the
community. In place of living in a gay and fashionable part of the
city, his lodging was in a miserable garret, overlooking one of the
gloomiest streets of the metropolis. His manners, too, were forbidding
and reserved. Instead of exhibiting the natural buoyancy of his years,
he looked careworn and dejected; nor was he ever known to smile.

After a period whispers got abroad that several of his female subjects
came to strange and untimely deaths. They were seized with some
dangerous malady, accompanied by frightful delusions. In general they
fancied themselves possessed. Wailings, shrieks, and horrible
blasphemies proceeded from the lips of the sufferers. These reports
were doubtless exaggerated, the marvellous being a prodigiously
accumulative and inventive faculty; yet enough remained, apparently
authentic, to justify the most unfavourable suspicions.

About this time a young Italian lady of a noble house arrived on a
visit to her brother in the suite of the Florentine embassy. This
princely dame, possessed of great wealth and beauty, was not long
unprovided with lovers; one especially, a handsome official in the
royal household, De Vessey by name, and as gallant a cavalier as ever
lady looked upon. But her term of absence being nigh expired, the
lovers were in great perplexity; and nothing seemed so likely to
contribute to their comfort during such unavoidable separation as a
miniature portrait of each from the hands of this inimitable painter.
Leonora sat first, and the lover was in raptures. Hour by hour he
watched the progress of his work in a little gloomy chamber, where the
artist, like some automaton fixture, was always found in the same
place, occupied too as it might seem without intermission.

"The gaze of that strange painter distresses me inexpressibly," said
Leonora to her companion, as they went for the last time to his
apartment. "I have borne it hitherto without a murmur, but words
cannot describe the reluctance with which I endure his glance; yet
while I feel as though my very soul abhorred it, it penetrates--nay,
drinks up and withers my spirit. Though I shrink from it, some
influence or fascination, call it as thou wilt, prevents escape; I
cannot turn away my eyes from his terrible gaze."

"Thou art fanciful, my love," said De Vessey; "the near prospect of
our parting makes thee apt to indulge these gloomy impressions. Be of
good cheer; nothing shall harm thee in my presence. 'Tis the last