death of his kinsman's
heir, and shortly afterwards by that of the kinsman himself; and had
become a widower, with one only child, a beautiful little girl of about
four years old. He lived in perfect seclusion, avoided all intercourse
with society, and seemed so perfectly unconscious of having ever seen me
before, whenever in our rides or walks we met, that I could not venture
to intrude myself on a reserve so rigid and unbroken as that which
characterized his habits and life.

The gloom and loneliness, however, in which Mordaunt's days were
spent, were far from partaking of that selfishness so common, almost
so necessarily common, to recluses. Wherever he had gone in his travels
through Italy, he had left light and rejoicing behind him. In his
residence at ----, while unknown to the great and gay, he was familiar
with the outcast and the destitute. The prison, the hospital, the sordid
cabins of want, the abodes (so frequent in Italy, that emporium of
artists and poets) where genius struggled against poverty and its own
improvidence,--all these were the spots to which his visits were paid,
and in which "the very stones prated of his whereabout." It was a
strange and striking contrast to compare the sickly enthusiasm of those
who flocked to Italy to lavish their sentiments on statues, and
their wealth on the modern impositions palmed upon their taste as the
masterpieces of ancient art,--it was a noble contrast, I say, to compare
that ludicrous and idle enthusiasm with the quiet and wholesome energy
of mind and heart which led Mordaunt, not to pour forth worship and
homage to the unconscious monuments of the dead but to console, to
relieve, and to sustain the woes, the wants, the feebleness of the
living.

Yet while he was thus employed in reducing the miseries and enlarging
the happiness of others, the most settled melancholy seemed to mark
himself "as her own." Clad in the deepest mourning, a stern and un
broken gloom sat forever upon his countenance. I have observed, that
if in his walks or rides any one, especially of the better classes,
appeared to approach, he would strike into a new path. He could not bear
even the scrutiny of a glance or the fellowship of a moment: and
his mien, high and haughty, seemed not only to repel others, but to
contradict the meekness and charity which his own actions so invariably
and unequivocally displayed. It must, indeed, have been a powerful
exertion of principle over feeling whic