fense. Besides, today, after his long comparative
obscuration, he hangs high in the heaven of our literature, for all the
world to see; he is a part of the light by which we walk. The most I
said was that he was no doubt not a woman's poet: to which she rejoined
aptly enough that he had been at least Miss Bordereau's. The strange
thing had been for me to discover in England that she was still alive:
it was as if I had been told Mrs. Siddons was, or Queen Caroline, or
the famous Lady Hamilton, for it seemed to me that she belonged to a
generation as extinct. "Why, she must be tremendously old--at least a
hundred," I had said; but on coming to consider dates I saw that it was
not strictly necessary that she should have exceeded by very much the
common span. Nonetheless she was very far advanced in life, and her
relations with Jeffrey Aspern had occurred in her early womanhood.
"That is her excuse," said Mrs. Prest, half-sententiously and yet also
somewhat as if she were ashamed of making a speech so little in the
real tone of Venice. As if a woman needed an excuse for having loved the
divine poet! He had been not only one of the most brilliant minds of
his day (and in those years, when the century was young, there were,
as everyone knows, many), but one of the most genial men and one of the
handsomest.

The niece, according to Mrs. Prest, was not so old, and she risked the
conjecture that she was only a grandniece. This was possible; I had
nothing but my share in the very limited knowledge of my English fellow
worshipper John Cumnor, who had never seen the couple. The world, as I
say, had recognized Jeffrey Aspern, but Cumnor and I had recognized him
most. The multitude, today, flocked to his temple, but of that temple he
and I regarded ourselves as the ministers. We held, justly, as I think,
that we had done more for his memory than anyone else, and we had done
it by opening lights into his life. He had nothing to fear from us
because he had nothing to fear from the truth, which alone at such a
distance of time we could be interested in establishing. His early
death had been the only dark spot in his life, unless the papers in Miss
Bordereau's hands should perversely bring out others. There had been an
impression about 1825 that he had "treated her badly," just as there had
been an impression that he had "served," as the London populace says,
several other ladies in the same way. Each of these cases Cumnor and
I had been