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affectionate unanimity between the rival queens themselves. When

Hark! there are murmurs in the crowded hall!

A sound a voice—a shriek-a fearful call!'

The prisoner had hurried verdict and catastrophe he had stabbed himself. Heavens! the sympathy he excited! 'Such strong feelings'-' ruin of his happiness'-' blighted affections'-in short, there was not a man in the court who would not have asked him to dinner, nor a woman who would not have married him."

Edward Lorraine.

"An equal sympathy they both confessed."

Lady Mandeville.-" An equal sympathy do you call it? Come, Emily, we must teach them to value us higher-we must leave them, that distance may lend enchantment to the view.""

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CHAPTER XIII.

"Alas! what differs more than man from man?

And whence that difference?-whence but from himself?

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"There is a bondage that is worse to bear

Than his who breathes, by roof, and floor, and wall

Pent in, a tyrant's solitary thrall:

'Tis his who

must bear

His fetters in his soul."

WORDSWORTH.

A DAY when the south wind brought with it sunshine and showers-when one half hour down came the glistening rain so quickly, that the sun had not time to hide his face-and the next, the blue sky had its azure deepened by the relief of the broken white clouds; while the garden was flooded with golden lightat the point of every leaf hung a clear, bright rain-drop- and the turf shone like an emerald with the moisture. The air was soft and warm, and fraught with that peculiar sweetness which tells that the serynga (our English orangeflower) has expanded, and that the lilacs are in full blossom.

Edward Lorraine was seated at an open window: when the soft warm rain came down, it beat the other way, and the eye followed it driving through the sunshine, like a fairy shower of diamond or amber, till it seemed to melt on the green and distant hills into a mist, silvery but indistinct.

Mr. Morland was amusing himself with the County Chronicle, and Edward was absorbed in his book: Lady Mandeville and Emily were seated at a small work-table. Lady Mandeville, who had not been in the room ten minutes, was very industrious; but it must be owned that Emily's eye wandered more than once to the opposite window: Edward was so very intent on the page before him. At length he closed the volume-leant, as if meditating on its contents, for a few minutes and then rose and approached the work-table.

Edward Lorraine.-" I am so fascinated with what I have been reading, that I am under the absolute necessity of talking about it:

6 'Happiness was born a twin.''

Lady Mandeville." And we are to enjoy your happiness without knowing in what it consists disinterested sympathy, at least."

Edward Lorraine." Have you read the tale I have just finished, Di Vasari?”

Lady Mandeville.-" Oh, we can enter into your enjoyment. Emily and I read it about a week ago; - read it during one half the day, and talked of it during the other."

Edward Lorraine." The story itself is one of intense interest-one of passion and poetry. But even this has less attraction for me than the strong peculiarities of the man's spirit. I knew him, and can so well imagine the strength and bitterness of his mind when some of the passages were written.”

Emily.- "You say you knew the author. What was he like ?"

Edward Lorraine.

"That is to say, was he handsome? Yes, in a peculiar and un-English style. He had high, sharp, and somewhat Jewish features, dark eyes, clear, keen, and penetrating, with something almost ferocious in their expression :

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'And in his eye the gladiator spoke.'

If I believed in transmigration, I should have said that in his former stage of existence he had been a Bengal tiger; and somewhat of its likeness still lingered in his face."

Emily." Did you know much of him?" Edward Lorraine.-"I never saw Mr. Thompson-(I wish, in order to interest you, he had had a more characteristic name)-but once. I had read in the very Magazine which contains Di Vasari, viz. Blackwood's, a tale called the Life of Charles Edwards-it struck me so much, that I grew curious about the author. I met him soon afterwards at a supper."

Lady Mandeville.-" Could he talk?”

Edward Lorraine.-"Wonderfully! Singular opinions singularly maintained! A flow of words, very felicitous, and yet such as no one else would have used. Not so much a love of, as a positive necessity for, contradiction seemed a part of his mind: add to this, extensive and outof-the-way reading, and a ready memory-and if your imagination be very vivid, you will form some faint notion of his discourse."

Lady Mandeville.—“ I should like to judge for myself. You must introduce him."

Edward Lorraine.-"Your command makes the impossible easy; but this is very impossible indeed. The subject of our discourse is dead. He died, as I have since heard, of a harassed mind, and a worn-out constitution. His history. is one of the many brief and bitter pages in

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