6

"Yes, the girl is very nice," assented Sir | really had hoped better things from the Douglas. confessor of the family, who seemed such a suave, well-mannered, sociable man, than to oppose himself to her daughter; and she was sure, Gertude would not object to listen occasionally' to his exhortations, or even to go, now and then, with her husband the prince,' to the great Church festivals, 'but not as a customary thing; of course they could not expect that.' I really do think there never was such a goose born as that woman!"

"I'm glad you like her," said Kenneth, carelessly; for they are the only people (of your sort) I care to see here; and your friend, Lorimer Boyd, is in and out of their house like a tame dog. When he ain't in the Chancellerie you may look for him in the Villa Mandorlo. I believe he means to take Lady Charlotte in hand, according to the advertisements, To ladies of neglected education.' He comes in like a tutor, with plans of Herculaneum, and drawings of Pompeian pottery, and tickets to see this, that, and the other, with most desperate industry."

6

"And does Lady Charlotte respond?" "Well, not unless some magnates are to accompany her. Her whole soul (if she has a soul) seems to be occupied with the ambition of being always in a certain set,' wherever she goes. She is always triumphing in being invited, or lamenting that she and her daughter are 'left out,' or setting some little wheel in motion to 'get asked, somewhere. I believe she tolerates Lorimer Boyd (to whom she always listens with a stifled yawn), only as the well-spring and fountain of introductions she would not otherwise obtain in this place. She dines constantly at the English Legation, and goes to balls at the Neapolitan Court, and knows all the Principessas, Duchessas, Contessas, and Contessin as that rattle their carriages up and down the Chiaja; and if the whole government were subverted (as it certainly will be one of these days), it is my belief that she would transfer her allegiance and her visiting cards to whatever potentates floated on the surface, and to whatever dynasty happened to reign." "Well, it is an odd mania in a woman holding a certain and established rank herself in her own country; but when you know more of the world, Kenneth, you won't think it so very uncommon. Are they

rich? "

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"By adding to her folly. She has all the minauderies and airs of a silly beautiful girl, being now but a silly elderly woman. I could box her ears when I see her drooping her faded pendulous cheek to her skeleton shoulder, with a long ringlet of heavenknows-who's hair in the fashion of a lovelock trailing over her scragginess. She always reminds me of some figure in Holbein's 'Dance of Death.' A most preposterous woman."

Her daughter seems very different, and very fond of her, Lorimer. There must be some good in her, depend upon it."

"I suppose there is some good in every one. Her daughter- well! we see what bright freshness of vegetation springs up in tropic dust; what flowers burst through the crevices of those bot, barren walls! Poor child! half her time is spent in endeavouring not to seem ashamed of her mother!" No; she loves her mother," exclaimed Sir Douglas, eagerly.

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Yes, I think they are. I believe" (and "She must have a great deal of love to here Kenneth hesitated a little)—“I be- spare,” said Lorimer Boyd, with something lieve the daughter has an independent for- between a sigh and a sneer; "and, if it be tune; and her mother is bent on marrying so, it says much for the daughter, but nothher to some foreign grandee. She very nearly ing for the mother. Gertrude Skifton is managed it with one of the Roman Colon-like her father. I knew him: he died here. nas, or some such great family, before they A man to love and to remember." came here; but his family wouldn't hear of it, the young lady being a Protestant."

"I wonder Lady Charlotte would think of such a marriage!"

"Think of it! I assure you she clung to it as if she were drowning; and as to the religious part of the difficulty, she said she

"Well, you must not dispute with my wise uncle," laughed Kenneth," for he sets up to know more of these people in two days than those who have sat, as we have, for two months, within hail of Lady Charlote's one ringlet almost every evening."

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CHAPTER VI.

HOW ACQUAINTANCE RIPENS.

"Caledonia, stern and wild,"

"A man's a man for a' that;"

willing to "foregather," as it is called, provided it be with their "own folk." They are a scantier population than the English, with a scantier aristocracy and gentry. The ALMOST every evening. It is astonish- tide of commercial success has not yet so ing how rapidly intimacy progresses in flooded in among them (though it is fast adcountry houses, sea-side gatherings, and the vancing) as it has amongst the English, small society of compatriots in a foreign sweeping away old feudal memories and town. If you know each other at all, it is landmarks. They know all about each almost impossible not to be what is called other's families and "forbears," down to the "intimate; even though that degree of twentieth degree of cousinhood; and both familiarity may lessen, or cease altogether, rich and poor, high and low, genteel and when the circumstances which produced it ungenteel, set a value on rank and connecare altered, and when persons who were tion far beyond the value set upon it in 'great friends" at Rome, Naples, or Flor- England, and set a value on their own naence, choose to drop into being civil acquain- tionality, which is a feeling distinct and tances, after they once more carelessly con- apart. "Come of gude Scotch bluid" is a gregate with the herding swarms of London. far greater recommendation among them Lady Charlotte and her daughter Gertrude than "come of a good old county family were the chief stars at Naples of many a is among the Southrons; and when that pic-nic party and ball. Not that Gertrude "gude stock" is also noble, the respect is was a great beauty, or her mother a wise unbounded. That woman, as we have seen; but because they were among the few well-connected English then in Naples, and "the set," as Lady Charlotte called it, with the addition of which made so rough a nurse to poetic what was best of the "foreign set," min- Burns, admits, as a theory, his noble line gled and met nearly every day in pursuit of the same aim-pleasure. The English are said to hold aloof from each other abroad; and there is a humorous passage at the opening of Sterne's "Sentimental Journey," where he represents himself as meeting with a gentleman-like and conversible person, of whose chance companionship he was about to avail himself, but, finding he was a compatriot, he retired to his own room. Whatever may have been the case in Sterne's time, it is certain that the disposition now is rather the reverse; and though we hear of ladies in India, and officers' wives in regiments on foreign service, "flouting" each other in their own small circle; and in colonial society of ladies whom "nobody in the colony visits;" and everywhere of the various little monkey-copyings of ex-bound and responsible for her destiny in clusiveness performed by the Zizines who give themselves airs abroad -"captains' ladies," and "majors' ladies," "colonels' ladies," and "governors' ladies;" and "white ladies," who won't associate with "brown ladies;" and Creoles, and Mestas, and all sorts of other distinctions unknown to the great European family - yet, in a general way, the English are a sociable nation; and, beyond a certain cautious shyness as to the " respectability" of new acquaintance, there is no reluctance to come together.

but, as a matter of practice, it is certain that if her wayward gauger had been a lord-if he had been a duke if he had even been a laird "Burns of Burndyke" - she would not have delayed the opportunity to fêter his genius till it became a centenary festival."

Lady Charlotte was a Scotchwoman; and she was glad to meet Lorimer Boyd and friends "from the North." She had even sought to establish a cousin hood between herself and Lorimer on the strength of some intermarriage between the Clochnabens and her own family in very remote times. And, at all events, she held him

Naples, for fit introductions, and pleasant days. He had been very kind, she said, when Mr. Skifton was dying; "read to him, and that sort of thing," and very sorry for her and her daughter. That was more than two years ago now; and the grief for Mr. Skifton had begun to be wiped off the china slate of his widow's memory. She had not been a bad wife to him. Always very gentle; always very attentive when he was particularly ill; very sorry when he died. She wept very much the first time she saw her daughter in mourning, and when she But Lady Charlotte was of Scotch ex- was trying on her own weeds. Indeed, traction, and the Scotch are yet more "for a long time afterwards," as she im

pressed upon Gertrude," she could not bear | heir to old Sir Douglas. Her efforts, howthe sight of black crape," it always "brought ever, being confined to what chaperons call the tears into her eyes, let her meet it "bringing the young people together," and where she would." But she was now be- the encouragement of much singing of ginning to be very cheerful and comfortable Scotch ballads in alternation with more again; and had none of that depth of na- cultivated music, she did neither good nor ture which, she observed, caused "a mere harm; and that is more than can be said of nothing" suddenly to "overcome that the majority of match-making or matchdear girl by reminding her of her poor hoping mothers. father."

But it was when Brazilian Zizine fell ill ("like a fellow-creature," as Lady Charlotte expressed it) that Sir Douglas's favour rose to its climax! He actually gravely inspected Zizine; he brought remedies, and seemed to pity the little dumb beast; and he talked with Gertrude of its "plaintive captive eyes," while he fed it. And Lady Charlotte was overheard saying of him, in most unintelligible Italian to the Contessa Rufo, that "Avendo potuto essere uno generale, nondimeno aveva guarito Zinine!" on which the pretty Contessa, with a warm Southern smile, pronounced Sir Douglas to be "tanto amabile!" though she had not the remotest idea what meaning her friend wished to convey, or what the possibility of his becoming a general had to do with his feeding a monkey.

playhouses have been discovered at Pompeii, and a third at Herculaneum;" and as to the beauties of Nature, he disposes of them in his diary thus:-"25 Fevrier. Je reviens de Pæstum. Route pittoresque."

An English lady who had arrived by sea at Lisbon sent her coachman and lady'smaid to amuse themselves with the sights of the new foreign city. The coachman returned filled with melancholy contempt for the inferior "turnout" of the Portuguese nobility as to carriages and harness: the lady's-maid said she (like Stendahl) had been to the opera, and thought the ladies' necks were in general far too short (though they wore some fine necklaces), and that their inclination to embonpoint was very remarkable; figures, indeed, that she "would have no pleasure in dressing.

His tenderness, however, to Zizine was Sir Douglas's mode of seeing Naples not all. He amused Lady Charlotte; who might be no better than that of his neighdeclared that talking to him was "like sit-bours, but it had the merit of entertaining ting with the Arabian Nights." "No, Mr. Lady Charlotte Skifton. He was full of Kenneth need not laugh; for of course she historical gossip; to which she used to did not mean that she could sit with the listen most attentively, pulling the young Arabian Nights, or with any other ringlet nearly straight, and looking round stories; but he knew well enough that what as if she vaguely expected to see the people she really meant was, that his uncle told and events he conjured up. She could them so many pleasant things." She had not eat her dinner" for thinking of young daily driven up and down the Chiaja till Conradin — titular king of Sicily from the she was weary, and daily inspected what time he was two years old till he was sixGertrude called the "playthings" at their teen, and then, (at that boyish age!) led pretty villa: playthings of which all Italians out to execution in the market-place with are very fond. Strange slender bridges his uncle Frederic of Austria; Pope Urban over artificial streamlets; garden traps that having aided Charles of Anjou to defeat when trodden on send a sprinkling shower and take him prisoner. She implicitly beover the head of the startled visitor; grot-lieved the doubtful story of his mother sailtoes, and guilt gazebos, and Chinese summer-houses and thatched rustic lodges. But she had not seen the graver sights of Naples, as a dowager who had more acquaintance with history or even with Murray's guide-books might have done so that much novelty cropped and budded out of the old places, in consequence of being with the new companionable friend.

People see things under such different aspects! When Stendahl published his "Rome, Naples, and Florence, in 1817," all that he chose to describe in his opening pages whether the better to mask subsequent expressions of political opinions, or from any other motive was the eagerness with which he flew to the theatres, and what operas were peformed at the various cities he visited during his tour. His account of his first entrance into Milan is, that he immediately went to La Scala; and his description of Naples is confined to the fact, that San Carlo being shut, he rushed to the Fiorentini. He mentions that "two

ing into the Bay of Naples with black sails to her ships, and untold treasure as ransom, too late to rescue her murdered and courageous boy. She was "afraid she was almost glad" at the increased hatred of the French which that execution inspired, till in the rolling course of years, at a certain Easter, 1282, every Frenchman in Sicily, except one, was murdered.

She thought Queen Joanna's conduct "really now so very abominable," twisting a silk cord of variegated colours, and answering her inquisitive husband that it was "to strangle him with," so playfully that he believed she was joking till the horrible threat came true. She was delighted to hear that Queen Joanna was herself smothered afterwards, after many more years of crime, and she looked at the dark, gaping windows of her ruined palace in the Bay, with awe and satisfaction.

As to Masaniello, and his rebellion and brief triumph-she said she knew all about him -except that the people had

sewed his head again to his body, and obliged the Government to give him a state burial after his downfall and massacre, "because she had seen the opera of Masaniello several times: only in the opera there was nothing about what happened after he was killed."

Newer to her was the hanging of Admiral Caraccioli (that blot upon the fame of Nelson), and the well-attested story of the body of the Italian admiral floating upright, to the consternation of the sailors, in the wake of Nelson's ship, from the imperfect weighing down of the corpse when flung into the sea.

Her interest as to the disputed fact whether Pozzuoli was the place where St. Paul landed, was weak to the absorbed attention with which she devoured the details of the murder of Agrippina by order of her own son, the Emperor Nero. The picture of this proud, profligate, energetic old woman, betrayed into a galley contrived like those in the time of the French Noyades, to give way and sink under her, her escape, after being hit on the head by a slave with an oar, her floating, swimming, and struggling to the shore at Baie, and being taken to her own Lucrine villa only to be afterwards assassinated in her bed there, - had a fascination, not unmixed with a sensation of terror for Lady Charlotte, moving her t observe that it was impossible for her to hear such a story, in the very place where it had happened, without being thankful no one could put her "on board a boat that was all to crack and come to pieces," or come and kill her at the Villa Mandórlo "only because somebody else had ordered it."

CHAPTER VII.

FAST YOUNG MEN.

SWIFTLY the days passed on; and it became almost a usual ceremony in the little circle to end each day with " What shall we do to-morrow? When Sir Douglas first arrived, indeed, there had been grave talk of instant departure; of breaking up bad habits by removing Kenneth from scenes of idle temptation; and of all sorts of reforming and repressive measures. But it is not so easy to move a full-fledged young gentleman of Kenneth's disposition, from a place that happens to hit his fancy. His uncle's arrival, if not followed by any very real reform of conduct, had certainly secured greater decency; and he bore with patience

THIRD SERIES.

(or comparative patience) the brief anxious lectures which followed the examination of very complicated and uncertain calculations as to general debts, and debts of "honour; " loans made (half from careless generosity, half from vanity) to idle young foreigners, who had no earthly claim upon his assistance; jewellery squandered on their female associates; and all the embar rassments from which,— had he probed his own heart for the truth, he expected to be relieved by the very simple expedient of getting his uncle to "pay them off."

Nothing is more curious, in these cases of extravagance, than the puppy-blindness which does not see, - in that first stage of manhood, that if such debts are "paid off" by some relative or friend, the items of which they were composed were acts of meanness, and not acts of generosity. If the phrases usual on such occasions were put into the language of the pleasant old story of the " Palais de la Verité," where people said, not what they intended to say, but spoke the "naked truth," how very extraordinary those sentences would sound! Conceive a man addressing his friend thus: "My dear fellow, certainly I will lend you a couple of hundreds. I'll give you all my three sisters' musiclessons, new dresses, and jaunts to the seaside for this year: and there's pale little Fanny, who costs my mother a good deal in physician's advice. I'll give you all her doctor's fees for six months or so, and she shall go without. I would not be so stingy as to refuse a friend such a paltry sum as you've asked of me, no, not for the world."

Or thus: ·

"I made little Justerini the dancer such a splendid present last Christmas! I gave her three years of my fat old father's plodding work as head-clerk with Tightenall and Co.! He's getting old, you know: drowsy of an evening: tired out in fact: had rather a hard life of it: a good many of us to provide for. But I was determined I'd give her the ear-rings. I'd have given double, ay, six years of his hard-earned salary, sooner than not have behaved handsomely to her about them!" Or thus:

"I can't stand a fellow refusing his chum such a paltry favour as belonging to a club, or sharing a yacht, or taking half an operabox with him. I know I didn't hesitate a minute when Tom Osprey asked me. I gave him my mother's carriage-horses, and little Sam's favourite pony, and my father's hunters, and that little box at Twickenham LIVING AGE. VOL. XXXII. 1492.