birth, but old, dull, and pompous-a caricature rather than a portrait of that great French noblesse, now almost if not wholly extinct. But her virtue was without a blemish-some said from pride, some said from coldness. Her wit was keen and courtlike-lively, yet subdued; for her French high breeding was very different from the lethargic and taciturn imperturbability of the English. All silent people can seem conventionally elegant. A groom married a rich lady; he dreaded the ridicule of the guests whom his new rank assembled at the table-an Oxford clergyman gave him this piece of advice," Wear a black coat and hold your tongue!" The groom took the hint, and is always considered one of the most gentlemanlike fellows in the county. Conversation is the touchstone of the true delicacy and subtle grace which make the ideal of the moral mannerism of a court. And there sate Madame de St. Ventadour, a little apart from the dancers, with the silent English dandy Lord Taunton, exquisitely dressed and superbly tall, bolt upright behind her chair; and the sentimental German Baron Von Schomberg, covered with orders, wiskered and wigged to the last hair of perfection, sighing at her left hand; and the French minister, shrewd, bland, and eloquent in the chair at her right; and round on all sides pressed and bowed and complimented, a crowd of diplomatic secretaries and Italian princes, whose bank is at the gaming table, whose states are in their galleries, and who sell a picture, as English gentlemen cut down a wood, whenever the cards. grow gloomy. The charming St. Ventadour! she had attraction for them all! smiles for the silent, badinage for the gay, politics for the Frenchman, poetry for the German- the eloquence of loveliness for all! She was looking her best-the slightest possible tinge of rouge gave a glow to her transparent complexion, and lighted up those large dark sparkling eyes, (with a latent softness beneath the sparkle,) seldom seen but in the French-and widely distinct from the unintellectual languish of the Spaniard, or the full and majestic fierceness of the Italian gaze. Her dress of black velvet, and graceful hat with its princely plume, contrasted the alabaster whiteness of her arms and neck. And what with the eyes, the skin, the rich colouring of the complexion, the rosy lips, and the small ivory teeth, no one would have had the cold hypercriticism to observe that the chin was too pointed, the mouth too wide, and the nose, so beautiful in the front face, was far from perfect in the profile.

Pray was madame in the Strada Nuova, to-day?" asked the German, with as much sweetness in his voice as if he had been vowing eternal love.

"What else have we to do with our mornings, we women?" replied Madame de St. Ventadour. “Our life is a lounge from

the cradle to the grave, and our afternoons are but the type of our career. A promenade and a crowd, voilà tout! We never see the world except in an open carriage."

"It is the pleasantest way of seeing it," said the Frenchman, drily.

"J'en doute; the worst fatigue is that which comes without exercise."

"Will you do me the honour to waltz?" said the tall English lord, who had a vague idea that Madame de St. Ventadour meant she would rather dance than sit still. The Frenchman smiled. "Lord Taunton enforces your own philosophy," said the minister.

Lord Taunton smiled because every one else smiled; and besides he had beautiful teeth; but he looked anxious for an

answer.

"Not to-night, my lord-I seldom dance. Who is that very pretty woman?-What lovely complexions the English have! and who," continued Madame de St. Ventadour, without waiting for an answer to the first question, "who is that gentleman, the young one I mean, leaning against the door?"

"What with the dark moustache?" said Lord Taunton,"he is a cousin of mine."

"Oh no-not Colonel Bellfield-I know him, how amusing he is! - no, the gentleman I mean wears no moustache." "Oh, the tall Englishman with the bright eyes and high forehead," said the French minister. "He is just arrived-from the East, I believe."

"It is a striking countenance," said Madame de St. Ventadour, "there is something chivalrous in the turn of the head. Without doubt, Lord Taunton, he is noble.""

"He is what you call 'noble,'” replied Lord Taunton-" that is, what we call a gentleman,' his name is Maltravers. Mr. Maltravers. He lately came of age-and has, I believe, rather a good property."

"Monsieur Maltravers, only Monsieur!" repeated Madame de St. Ventadour.

"Why," said the French minister, " you understand that the English gentilhomme does not require a De or a title to distinguish him from the Roturier.”

"I know that, but he has an air above a simple gentilhomme. There is something great in his look-but it is not, I must own, the conventional greatness of rank - perhaps he would have looked the same had he been born a peasant.'

"You don't think him handsome?" said Lord Taunton, almost angrily, (for he was one of the Beauty-men, and Beautymen are sometimes jealous.)

"Handsome! I did not say that," replied Madame de St. Ventadour, smiling; "it is rather a fine head than a handsome face. Is he clever, I wonder - but all you English, milord, are well educated."

"Yes, profound-profound, we are profound, not superficial," replied Lord Taunton, drawing down his wristbands.

"Will Madame de St. Ventadour allow me to present to her one of my countrymen?" said the English minister, approaching"Mr. Maltravers."

Madame de St. Ventadour half smiled and half blushed, as she looked up, and saw bent admiringly upon her, the proud and earnest countenance she had remarked.

The introduction was made-a few monosyllables exchanged. The French diplomatist rose and walked away with the English one. Maltravers succeeded to the vacant chair.

"Have you been long abroad?" asked Madame de St. Ventadour.

"Only four years yet long enough to ask whether I should not be most abroad in England."

"You have been in the East-I envy you. And Greece, and Egypt, all the associations! - you have travelled back into the Past-you have escaped, as Madame D'Epinay wished, out of civilisation and into romance.

"Yet Madame D'Epinay passed her own life in making pretty romances out of a very agreeable civilisation," said Maltravers, smiling.

"You know her memoirs, then," said Madame de St. Ventadour, slightly colouring. "In the current of a more exciting literature, few have had time for the second-rate writings of a past century.'

"Are not those second-rate performances often the most charming," said Maltravers, "when the mediocrity of the intellect seems almost as if it were the effect of a touching, though too feeble delicacy of sentiment? Madame D'Epinay's memoirs are of this character. She was not a virtuous woman — but she felt virtue and loved it: she was not a woman of genius-but she was tremblingly alive to all the influences of genius. Some people seem born with the temperament and the tastes of genius without its creative power-they have its nervous system, but something is wanting in the intellectual. They feel acutely, yet express tamely. These persons always have in their character an unspeakable kind of pathos — a court civilisation produces many of them—and the French memoirs of the last century are particularly fraught with such examples. This is interesting this struggle of sensitive minds against the lethargy of a society, dull yet brilliant, that glares them as it were to sleep. It comes

home to us-for," added Maltravers, with a slight change of voice- how many of us fancy we see our own image in the mirror!"

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And where was the German baron? - flirting at the other end of the room. And the English lord?-dropping monosyllables to dandies by the door-way. And the minor satellites? -dancing, whispering, making love, or sipping lemonade. And Madame de St. Ventadour was alone with the young stranger in a crowd of eight hundred persons; and their lips spoke of sentiment, and their eyes involuntarily applied it!

While they were thus conversing, Maltravers was suddenly startled by hearing, close behind him, a sharp, significant voice, saying in French, "Hein, hein! I've my suspicions I've my suspicions."

"It

is

Madame de St. Ventadour looked round with a smileonly my husband," said she, quietly" let me introduce him to you."

Maltravers rose and bowed to a little thin man, most elaborately dressed, with an immense pair of spectacles upon a long sharp nose.

"Charmed to make your acquaintance, sir!" said Monsieur de St. Ventadour. "Have you been long in Naples?..... Beautiful weather-won't last long-hein, hein, I've my suspicions! No news as to your parliament-be dissolved soon! Bad opera in London this year;-hein, hein-I've my suspicions."

This rapid monologue was delivered with appropriate gesture. Each new sentence Monsieur de St. Ventadour began with a sort of bow, and when it dropped in the almost invariable conclusion affirmative of his shrewdness and incredulity, he made a mystical sign with his fore finger by passing it upward in a parallel line with his nose, which at the same time performed its own part in the ceremony, by three convulsive twitches which seemed to shake the bridge to its base.

Maltravers looked with mute surprise upon the connubial partner of the graceful creature by his side-and Monsieur de St. Ventadour, who had said as much as he thought necessary, wound up his eloquence by expressing the rapture it would give him to see Monsieur Maltravers at his hotel. Then, turning to his wife, he began assuring her of the lateness of the hour, and the expediency of departure. Maltravers glided away, and as he regained the door was seized by our old friend, Lumley Ferrers. "Come, my dear fellow," said the latter. "I have been waiting for you this half hour. Allons. But, perhaps, as I am dying to go to bed, you have made up your mind to stay and supper. Some people have no regard for other people's feelings.' "No, Ferrers, I'm at your service," and the young men

descended the stairs and passed along the Chiaja towards their hotel. As they gained the broad and open space on which it stood, with the lovely sea before them, sleeping in the arms of the curving shore, Maltravers, who had hitherto listened in silence to the volubility of his companion, paused abruptly.

"Look at that sea, Ferrers... What a scene! - what delicious air! How soft this moonlight! Can you not fancy the old Greek adventurers when they first colonised this divine Parthenopethe darling of the ocean-gazing along those waves, and pining no more for Greece?

"I cannot fancy anything of the sort," said Ferrers... And depend upon it the said gentlemen, at this hour of the night, unless they were on some piratical excursion for they were cursed ruffians, those old Greek colonists-were fast asleep in their beds."

"Did you ever write poetry, Ferrers?"

"To be sure, all clever men have written poetry once in their lives-small-pox and poetry—they are our two diseases." "And did you ever feel poetry?”

"Yes; if you put the moon into your verses, did you first feel it shining into your heart?'

"My dear Maltravers, if I put the moon into my verses, in all probability it was to rhyme to noon. "The night was at her noon' is a capital ending for the first hexameter - and the moon is booked for the next stage. Come in."

"No, I shall stay out."

"Don't be nonsensical."

"By moonlight there is no nonsense like common sense." "What we who have climbed the Pyramids, and sailed up the Nile, and seen magic at Cairo, and been nearly murdered, bagged, and Bosphorised at Constantinople, because you insisted on our following an old woman

"Ah, don't talk of that my beautiful Georgian !

"Well, I say, is it for us, who have gone through so many adventures, looked on so many scenes, and crowded into four years events that would have satisfied the appetite of a cormorant in romance, if it had lived to the age of a phoenix; - is it for us to be doing the pretty and sighing to the moon, like a blackhaired apprentice without a neckcloth, on board of the Margate boy? Nonsense, I say we have lived too much not to have lived away our green sickness of sentiment."

"Perhaps you are right, Ferrers," said Maltravers, smiling. "But I can still enjoy a beautiful night."

66

'Oh, if you like flies in your soup, as the man said to his guest, when he carefully replaced those entomological black