, and inoffensive, and his whole pursuit in life
a passion for inventing fortifications, and defending passes and
tetes-du-pont by lines, circumvallations, and ravelins, which cost reams
of paper and whole buckets of water-color to describe. The only fire
which burned within his nature was a little flickering flame of hope,
that one day the world would awake to the recognition of his great
discoveries, and his name be associated with those of Vauban and Carnot.
Sustained by this, he bore up against contemporary neglect and actual
indifference; he whispered to himself, that, like Nelson, he would one
day "have a gazette of his own," and in this firm conviction, he went on
with rule and compass, measuring and daubing and drawing from morn till
night, happy, humble, and contented: nothing could possibly be more
inoffensive than such an existence. Even the French our natural enemies
or the Russians our Palmerstonian Betes noires would have forgiven, had
they but seen, the devices of his patriotism. Never did heroic ardor
burn in a milder bosom, for, though his brain revelled in all the
horrors of siege and slaughter, he would not have had the heart to crush
a beetle.

Unlike him in every respect was the partner of his joys: a more
bustling, plotting, scheming existence it was hard to conceive. Most
pretenders are satisfied with aspiring to one crown; her ambitions were
"legion." When Columbus received the taunts of the courtiers on the ease
of his discovery, and merely replied, that the merit lay simply in the
fact that he alone had made it, he was uttering a truth susceptible of
very wide application. Nine tenths of the inventions which promote
the happiness or secure the ease of mankind have been not a whit more
difficult than that of balancing the egg. They only needed that some one
should think of them "practically." Thousands may have done so in
moods of speculation or fancy; the grand requisite was a practical
intelligence. Such was Mrs. Ricketts's. As she had seen at Naples
the lava used for mere road-making, which in other hands, and by other
treatment, might have been fashioned into all the shapes and colors
of Bohemian glass, so did she perceive that a certain raw material was
equally misapplied and devoted to base uses, but which, by the touch
of genius, might be made powerful as the wand of an enchanter. This was
"Flattery." Do not, like the Spanish courtiers, my dear reader, do not
smile at her discovery, nor s