d failed to provide, Odo had little difficulty
in obtaining for himself; for though most of the new writers were on the
Index, and the Sardinian censorship was notoriously severe, there was
never yet a barrier that could keep out books, and Cantapresto was a
skilled purveyor of contraband dainties. Odo had thus acquainted himself
with the lighter literature of England and France; and though he had
read but few philosophical treatises, was yet dimly aware of the new
standpoint from which, north of the Alps, men were beginning to test the
accepted forms of thought. The first disturbance of his childish faith,
and the coincident reading of the Lettres Philosophiques, had been
followed by a period of moral perturbation, during which he suffered
from that sense of bewilderment, of inability to classify the phenomena
of life, that is one of the keenest trials of inexperience. Youth and
nature had their way with him, however, and a wholesome reaction of
indifference set in. The invisible world of thought and conduct had been
the frequent subject of his musings; but the other, tangible world was
close to him too, spreading like a rich populous plain between himself
and the distant heights of speculation. The old doubts, the old
dissatisfactions, hung on the edge of consciousness; but he was too
profoundly Italian not to linger awhile in that atmosphere of careless
acquiescence that is so pleasant a medium for the unhampered enjoyment
of life. Some day, no doubt, the intellectual curiosity and the moral
disquietude would revive; but what he wanted now were books which
appealed not to his reason but to his emotions, which reflected as in a
mirror the rich and varied life of the senses: books that were warm to
the touch, like the little volume in his hand.

For it was not only of nature that the book spoke. Amid scenes of such
rustic freshness were set human passions as fresh and natural: a great
romantic love, subdued to duty, yet breaking forth again and again as
young shoots spring from the root of a felled tree. To
eighteenth-century readers such a picture of life was as new as its
setting. Duty, in that day, to people of quality, meant the observance
of certain fixed conventions: the correct stepping of a moral minuet; as
an inner obligation, as a voluntary tribute to Diderot's "divinity on
earth," it had hardly yet drawn breath. To depict a personal relation so
much purer and more profound than any form of sentiment then in f