ter that our traveller
liked: its love of ease, reduced into a system; its courtesy; its
content with the world as it is; its moral apathy as regards all that
agitates life, save one passion--and the universal tenderness, ardour,
and delicacy which, in that passion, it ennobles itself in displaying.
The commonest peasant of Rome or Naples, though not perhaps in the freer
land of Tuscany, can comprehend all the romance and mystery of the most
subtle species of love; all that it requires in England the idle habits
of aristocracy, or the sensitive fibre of genius, even to conceive. And
what is yet stranger, the worn-out debauches, sage with an experience
and variety of licentiousness, which come not within the compass of a
northern profligacy, remains alive to the earliest and most innocent
sentiments of the passion. And if Platonism in its coldest purity exist
on earth, it is among the Aretins of southern Italy.

This unworldly refinement, amidst so much worldly callousness, was a
peculiarity that afforded perpetual amusement to the nice eye and subtle
judgment of Godolphin. He loved not to note the common elements of
character; whatever was most abstract and difficult to analyse, pleased
him most. He mixed then much with the Romans, and was a favourite
amongst them; but, during his present visit to the Immortal City, he did
not, how distantly soever, associate with the English. His carelessness
of show, and the independence of a single man from burdensome
connexions, rendered his income fully competent to his wants; but, like
many proud men, he was not willing to make it seem even to himself, as
a comparative poverty, beside the lavish expenses of his ostentatious
countrymen. Travel, moreover, had augmented those stores of reflection
which rob solitude of ennui.

CHAPTER XXX.

MAGNETISM.--SYMPATHY.--THE RETURN OF ELEMENTS TO ELEMENTS.

Daily did the health of Volktman decline; Lucilla was the only one
ignorant of his danger. She had never seen the gradual approaches of
death: her mother's abrupt and rapid illness made the whole of her
experience of disease. Physicians and dark rooms were necessarily
coupled in her mind with all graver maladies; and as the astrologer,
wrapt in his calculations, altered not any of his habits, and was
insensible to pain, she fondly attributed his occasional complaints to
the melancholy induced by seclusion. With sedentary men, diseases being
often those connected with the Organisa