blot on her birth, was regarded by them in the unmentioned abstract,
and the child's presence upon earth seen with the indulgence (without the
naughty curiosity) of the loyal moral English for the numerous offspring
of the peccadillos of their monarchs. These things pass muster from being
'Britannically cocooned in the purple,' says our irreverent satirist; and
the maiden ladies' passion of devotion to 'the blood' helped to blind
them; but still more so did the imperious urgency to curtain closely the
night of Tasso, throwing all its consequences upon Victor's masterful
tongue. Whence it ensued (and here is the danger for illogical
individuals as well as vast communities, who continue to batten upon
fiction when the convenience of it has taken the place of pleasure), that
they had need to exalt his eloquence, for a cloak to their conduct; and
doing it, they fell into a habit of yielding to him; they disintegrated
under him; rules, principles, morality, were shaken to some confusion.
And still proceeding thus, they now and then glanced back, more
wonderingly than convicted sinners upon their days of early innocence, at
the night when successfully they withstood him. They who had doubted of
the rightness of letting Victor's girl come into collision with two
clerical gentlemen, one of whom was married, permitted him now to bring
the Hon. Dudley Sowerby to their house, and make appointments to meet Mr.
Dudley Sowerby under a roof that sheltered a young lady, evidently the
allurement to the scion of aristocracy; of whose family Mr. Stuart Rem
had spoken in the very kindling hushed tones, proper to the union of a
sacerdotal and an English citizen's veneration.

How would it end? And if some day this excellent Mr. Dudley Sowerby
reproached them! He could not have a sweeter bride, one more truly a lady
in education and manners; but the birth! the child's name! Their trouble
was emitted in a vapour of interjections. Very perplexing was it for the
good ladies of strict principles to reflect, as dimly they did, that the
concrete presence of dear Nesta silenced and overcame objections to her
being upon earth. She seemed, as it were, a draught of redoubtable Nature
inebriating morality. But would others be similarly affected? Victor
might get his release, to do justice to the mother: it would not cover
the child. Prize as they might the quality of the Radnor blood (drawn
from the most ancient of original Britain's princes), there was