furniture, purchased at Mr. Oakley's, and set off with
curtains, carpet, and looking-glasses--at a price which would have
maintained a country town of seven hundred poor with bread and soup
during the hardest winter--the reader will not suppose that a man of
Lorenzo's taste, who called books his best wealth, would devote two
thousand pounds to such idle trappings; which in the course of three
years, at farthest, would lose their comfort by losing their fashion.
But he will suppose that elegance and propriety were equally consulted
by our host.

Accordingly, a satin-wood book-case of 14 feet in width and 11 in
height, ornamented at the top with a few chaste Etruscan vases--a
light blue carpet, upon which were depicted bunches of grey roses,
shadowed in brown--fawn-coloured curtains, relieved with yellow silk
and black velvet borders--alabaster lamps shedding their soft light
upon small marble busts--and sofas and chairs corresponding with the
curtains--(and upon which a visitor might sit without torturing the
nerves of the owner of them) these, along with some genuine pictures
of Wouvermans, Berghem, and Rysdael, and a few other (subordinate)
ornaments, formed the furniture of Lorenzo's Drawing Room. As it was
_en suite_ with the library, which was fitted up in a grave style or
character, the contrast was sufficiently pleasing.

Lisardo ran immediately to the book-case. He first eyed, with a greedy
velocity, the backs of the folios and quartos; then the octavos; and,
mounting an ingeniously-contrived mahogany rostrum, which moved with
the utmost facility, he did not fail to pay due attention to the
duodecimos; some of which were carefully preserved in Russia or
morocco backs, with water-tabby silk linings, and other appropriate
embellishments. In the midst of his book-reverie, he heard, on a
sudden, the thrilling notes of a harp--which proceeded from the
further end of the library!--it being Lorenzo's custom, upon these
occasions, to request an old Welch servant to bring his instrument
into the library, and renew, if he could, the strains of "other
times." Meanwhile the curtains were "let fall;" the sofa wheeled
round;

--and the cups
That cheer, but not inebriate,

with "the bubbling and loud hissing urn," "welcomed the evening in."
Lorenzo brought from his library a volume of Piranesi, and another of
engravings from the heads of Vandyke. Lisardo, in looking at them,
beat time with his head and