ive slave, bowing his mind to all the traditionary bigotry
which she adored, never daring to form an opinion for himself,
worshipping her idol, custom, and labouring by habitual hypocrisy to
perpetuate the delusions of all around her!

In the meantime, while Lord Cadurcis was chewing the cud of these
bitter feelings, we will take the opportunity of explaining the
immediate cause of Lady Annabel's frigid reception of his friendly
advances. All that she had heard of Cadurcis, all the information she
had within these few days so rapidly acquired of his character and
conduct, were indeed not calculated to dispose her to witness the
renewal of their intimacy with feelings of remarkable satisfaction.
But this morning she had read his poem, the poem that all London was
talking of, and she had read it with horror. She looked upon Cadurcis
as a lost man. With her, indeed, since her marriage, an imaginative
mind had become an object of terror; but there were some peculiarities
in the tone of Cadurcis' genius, which magnified to excess her general
apprehension on this head. She traced, in every line, the evidences
of a raging vanity, which she was convinced must prompt its owner
to sacrifice, on all occasions, every feeling of duty to its
gratification. Amid all the fervour of rebellious passions, and the
violence of a wayward mind, a sentiment of profound egotism appeared
to her impressed on every page she perused. Great as might have been
the original errors of Herbert, awful as in her estimation were the
crimes to which they had led him, they might in the first instance be
traced rather to a perverted view of society than of himself. But self
was the idol of Cadurcis; self distorted into a phantom that seemed
to Lady Annabel pregnant not only with terrible crimes, but with the
basest and most humiliating vices. The certain degradation which in
the instance of her husband had been the consequence of a bad system,
would, in her opinion, in the case of Cadurcis, be the result of a
bad nature; and when she called to mind that there had once been a
probability that this individual might have become the husband of her
Venetia, her child whom it had been the sole purpose of her life to
save from the misery of which she herself had been the victim; that
she had even dwelt on the idea with complacency, encouraged its
progress, regretted its abrupt termination, but consoled herself by
the flattering hope that time, with even more favoura