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ruption; for she had completely captivated the flower of his affections; and these being trampled and crushed under foot, the world within him withers, like a garden blighted into a desert. No stone is left unturned to ascertain whither Alice may have Aown. It is in vain that he lingers weeks and months in the neighbourhood. All that was evident every one could tell him;

that the house had been robbed,—that the old woman was fastened by her garters to the bed-post,--that a man of notorious character, named Luke Darvil had absconded, though he was declared to have known better days,—that some trace of cart-wheels from his hovel gave a faint clue to pursuit; and that after an interval of active search, persons answering to the description of the suspected burglars, with a young female in their company, were tracked to a small inn by the sea-side famous for smugglers. Time rolls on, and no further tidings can be obtained. He is forced to leave a vicinity at once so saddened and so endeared. His guardian, on whom the charge of his education and property devolves, has sent for him again and again. We might extract the portrait of this gentleman, the Honourable Frederick Cleveland, did space permit; but it is out of the question. At length the melancholy Maltravers feels compelled to obey; and presents himself at Temple Grove. Our Author here finely reminds us that,

· Nine times out of ten, it is over the Bridge of Sighs we pass the narrow gulf from youth to manhood. That interval is usually occupied by an ill-placed or disappointed affection. We recover, and we find ourselves new beings. The intellect has become hardened by the fire through which it has passed. The mind profits by the wreck of every passion, and we may measure our road to wisdom by the sorrows we have undergone. Maltravers was yet on the Bridge ; and for a time both mind and body were enfeebled. Cleveland had the sagacity to discern that the affections had their share in the change which he grieved to witness.'-ib., p. 135.

The health of his ward, however, got more and more impaired; and Mr. Bulwer tells us that out of the benign and simple elements of the Scripture, he conjured up for himself a fanaticism quite as gloomy and intense as that of illiterate enthusiasts.' In order to cure him of methodism, his guardian sends for a companion,-Lumley Ferrers, a young gentleman of twenty-six, with a genteel independence of eight bundred a year, a powerful and most acute mind, great animation of manner, high physical spirits, a witty racy vein of conversation, determined assurance, and profound confidence in his own resources. At once sarcastic and argumentative, he usually obtained unbounded influence over those with whom he was brought into contact. His leading vices were a total absence of feeling, and an utter insensibility to

moral principles. The object which Cleveland has in view is so far attained, that Maltravers submits to argue about religion with his new comrade; and what is better still, "he one night stole softly to his own room and opened the New Testament, and * read its heavenly moralities with purged eyes; and when he • had done, he fell upon his knees, and prayed the Almighty to “pardon his ungrateful heart, which worse than the Atheists, had confessed his existence, but denied his goodness. And the sleep ‘of Ernest Maltravers that night was deep and sweet, and his dreams were cheerful; and he woke the next morning reconciled • with God and man. Thus loose and preposterous are the notions which even wise men, and men of genius, entertain upon a subject beyond all others momentous and important. Our novelist, no doubt, imagined that in the few pathetic lines just quoted, is presented a most attractive and correct delineation of real reli. gion. Upon his own showing, however, the altered faith of his hero proves lighter than the dust of the balance, when weighed against the temptations of the world, the Aesh, and the devil.

Maltravers and Ferrers agree to travel together through Greece, Egypt, and the East; and upon setting their faces once more towards Europe, we encounter the former in the midst of Neapolitan society, as an admirer of a certain Madame de St. Ventadour. All connected with this lady appears to us the dullest part of the whole double work; nor do we perceive the direct bearing which she has upon the denouement of the story. Women of fashion, even when rather sensible, can be spared from the business of human life, not less easily than their parrots, lapdogs, cats, fans, and old china. Indirectly, it is true, she contributes to give Ernest Maltravers an impulse from what is wrong to what is right. He has backslidden since he left England. The world, and its ways have indurated the surface of his inner man; and although at bottom, its springs are described as still fresh and living, he drifts forward without useful or satisfactory pursuits, and wastes the fair fund of his faculties and sentiments. He is less elevated and more selfish ; as must infallibly be the case, wherever that fear of the Lord, which is the sum of wisdom, fails to be the governing and pervading principle. From Naples we accompany him to Como, where, on the banks of its celebrated lake, M. and Mad. de Montaigne have a delightful villa; at which, a la mode Italienne, Ernest forms an intimacy, not only with its intelligent possessors, but with a brother of the lady, Signor Castruccio Cæsarini. This last individual is a second-rate poet, devoured by his own vanity,-a perfect Heautontimoreumenos ;-until he literally goes mad through a fruitless thirst after fame; as cruel a syren as ever allured mortals to destruction. His history grows pregnant with solemn warnings, long before the catastrophie arrives; and throughout he moves to and fro, like a

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condemned soul darkening into a demon, and wandering among dry places, seeking rest, but finding none. The illness of Cleveland calls Maltravers to England late in the autumn. He figures in London,--rusticates in his own country seat at Burleigh, of which there are several excellent descriptions,—turns author, and puts in successfully for literary immortality,—again falls in with Madame de St. Ventadour,--and is in the very act of kissing her hand passionately, at an inn where they had been driven for shelter by the rain, when Alice, arriving at the same house, and catching a glimpse of him, enters the apartment, fully persuaded that he was alone :

• She had entered with her heart upon her lips; love, sanguine, hopeful, love in every vein, and every thought :—she had entered, dreaming that across that threshold, life would dawn upon

her afresh, that all would be once more as it had been, when the common air was rapture. Thus she entered; and now she stood spell-bound, terrorstricken, pale as death,—life turned to stone, youth, hope, bliss, were for ever over to her. Ernest kneeling to another, was all she saw ! For this had she been faithful and true, amidst storm and desolation ; for this, had she hoped-dreamed-lived. They did not note her ; she was unseen—unheard. And Ernest, who would after all have gone barefoot to the end of the earth to find her, was in the very room with her, and knew it not.'-Vol. II., pp. 196, 197.

The fact is, that Maltravers and the Frenchwoman were only vowing eternal friendship, not love, to each other, after the most approved fashion of romancers, fine gentlemen, and ladies. Alice knows nothing of these vain forms and empty sounds. She believes in her mind what she sees with her eyes, and hears with her ears : and so she turns noiselessly away; for humble as her heart might be, there was no meanness in it. This moment proves the crisis of years, as will be seen in the sequel.

Her adventures have been hitherto not less wonderful than affecting When driven from the door of that cottage, where she had lived in sinful pleasure, vagrancy without any other goal than death at the end of it, appears to be her appointed portion. But God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb. A Mrs. Leslie spreads over the wanderer, and her offspring, a wing of protec*tion; and getting gradually interested in their history, she sets up Alice as a teacher of singing and music, in a cathedral town, sufficiently far off to keep down the curtain of secrecy over her aberrations and misfortunes. It happens that the magnate of this place is a Mr. Templeton,-a retired banker, very opulent, and formerly its representative in parliament. He is a Dissenter; and maternal uncle to Lumley Ferrers. His influence still remains paramount in the borough; so that in the days of Gatton and Old Sarum, he could always return one or even two mem

bers.

He is portrayed as a sanctimonious, prudent, and ambitious man, with a most fair exterior, yet carrying the seeds of every vice within, unfolded exactly up to that point, where if matters should proceed further, the mask of hypocrisy must necessarily be thrust aside. His professions in religion and politics are so nicely adjusted, that saint and sinner, charity and mammon, sensualism and decorum, government and opposition, tories, whigs, and sectaries, have all sufficient pretences to claim him for their own. He longs to be a widower, that he may be rid of his present wife without a crime; and he sighs for a peerage, that the obscurity of his origin may be forgotten. There are hopes of his ultimately wearing a coronet; for his stirring nephew, Lumley Ferrers, has another set of relations, on the paternal side of his pedigree, one of them an Earl of Saxingham, father of the rich and beautiful heiress Florence Lascelles, and himself holding an office in the cabinet. Mr. Templeton is the idol of his neighbourhood, just at the very juncture of Mrs. Leslie's patronage being extended to Alice; and there is a curious interview between the several parties, at which the benevolent lady endeavours to interest the banker on behalf of the pretty vagrant. Such a recommendation does something with Mr. Templeton; the blue eyes and lovely complexion of Alice do a great deal more; and a private affair of his own, the nature of which does not for a long interval transpire, effects most. Templeton, in fact, takes up Alice from motives more sensual than pure, yet, as it appears in the end, more secular than sensual. His partner, by her timely decease, releases him from those matrimonial fetters of which he is weary. Alice about the same time is molested by an unexpected visit from Luke Darvil, whom Templeton gets rid of, by promising to transmit him an annuity from the earnings of his daughter; although no actual payment becomes necessary, since certain officers of justice having fallen upon the highwayman as an old offender, he dies by a pistol-shot in his desperate efforts to escape their hands. Templeton, relieved by such an event, pays secret addresses to Alice; scoffs at the whispers of scandal already rife in his vicinity; and after encountering more than one mortifying refusal, succeeds in leading her to the altar, not long subsequently to that glimpse she had obtained of Ernest Maitravers laying his heart, as she imagined, at the feet of Madame de St. Ventadour. Thus raised in her circumstances far above depression and dependence, her beauty flourishes into its maturity. Mr. Templeton removes to a villa near London ; where the exquisite attractiveness of a little girl, passing under the description of Alice's by a former marriage, extorts universal admiration.

We must now glance at some of the other personages of the drama. Maltravers is rising in the firmament of literature; and acquiring an European reputation. Cæsarini has also published

a volume of poems, which fails ; yet he is in London himself, caressed by the great as a sort of literary lion, likely to last one season at least. His manners, costume, letters of introduction, and the disinterested kindness of Ernest, which the Italian repays with truly national ingratitude, open to him every saloon and assembly at the West End. Fine society completes the ruin of whatsoever might once have been sound and manly in his intellect. Envy, malice, pride, and wounded vanity, flock to his bosom, as vultures to a decomposing carcase. His fortune, originally more than sufficient for a foreigner in any land but Great Britain, or any city but its mammoth-metropolis, falls into a rapid decline; which the poor fool accelerates by buying horses, presenting jewels, making love to marchionesses, and gambling at the club houses. Lumley Ferrers forms the closest intimacy with him, partly from the coolness in both towards Maltravers, produced by several causes; and partly from superior discernment enabling him to foresee the consequences to Cæsarini of his present courses. These last, he thought, would soon render him a convenient instrument for promoting sundry purposes of his own, fraught with perfidy and wickedness. Primarily he is trying to worm himself into the good graces of his uncle Templeton, with a view to inherit his property; whilst he also carefully cultivates his intercourse with Lord Saxingham, as well to maintain his individual importance, as to secure another string to his bow, for rising in the world. The lineaments of his entire character are traced with all the breadth and tone of Corregio, as they blacken into the depth of moral obliquity. We see how mere selfishness, apart from sensual vices, may conduct a man not only across the Acheron of ordinary iniquity, but into the lowest abysses of Tartarus. His eyes and avarice, as the story proceeds, are now gloating over the possibility of marrying the opulent daughter of his noble relative. Her attractions have reached their meridian. The beau-monde moves after the lady Florence Lascelles, whose beauty might serve painters as a model for Semiramis or Zenobia; more majestic perhaps it may seem to some, than becomes her years; and so classically faultless, as to have a touch of the statue in its composition. Yet, while flattering crowds murmur unbounded applauses, her own selection is fixed,—and that too upon Ernest Maltravers.

His fame seems first to have won her admiration, which frequent intercourse with him warmed into softer sentiments. She addresses to him a series of anonymous papers, replete with talent and pathos, urging him to spend and be spent in the service of his day and generation. Her delicacy of mind, however, appears unharmed amidst trials so fiery and searching; except, that with thoroughly aristocratic cruelty, she suffers Cæsarini to fancy that he may presume to make her an offer ; nor does she quite turn a