f culture and of refined
tastes, fond of music, much given to writing sonnets and to reading the
works of the elegant Politian, as well as to composing sentimental airs
for the voice and lute. He patronised arts and letters with vast credit
and secret economy; for he never gave anything more than a supper and a
recommendation to the poets, musicians, and artists who paid their court
to him and dedicated to him their choicest productions. The supper was
generally a frugal affair, but his reputation in aesthetic matters was so
great that a word from him to a leader of fashion, or a letter of
introduction to a Venetian Ambassador abroad, often proved to be worth
more than the gold he abstained from giving. He spoke Latin, he could
read Greek, and his taste in poetry was so highly cultivated that he
called Dante's verse rough, uncouth, and vulgar--precisely as Horace
Walpole, seventy or eighty years later, could not conceive how any one
could prefer Shakespeare's rude lines to the elegant verses of Mr. Pope.
For the Senator lived in the age when Louis XIV. was young, and Charles
II. had been restored to the throne only a few years before the
beginning of this story.

Pignaver was about fifty years old. There is no good reason why a
widower of that age, robust and temperate, and hardly grey, should not
take a wife; perhaps there is really no reason, either, why he should
not marry a girl of eighteen, if she will have him, and where neither
usage nor ecclesiastical ordinances are opposed to it, the young lady
may even be his niece. Besides, in the present case, the Senator would
appear to his peers and associates to be conferring a favour on the
object of his elderly affections, and to be crowning the series of
favours he had already conferred. For Ortensia was the penniless child
of his brother-in-law, a scapegrace who had come to a bad end in Crete.
The Senator's wife had taken the child to her heart, having none of her
own, and had brought her up lovingly and wisely, little dreaming that
she was educating her own successor. If she had known it, she might have
behaved differently, for her lord had never succeeded in winning her
affections, and she regarded him to the end with mingled distrust and
dislike, while he looked upon her as an affliction and a thorn in his
side. Yet they were both very good people in their way. She died
comparatively young, and he deemed it only just that after enduring the
thorn so long, he should