neglected and abandoned by its present proprietor, the Duke of Andria; and we join in the hope that the new government of Italy may be induced to take some steps to preserve it from decay.

This descent of the present King of Italy may not be immediately obvious to some readers. They must remember that Constance, the daughter of Manfred, carried her claims upon Sicily and Naples by marriage to the House of Aragon. It is to her that Dante refers in the message which he makes Manfred deliver:

Vedi a mia bella figlia, genitrice Dell' onor di Sicilia e d' Aragona.† In the sixteenth century Aragon became united with Castile through Ferdinand and Isabella, and their great-grandson, King Philip the Second, gave his daughter in marriage to the Duke of Savoy.

But will success continue to attend the descendant and successor of Frederick? Will the noble design of Italian unity in the long-run prevail? If good wishes could ensure it, they would not be wantBoth the Fredericks have left behind ing. Our good wishes, however, must them compositions both in verse and not blind us to the serious obstacles in prose. Those of the King are well known, the way, and, above all, to those presented and on some points justly celebrated. But by the differences of feeling and of custhe Emperor also wrote some graceful toms in the population of the several pieces of poetry. Those by himself, by States which it is sought to blend and his son Enzio, and his Chancellor, Peter combine. Here are races which, until of de Vineâ, are ranked among the earliest attempts in the Italian language, which began to form itself at his Court. There has also been published an Essay on Falconry from his pen, which is highly commended by the very few who have pe

rused it:

"That book," says von Raumer, "is astonishing for its accuracy and minuteness; it goes far beyond the limits of its subjects; it treats also of the mode of life of birds, their food, their construction of nests, their propagation, and their care of young, their sicknesses, and the best remedies for these, the flights of some kinds in spring and autumn, their means of attack and defence, and the numbers and the arrangement of their feathers; and it further contains what was still less to be expected in that age, an acute exposition of some points of comparative anatomy."

The consistent object of Frederick the Suabian through his public life was so think his ablest modern critics, not judging from any single declaration, but rather from the whole scope and tenor of his acts the unity of Italy. Thus says Ugo

late, were almost in arms against each other. Can they so suddenly become, not allies only, but fellow-citizens? Or, if that cohesion be effected, would it stand firm against a blow? Even the imbecility of the old Papal Government might come at last to be regretted in a system of much heavier taxes and a larger standing army.

In a biography which was published fully forty-three years ago, but whose writer still survives amongst us, it was laid down as "a singular and striking fact" that, of all the illustrious men who have done honour to modern Italy, scarce any one has been born at Rome, and by very far the greater number have sprung from its northerly provinces, where there has been from early times an admixture of Gallic and Teutonic blood. Much

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more recently the same view has been | London. It was one of those houses urged with patriotic ardour by an acute which, dating only from the prosaic age and popular author in Bavaria Louis of Queen Anne, have come to be picturSteub.*

The facts, we must say, seem in favour of that assertion. If we take the new Italian kingdom with Sicily included, and draw a line across the Peninsula between what were recently the two principal seaports of the Papal States — from Ancona, we mean, to Civita Vecchia-we shall thus have divided the kingdom into two nearly equal parts. Now look at the list of all the most eminent poets and prosewriters, warriors and statesmen, voyagers and discoverers, astronomers and men of science, sculptors and painters, musicians and composers, of whom since the revival of letters Italy can boast; and it will be found that perhaps nine-tenths of them come from the northward of that line, and only one-tenth, or some such very small proportion, from the southward.

Such a fact, we are strongly of opinion, is not to be considered as only single, but must be held to involve within it many other points of dissimilarity and causes of divergence.

We do not desire to carry this subject any further, or to enumerate in more detail the various obstacles that may arise to mar the desired object. Let us rather look at the encouraging example of France, where differences nearly as considerable at one time estranged such provinces as Brittany from Provence, or Roussillon from Picardy, and where notwithstanding by degrees all have been most successfully welded into one. Let us hope, with such a precedent before us, that the Italians will become once more an united people, not in name only or in law, but also in feeling and affection, and that, justly proud of their ancient fame, they may gather again as contented provinces around regenerated Rome.

* "Herbsttage in Tirol," p. 222, ed. 1867.

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esque in their way which they were
never intended to be- and are comfort-
able, which they were intended to be, to
a degree rarely attained by all our mod-
ern efforts. What advances we have
made since then in every way! And yet
all Belgravia did not hold a house so
thoroughly good for living in, so pleasant,
so modest, so dignified, and so refined,
as the big brick house, partly white-
washed, partly retaining its native red,
lichened all over with brown and yellow
mosses, in which, at the outset of this
history, Mrs. Eastwood lived with her
children. It had been built by the East-
woods of the time, more than a century
and a half ago. It had given shelter to
various generations since then their
mortal inn and lodging, the everlasting
dwelling-place of their memory. They
had left layers, so to speak, of old furni
ture, from the japanned screens and cab-
inets of the founder, to the hideous hair-
cloth and mahogany of George IV.; and
pictures and knick-knacks, and precious
old china for which collectors would have
given its weight in gold. All these riches
were not shown off to advantage, as they
might have been. You stumbled on them
in corners; you found them in out-of-the-
way cupboards, in rooms that were rarely
used. In short, you could not take a walk
on a wet day about this delightful house
without finding something out that you
had not seen before. For my own part I
prefer this to the modern device of mak-
ing a museum or china-shop of one's
drawing-room. The drawing-room was a
place to live in at The Elms. It had a
hundred prettinesses about, none of
which had been bought within the mem-
ory of any of the young people, except,
indeed, a few foolish knick-knacks be-
longing to Ellinor-for what girl worth
calling such was ever without knick-
knacks? But its supreme use was to be
lived in, and for this it was infinitely well
adapted. Its only drawback that I know
-and that many people thought a great
advantage was that, being close to
London, you saw nothing from the win-
dows that you might not have seen a hun-
dred miles deep in the country. The
drawing-room windows looked out upon
a great green lawn, set in old trees. In
winter, when the trees had lost their
leaves, bits of other old houses, red and
mossy, looked in through the bare branch-
les; but in spring the further end of the

lawn was carpeted with primroses, and canopied with foliage, and the long avenue of elms at one side, and the narrower path on the other under the lime-trees, which was called the Lady's Walk, might have graced a squire's house anywhere. Both of these ended in a high paling; but I defy you to have found that out when elms and limes alike were in their glory of summer array.

under fifty, which, for a woman who has had neither bad health nor trouble in her life, is quite a youthful age. Her eldest son was six-and-twenty. There had never appeared a very great difference between them; for Frederick had always been the most serious member of the family. His name of itself was a proof of this. While all the others were addressed by a perpetually varying host of diminutives and pet names, Frederick had always remained Frederick. I need not point out how different this is from "Fred." He was the

as yet brought any trouble or anxiety to it, but he was by far the most proper and dignified person in the house. The rest were very youthful indeed, varying, as we have said, from the light-hearted though sober-visaged youthfulness of seven-andforty to the tricksey boyhood of sixteen. It was a house, accordingly, in which there was always something going on. The family were well-off, and they were popular; they were rich enough to give frequent and pleasant little entertainments, and they had never acquired that painful habit of asking, "Can we afford it?" which is so dreadful a drawback to social pleasures. I do not intend to imply by this that there was any recklessness or extravagance in this well-ordered house. On the contrary, Mrs. Eastwood's bills were paid as by clockwork, with a regularity which was vexatious to all the tradesmen she employed; but neither she nor her children - blessed privilege! knew what it was to be poor, and they had none of the habits of that struggling condition. That ghost which haunts the doors of the less comfortably endowed, which hovers by them in the very streets, and is always waiting round some corner

After having said so much about the house, I may introduce you to its inhabitants. Mrs. Eastwood was a widow, and had four children, all as yet at home un-only member of the household who had der the maternal roof. The eldest son was in a public office; the second, Richard, commonly called Dick, was at home "reading" for one of those examinations which occupy all our youth now-a-days. The third boy, who bore the magnificent name of Plantagenet, usually, I am grieved to say, shortened into Jenny, was still at Eton. One only remains to be accounted for, and that was Ellinor. She was but one, counted according to ordinary arithmetic; but she was as good as three additional at least, reckoning by her importance in the household. "If you count girls, there are seven of us; but some people don't count girls. I'm one," said one of Mr. Punch's delightful little boys in the old days of Leech. Ellinor Eastwood might have adapted this saying with perfect propriety to her own circumstances. The boys might or might not be counted; but to enter once into the house without hearing, seeing, divining the girl in it was impossible. Not that she was a remarkable young woman in any way. I don't know if she could justly be called clever; and she certainly was not more perfectly educated than usual -and does not everybody say that all women are badly educated? Her brothers knew twenty times as much as she did. They had all been at Eton; and Frederick, the eldest, was a University man, and had taken a very good class, though not the highest; and Dick was costing his mother a fortune in "coaches " and was required by the conditions of his examination to be a perfect mine of knowledge; they ought by all rules to have been as superior to their sister intellectually and mentally as daylight is to dark

ness.

But they were not. I don't venture to explain how it was; perhaps the reader may in his or her experience have met with similar cases, though I allow that they go against a good many theories. The household was a young household altogether. Mrs. Eastwood herself was

that black spectre of indebtedness or scarcity had never been seen at the Elms. There was a cheerful security of enough, about the house, which is more delightful than wealth. To be sure, there are great moral qualities involved in the material comfort of having enough, into which we need not enter. The comfort of the Eastwoods was a matter of habit. They lived as they had always lived. It never occurred to them to start on a different pied, or struggle to a higher level. What higher level could they want? They were gentlefolks, and well connected; no sort of parvenu glitter could have done anything for them, even had they thought of it; therefore it was no particular credit to them to be content and satisfied. The morality of the matter was passive in their

case it was habitual, it was natural, not | was deeply in debt, and was going out to

a matter of resolution or thought.

Australia by the next ship to repent and make up his deficiencies. Fancy having all this poured into your ears of a cold spring morning in your peaceful bed, when you woke up with the consciousness that to-day would be as yesterday, and, perhaps, still more tranquil and pleasant. Mrs. Eastwood was stricken dumb with consternation. It was the first time that trouble in this shape had

And yet there had been one break in this simple and uncomplicated state of affairs. Four years before the date at which this history begins, an event had occurred to which the family still looked back with a sort of superstition, -a mingled feeling of awe, regret, and pride, such as might move the descendants of some hero who had abdicated a throne at the call of duty. The year in which Fred-ever visited her. Grief she had known erick took his degree, and left Oxford, Mrs. Eastwood had put down her carriage. I dare not print such words in ordinary type. She said very little about the reasons for this very serious proceeding; but it cannot be denied that there was a grandeur and pathos in the incident, which gave it a place in what may be called the mythology of the family. Nobody attempted to explain how it was or why it was. It gave a touch of elevating tragedy and mystery to the comfortable home-life, which was so pleasant and free from care. When now and then a sympathizing friend would say, "You must miss your carriage," Mrs. Eastwood was always prompt to disclaim any need for pity. "I have always been an excellent walker," she said, cheerily. She would not receive any condolences, and yet even she got a certain subtle pleasure, without knowing it, out of the renunciation. It was the hardest thing she had been called upon to do in her life, and how could she help being a little, a very little, proud of it? But, to be sure, this sentiment was quite unconscious. It was the only unexplained event in her innocent life. Ellinor, of course, half by instinct, half by reason of that ineffable communion between a mother and an only daughter, which makes the one conscious of all that passes within and without the other almost without words, knew exactly how this great family event had come about; but no one else knew, not even the most intimate friends of the house.

The cause, however, was nothing much out of the course of nature. Frederick, the eldest son and hope, he of whom everybody declared that he was his mother's stay and support, as good as the head of the family, had suddenly burst into her room one morning before she was up, like a sudden avalanche. He came to tell her in the first place, that he had made up his mind not to go into the Church, for which he had been educated, and in which he had the best of prospects; and in the second place, that he

-but that curtain of gentle goodness and well-seeming which covers the surface of life had never before been rudely rent before her eyes, revealing the abyss below. And the shock was all the greater that it was Frederick who gave it; he who had been her innocent child just the other day, and who was still her serious boy, never the one to get into mischief. The surprise was so overwhelming that it almost deadened her sense of pain; and then, before she could fully realize what had happened, the real importance of the event was still further confused by the fact, that instead of judging the culprit on his real demerits, she had to pray and plead with him to give up his mad resolution, to beg him not to throw his life away after his money. So urgent did this become that she gradually forgot all about the blame attaching to him, and could think of nothing but those terrible threats about Australia, which gradually became the central fact of the catastrophe. To do him justice, Frederick was perfectly sincere, and had no thought of the admirable effect to be produced by his obstinate determination. Where is the family that does not know such scenes? The result was that the carriage was "put down," the debts paid, Australia averted; and after a short time Mr. Frederick Eastwood gained, after a severe examination, his present appointment, and all again went merry as marriage bells. I don't know whether the examination was in reality severe; but at least Mrs. Eastwood thought so, which pleased her, and did nobody any harm; and as time went on she found to her entire satisfaction that everything had been for the best, and that Providence had brought good out of evil. In the first place, it was "noble" of Frederick, when he found he could not conscientiously enter the Church, to scorn all mercenary motives, and not to be tempted by the excellent living which he knew awaited him. And then what a comfort and blessing it was to have him at home, instead of away down in Somerset

shire, and only paying his family a visit
two or three times in a year! Thus the
fault faded out of sight altogether by the
crowding of the circumstances round it;
and Frederick himself in contemplating
(for he was always serious) the providen-
tial way in which his life had been ar-
ranged for him in a new groove, forgot
that the first step in this arrangement had
been a very reprehensible one on his own
part, and came to regard the "putting
down" of the carriage as the rest did
as a tremendous and mysterious family
event, calling forth an intense pride and
melancholy, but no individual sense of
guilt or responsibility so far as he was
personally concerned. "I don't like to
take you out in a fly, Nelly," Mrs. East-
wood would sometimes say, as she gave
the last touch to Ellinor's ribbons, and
breathed a soft little sigh. "As if I
cared!" cried the girl: "and besides,
you can say, like Lady Dobson, that you
never take your horses out at night."
Now Lady Dobson was very rich, and in
trade, and a standing joke in the East-
wood circle; and the party went off very
merry in the fly, with never another
thought of the carriage which had been
"put down."

Light-hearted folk! That sudden tempest of trouble and terror which had driven Frederick into the Sealing-Wax Office, and the ladies into Mr. Sutton's neat flys, gave, I think on the whole, a zest to their happiness.

wood had, as every mother of a family ought to have, her particular chair, with her particular little table and footstool, a detached and commanding position, a genial domestic throne, with the supremacy of which no one ever interfered. There was room for any one who wanted counsel to draw a chair by its side, and plenty of room for a big boy to stretch out his lazy length on the rug at its feet, resting a curly head, it might be, on the mother's footstool. Mrs. Eastwood was seated here in her black gown with violet ribbons, which was her compromise between the world and her widowhood. Sometimes she went the length of grey and red. I don't know what innocent prejudice she had to the effect that grey and red betokened still some recondite style of mourning; but such was her prejudice. She would have felt a blue ribbon to be profane. Need I say that she was plump, and had perhaps a little more colour than when she was twenty? But there were few wrinkles upon her pleasant face, and no clouds upon her forehead. She had known grief, innocent and holy, but no trouble of that wearing kind which saps the strength and steals the courage out of life, except that one of which the reader has been told; and that, as he has also been informed, had turned out for the best.

Ellinor was the only other member of the family present, except, indeed a certain small Skye terrier, known by the The drawing-room at The Elms was a name of Winks, who was a very imporlarge room, with a rounded end occupied tant member of the family. As Winks, by a great bow window, which opened however, for the present is asleep coiled like a door into a pretty conservatory, al- up in an easy chair, and happily unobserways gay with flowers. Opposite the vant of what is going on, we may leave fireplace were three other long and large him for an after occasion, and pass on to windows cut to the floor, from which you the young lady of the house. What can looked out over the long stretch of green- we say about her? Dear and gentle readsward embosomed in great trees which er, you know half-a-hundred just like has been already described. In summer, Nelly. She had brown hair, bright, dancthe flower beds which were cut in the ing, brown eyes, and a nose which thanks grass close under the windows were to Mr. Tennyson, we do not require to ablaze with brilliant colours, but in the describe as retroussé. It was "tip-tilted, meantime, on the afternoon when this like the petal of a flower." As there was story opens, nothing was visible but an not a straight line about her anywhere, interrupted golden line of crocus defining this delicate little turn was appropriate. each bed, and depending upon the sun to Although, however, it is true that there make the definition successful. When was no one straight line about the girl, the day was bright the border bristled all the combination of a hundred soft curves round in close array with spikes of gold; produced a perfect pose of figure, light, but on this particular day it was gloomy, firm, and elastic, like-well, like most and the line was straggling and broken. girls of twenty. What can one say more? On a damp February afternoon the Nelly had no settled place like her mothstrongest attraction is generally indoors; er. She was not restless, nor fidgety, but and the room was bright enough to sat- she was everywhere at once. I don't isfy the most difficult critic. Mrs. East-know why it was necessary that she should

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