rred to each since they met; and, in whatsoever Godolphin
communicated to him, the mystic sought to impress upon his friend's
attention the fulfilment of an astrological prediction.

Godolphin, though no longer impressed with a belief in the visionary's
science, did not affect to combat his assertions. He had not, in his
progress through life, found much to shake his habitual indolence in
ordinary affairs; and it was no easy matter to provoke one of his quiet
temper and self-indulging wisdom into conversational dispute. Besides,
who argues with fanaticism?

Since the young idealist had left England, the elements of his character
had been slowly performing the ordination of time, and working their due
change in its general aspect. The warm fountains of youth flowed not so
freely as before the selfishness that always comes, sooner or later,
to solitary men of the world, had gradually mingled itself with all the
channels of his heart. The brooding and thoughtful disposition of his
faculties having turned from romance to what he deemed philosophy, that
which once was enthusiasm had hardened into wisdom. He neither hated men
nor loved them with a sanguine philanthropy; he viewed them with cool
and discerning eyes. He did not think it within the power of governments
to make the mass, in any country, much happier or more elevated than
they are. Republics, he was wont to say, favoured aristocratic virtues,
and despotisms extinguished them: but, whether in a monarchy or
republic, the hewers of wood and the drawers of the water, the
multitude, still remained intrinsically the same.

This theory heightened his indifference to ambition. The watchwords of
party appeared to him ridiculous; and politics in general--what a great
moralist termed one question in particular--a shuttlecock kept up by
the contention of noisy children. His mind thus rested as to all public
matters in a state of quietude, and covered over with the mantle of a
most false, a most perilous philosophy. His appetites to pleasure had
grown somewhat dulled by experience, but he was as yet neither sated
nor discontented. One feeling at his breast still remained scarcely
diminished of its effect, when the string was touched--his tender
remembrance of Constance; and this had prevented any subsequent but
momentary attachment deepening into love. Thus, at the age of seven and
twenty, Percy Godolphin reappears on our stage.

There was a great deal in the Italian charac