Читать книгу: «Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 66 No.406, August 1849», страница 3

"Feb. 19, 1803.

"My Dear Manning, – The general scope of your letter afforded no indications of insanity; but some particular points raised a scruple. For God's sake, don't think any more of 'Independent Tartary.' What are you to do among such Ethiopians? Read Sir John Mandeville's travels to cure you, or come over to England. There is a Tartar-man now exhibiting at Exeter Change. Come and talk with him, and hear what he says first. Indeed, he is no favourable specimen of his countrymen! Some say they are cannibals; and then conceive a Tartar fellow eating my friend, and adding the cool malignity of mustard and vinegar! I am afraid 'tis the reading of Chaucer has misled you; his foolish stories about Cambuscan, and the ring and the horse of brass. Believe me, there are no such things. These are all tales – a horse of brass never flew, and a king's daughter never talked with birds. The Tartars really are a cold, insipid, smoutchy set. You'll be sadly moped (if you are not eaten) amongst them. Pray try and cure yourself. Shave yourself oftener. Eat no saffron; for saffron eaters contract a terrible Tartar-like yellow. Shave the upper lip. Go about like a European. Read no books of voyages, (they are nothing but lies;) only now and then a romance, to keep the fancy under. Above all, don't go to any sights of wild beasts. That has been your ruin."

And when Manning really departed on his voyage to China, he writes to him in the following mingled strains of humour and of feeling. Being obliged to omit a great deal, it would only be unsightly to mark every instance where a sentence has been dropt. The italics, we must remark, are not ours. If Lamb's, they show how naturally, even in writing to his most intimate friend, he fell into the feelings of the author: —

"May 10, 1806.

"… Be sure, if you see any of those people whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders, that you make a draught of them. It will be very curious. Oh! Manning, I am serious to sinking almost, when I think that all those evenings which you have made so pleasant are gone, perhaps for ever. Four years, you talk of, may be ten – and you may come back and find such alterations! Some circumstance may grow up to you or to me, that may be a bar to the return of any such intimacy. I dare say all this is hum! and that all will come back; but, indeed, we die many deaths before we die, and I am almost sick to think that such a hold I had of you is gone."

"Dec. 5, 1806.

"Manning, your letter dated Hottentots, August the – what was it? came to hand. I can scarce hope that mine will have the same luck. China – Canton – bless us! how it strains the imagination, and makes it ache. It will be a point of conscience to send you none but bran-new news (the latest edition), which will but grow the better, like oranges, for a sea voyage. Oh that you should be so many hemispheres off – if I speak incorrectly you can correct me – why, the simplest death or marriage that takes place here must be important to you as news in the old Bastile."

He then tells him of the acceptance of his farce —Mr H.; which farce, by the way, was produced, and failed, Lamb turning against his own production, and joining the audience in hissing it off the stage. It certainly deserved its fate.

"Now, you'd like to know the subject. The title is, 'Mr H.' No more; how simple, how taking! A great H sprawling over the play-bill, and attracting eyes at every corner. The story is, a coxcomb appearing at Bath, vastly rich – all the ladies dying for him – all bursting to know who he is; but he goes by no other name than Mr H. – a curiosity like that of the dames of Strasburg about the man with the great nose. But I won't tell you any more about it. Yes, I will; but I can't give you any idea how I have done it. I'll just tell you that, after much vehement admiration, when his true name comes out, 'Hogsflesh,' all the women shun him, avoid him, and not one can be found to change her name for him; that's the idea – how flat it is here – but how whimsical in the farce! And only think how hard upon me it is, that the ship is despatched to-morrow, and my triumph cannot be ascertained till the Wednesday after. But all China will ring of it by-and-by. Do you find, in all this stuff I have written, anything like those feelings which one should send my old adventuring friend that is gone to wander among Tartars, and may never come again? I don't; but your going away, and all about you, is a threadbare topic. I have worn it out with thinking. It has come to me when I have been dull with anything, till my sadness has seemed more to have come from it than to have introduced it. I want you, you don't know how much; but if I had you here, in my European garret, we should but talk over such stuff as I have written.

"Good Heavens! what a bit only I've got left! How shall I squeeze all I know into this morsel! Coleridge is come home, and is going to turn lecturer on taste at the Royal Institution. How the paper grows less and less! In less than two minutes I shall cease to talk to you, and you may rave to the great Wall of China. – N.B. Is there such a wall? Is it as big as Old London Wall by Bedlam? Have you met with a friend of mine, named Ball, at Canton? If you are acquainted, remember me kindly to him."

But we should be driven into as hard straits as Lamb, at the close of his epistle, if we, should attempt, in the small space that remains to us, to give any fair idea of the various "humours" and interests, of many kinds, of these letters. We pass at once to those that illustrate the last important incident of his life, his retirement from office. It is thus he describes his manumission, and the sort of troubled delight it brought with it, to Wordsworth: —

"6th April, 1825.

"Here am I then, after thirty-three years' slavery, sitting in my own room, at eleven o'clock this finest of all April mornings, a freed man, with £441 a-year for the remainder of my life, live I as long as John Dennis, who outlived his annuity and starved at ninety.

"I came home FOR EVER on Tuesday of last week. The incomprehensibleness of my condition overwhelmed me. It was like passing from life into eternity. Every year to be as long as three; i. e., to have three times as much real time – time that is my own in it! I wandered about thinking I was happy, but feeling I was not. But that tumultuousness is passing off, and I begin to understand the nature of the gift."

And to Bernard Barton he writes:

"My spirits are so tumultuary with the novelty of my recent emancipation, that I have scarce steadiness of hand, much more of mind, to compose a letter. I am free, Bernard Barton – free as air!

 
'The little bird, that wings the sky,
Knows no such liberty.'
 

I was set free on Tuesday in last week at four o'clock. I came home for ever!

"I have been describing my feelings, as well as I can, to Wordsworth, and care not to repeat. Take it briefly, that for a few days I was painfully oppressed by so mighty a change, but it is becoming daily more natural to me. I went and sat among them all, at my old thirty-three years' desk yester morning; and deuce take me, if I had not yearnings at leaving all my old pen-and-ink fellows, merry sociable lads, at leaving them in the lurch – fag, fag, fag! The comparison of my own superior felicity gave me anything but pleasure.

"B. B., I would not serve another seven years for seven hundred thousand pounds! I have got £440 net for life, with a provision for Mary if she survives me. I will live another fifty years."

But to live without any steady compulsory occupation requires an apprenticeship as much as any other mode of life. An idle man ought to be born and bred to the profession. With Lamb, literature could be nothing but an amusement, and for a mere amusement literature is far too laborious. It cannot, indeed, serve long as an amusement except when it is adopted also as a labour. He was destined, therefore, to make the humiliating discovery, which so many have made before him, that one may have too much time, as well as too little, at one's own disposal. Writing to the same Bernard Barton, a year or two afterwards, he says: —

"What I can do, and over-do, is to walk; but deadly long are the days, these summer all-day days, with but a half-hour's candle-light and no fire-light. I do not write, tell your kind inquisitive Eliza, and can hardly read. 'Tis cold work authorship, without something to puff one into fashion… I assure you no work is worse than over-work. The mind preys on itself, the most unwholesome food. I bragged, formerly, that I could not have too much time. I have a surfeit; with few years to come, the days are wearisome. But weariness is not eternal. Something will shine out to take the load off that crushes me, which is at present intolerable. I have killed an hour or two in this poor scrawl. Well; I shall write merrier anon. 'Tis the present copy of my countenance I send, and to complain is a little to alleviate."

He had taken a house at Enfield, but the cares of housekeeping were found to be burdensome to Miss Lamb, and they took up their abode as boarders in the house of a neighbour. To this circumstance he alludes in the following extract from a letter to Wordsworth, which is the last we shall make, and with which we shall bid farewell to our subject. It will be found to be not the least remarkable amongst the letters of Lamb, and contains one passage, we think, the boldest piece of extravagance that ever humorist ventured upon with success. It just escapes! – and, indeed, it rather takes away our breath at its boldness than prompts to merriment.

"January 2, 1831.

"And is it a year since we parted from you at the steps of Edmonton stage? There are not now the years that there used to be. The tale of the dwindled age of men, reported of successional mankind, is true of the same man only. We do not live a year in a year now. 'Tis a punctum stans. The seasons pass with indifference. Spring cheers not, nor winter heightens our gloom; autumn hath foregone its moralities. Let the sullen nothing pass. Suffice it, that after sad spirits, prolonged through many of its months, we have cast our skins; have taken a farewell of the pompous, troublesome trifle, called housekeeping, and are settled down into poor boarders and lodgers at next door, the Baucis and Baucida of dull Enfield. Here we have nothing to do with our victuals but to eat them; with the garden but to see it grow; with the tax-gatherer but to hear him knock; with the maid but to hear her scolded. Scot and lot, butcher, baker, are things unknown to us, save as spectators of the pageant. We are fed we know not how; quieted – confiding ravens. Yet in the self-condemned obliviousness, in the stagnation, some molesting yearnings of life, not quite killed, rise, prompting me that there was a London, and that I was of that old Jerusalem. In dreams I am in Fleet Market, but I wake and cry to sleep again. I die hard, a stubborn Eloisa in this detestable Paraclete. What have I gained by health? Intolerable dulness. What by early hours and moderate meals? A total blank. Oh! let no native Londoner imagine that health, and rest, and innocent occupation, interchange of converse sweet, and recreative study, can make the country anything better than altogether odious and detestable. A garden was the primitive prison, till man, with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it."

Any further summary than what we have already given, of the literary character of Lamb, would be only tedious. He is one who will be generally liked, who with a smaller class will be greatly admired, and who will never excite hostile criticism, unless his injudicious friends shall elevate him to a higher pedestal than is due to him, or than he is manifestly fit to occupy. Such is the cold and calm verdict with which criticism must dismiss him. But those who have thoroughly enjoyed the essays of Elia and the letters of Lamb, will feel a warmer, a more partial affection than Criticism knows well how to express: she becomes somewhat impatient of her own enforced gravity; she would willingly throw away those scales with which, like Justice, we suppose, she is symbolically supplied, and, embracing the man as he is, laugh and be pleased with the rest of the world, without further thought of the matter.

THE CAXTONS. – PART XV

CHAPTER LXXXIV

"Please, sir, be this note for you?" asked the waiter.

"For me – yes; it is my name."

I did not recognise the handwriting, and yet the note was from one whose writing I had often seen. But formerly the writing was cramped, stiff, perpendicular, (a feigned hand, though I guessed not it was feigned;) now it was hasty, irregular, impatient – scarce a letter formed, scarce a word that seemed finished – and yet strangely legible withal, as the handwriting of a bold man almost always is. I opened the note listlessly, and read —

"I have watched for you all the morning. I saw her go. Well! – I did not throw myself under the hoofs of the horses. I write this in a public-house, not far. Will you follow the bearer, and see once again the outcast whom all the rest of the world will shun?"

Though I did not recognise the hand, there could be no doubt who was the writer.

"The boy wants to know if there's an answer," said the waiter.

I nodded, took up my hat, and left the room. A ragged boy was standing in the yard, and scarcely six words passed between us, before I was following him through a narrow lane that faced the inn, and terminated in a turnstile. Here the boy paused, and, making me a sign to go on, went back his way whistling. I passed the turnstile, and found myself in a green field, with a row of stunted willows hanging over a narrow rill. I looked round, and saw Vivian (as I intend still to call him) half kneeling, and seemingly intent upon some object in the grass.

My eye followed his mechanically. A young unfledged bird, that had left the nest too soon, stood, all still and alone, on the bare short sward – its beak open as for food, its gaze fixed on us with a wistful stare. Methought there was something in the forlorn bird that softened me more to the forlorner youth, of whom it seemed a type.

"Now," said Vivian, speaking half to himself, half to me, "did the bird fall from the nest, or leave the nest at its own wild whim? The parent does not protect it. Mind, I say not it is the parent's fault – perhaps the fault is all with the wanderer. But, look you, though the parent is not here, the foe is! – yonder, see!"

And the young man pointed to a large brindled cat, that, kept back from its prey by our unwelcome neighbourhood, still remained watchful, a few paces off, stirring its tail gently backwards and forwards, and with that stealthy look in its round eyes, dulled by the sun – half fierce, half frightened – which belongs to its tribe, when man comes between the devourer and the victim.

"I do see," said I, "but a passing footstep has saved the bird!"

"Stop!" said Vivian, laying my hand on his own, and with his old bitter smile on his lip – "stop! do you think it mercy to save the bird? What from? and what for? From a natural enemy – from a short pang and a quick death? Fie! – is not that better than slow starvation? or, if you take more heed of it, than the prison-bars of a cage? You cannot restore the nest, you cannot recall the parent. Be wiser in your mercy: leave the bird to its gentlest fate!"

I looked hard on Vivian; the lip had lost the bitter smile. He rose and turned away. I sought to take up the poor bird, but it did not know its friends, and ran from me, chirping piteously – ran towards the very jaws of the grim enemy. I was only just in time to scare away the beast, which sprang up a tree, and glared down through the hanging boughs. Then I followed the bird, and, as I followed, I heard, not knowing, at first whence the sound came, a short, quick, tremulous note. Was it near? was it far? – from the earth? in the sky? Poor parent-bird! – like parent-love, it seemed now far and now near; now on earth, now in sky!

And at last, quick and sudden, as if born of the space, lo! the little wings hovered over me!

The young bird halted, and I also. "Come," said I, "ye have found each other at last – settle it between you!"

I went back to the outcast.

CHAPTER LXXXV

Pisistratus. – How came you to know we had stayed in the town?

Vivian. – Do you think I could remain where you left me? I wandered out – wandered hither. Passing at dawn through yon streets, I saw the ostlers loitering by the gates of the yard, overheard them talk, and so knew you were all at the inn – all! (He sighed heavily.)

Pisistratus. – Your poor father is very ill! O cousin, how could you fling from you so much love!

Vivian. – Love! – his! – my father's!

Pisistratus. – Do you really not believe, then, that your father loved you?

Vivian. – If I had believed it, I had never left him! All the gold of the Indies had never bribed me to leave my mother!

Pisistratus. – This is indeed a strange misconception of yours. If we can remove it, all may be well yet. Need there now be any secrets between us? (persuasively.) Sit down, and tell me all, cousin.

After some hesitation, Vivian complied; and by the clearing of his brow, and the very tone of his voice, I felt sure that he was no longer seeking to disguise the truth. But, as I afterwards learned the father's tale as well as now the son's, so, instead of repeating Vivian's words, which – not by design, but by the twist of a mind habitually wrong – distorted the facts, I will state what appears to me the real case, as between the parties so unhappily opposed. Reader, pardon me if the recital be tedious. And if thou thinkest that I bear not hard enough on the erring hero of the story, remember that he who recites judges as Austin's son must judge of Roland's.

CHAPTER LXXXVI

Vivian.

AT THE ENTRANCE OF LIFE SITS – THE MOTHER.

It was during the war in Spain that a severe wound, and the fever which ensued, detained Roland at the house of a Spanish widow. His hostess had once been rich; but her fortune had been ruined in the general calamities of the country. She had an only daughter, who assisted to nurse and tend the wounded Englishman; and when the time approached for Roland's departure, the frank grief of the young Ramouna betrayed the impression that the guest had made upon her affections. Much of gratitude, and something, it might be, of an exquisite sense of honour, aided, in Roland's breast, the charm naturally produced by the beauty of his young nurse, and the knightly compassion he felt for her ruined fortunes and desolate condition.

In one of those hasty impulses common to a generous nature – and which too often fatally vindicate the rank of Prudence amidst the tutelary Powers of Life – Roland committed the error of marriage with a girl of whose connexions he knew nothing, and of whose nature little more than its warm spontaneous susceptibility. In a few days subsequent to these rash nuptials, Roland rejoined the march of the army; nor was he able to return to Spain till after the crowning victory of Waterloo.

Maimed by the loss of a limb, and with the scars of many a noble wound still fresh, Roland then hastened to a home the dreams of which had soothed the bed of pain, and now replaced the earlier visions of renown. During his absence a son had been born to him – a son whom he might rear to take the place he had left in his country's service; to renew, in some future fields, a career that had failed the romance of his own antique and chivalrous ambition. As soon as that news had reached him, his care had been to provide an English nurse for the infant – so that, with the first sounds of the mother's endearments, the child might yet hear a voice from the father's land. A female relation of Bolt's had settled in Spain, and was induced to undertake this duty. Natural as this appointment was to a man so devotedly English, it displeased his wild and passionate Ramouna. She had that mother's jealousy, strongest in minds uneducated; she had also that peculiar pride which belongs to her country-people, of every rank and condition; the jealousy and the pride were both wounded by the sight of the English nurse at the child's cradle.

That Roland, on regaining his Spanish hearth, should be disappointed in his expectations of the happiness awaiting him there, was the inevitable condition of such a marriage; since, not the less for his military bluntness, Roland had that refinement of feeling, perhaps over-fastidious, which belongs to all natures essentially poetic; and as the first illusions of love died away, there could have been little indeed congenial to his stately temper in one divided from him by an utter absence of education, and by the strong but nameless distinctions of national views and manners. The disappointment probably, however, went deeper than that which usually attends an ill-assorted union; for, instead of bringing his wife to his old tower, (an expatriation which she would doubtless have resisted to the utmost,) he accepted, maimed as he was, not very long after his return to Spain, the offer of a military post under Ferdinand. The Cavalier doctrines and intense loyalty of Roland attached him, without reflection, to the service of a throne which the English arms had contributed to establish; while the extreme unpopularity of the Constitutional Party in Spain, and the stigma of irreligion fixed to it by the priests, aided to foster Roland's belief that he was supporting a beloved king against the professors of those revolutionary and Jacobinical doctrines, which to him were the very atheism of politics. The experience of a few years in the service of a bigot so contemptible as Ferdinand, whose highest object of patriotism was the restoration of the Inquisition, added another disappointment to those which had already embittered the life of a man who had seen in the grand hero of Cervantes no follies to satirise, but high virtues to imitate. Poor Quixote himself – he came mournfully back to his La Mancha, with no other reward for his knight-errantry than a decoration which he disdained to place beside his simple Waterloo medal, and a grade for which he would have blushed to resign his more modest, but more honourable English dignity.

But, still weaving hopes, the sanguine man returned to his Penates. His child now had grown from infancy into boyhood – the child would pass naturally into his care. Delightful occupation! – At the thought, Home smiled again.

Now, behold the most pernicious circumstance in this ill-omened connexion.

The father of Ramouna had been one of that strange and mysterious race which presents in Spain so many features distinct from the characteristics of its kindred tribes in more civilised lands. The Gitáno, or gipsy of Spain, is not the mere vagrant we see on our commons and roadsides. Retaining, indeed, much of his lawless principles and predatory inclinations, he lives often in towns, exercises various callings, and not unfrequently becomes rich. A wealthy Gitáno had married a Spanish woman;⁵ Roland's wife had been the offspring of this marriage. The Gitáno had died while Ramouna was yet extremely young, and her childhood had been free from the influences of her paternal kindred. But, though her mother, retaining her own religion, had brought up Ramouna in the same faith, pure from the godless creed of the Gitáno – and, at her husband's death, had separated herself wholly from his tribe – still she had lost caste with her own kin and people. And while struggling to regain it, the fortune, which made her sole chance of success in that attempt, was swept away, so that she had remained apart and solitary, and could bring no friends to cheer the solitude of Ramouna during Roland's absence. But, while my uncle was still in the service of Ferdinand, the widow died; and then the only relatives who came round Ramouna were her father's kindred. They had not ventured to claim affinity while her mother lived; and they did so now, by attentions and caresses to her son. This opened to them at once Ramouna's heart and doors. Meanwhile, the English nurse – who, in spite of all that could render her abode odious to her, had, from strong love to her charge, stoutly maintained her post – died, a few weeks after Ramouna's mother, and no healthful influence remained to counteract those baneful ones to which the heir of the honest old Caxtons was subjected. But Roland returned home in a humour to be pleased with all things. Joyously he clasped his wife to his breast, and thought, with self-reproach, that he had forborne too little, and exacted too much – he would be wiser now. Delightedly he acknowledged the beauty, the intelligence, and manly bearing of the boy, who played with his sword-knot, and ran off with his pistols as a prize.

The news of the Englishman's arrival at first kept the lawless kinsfolk from the house; but they were fond of the boy, and the boy of them, and interviews between him and these wild comrades, if stolen, were not less frequent. Gradually Roland's eyes became opened. As, in habitual intercourse, the boy abandoned the reserve which awe and cunning at first imposed, Roland was inexpressibly shocked at the bold principles his son affected, and at his utter incapacity even to comprehend that plain honesty and that frank honour which, to the English soldier, seemed ideas innate and heaven-planted. Soon afterwards, Roland found that a system of plunder was carried on in his household, and tracked it to the connivance of the wife and the agency of the son, for the benefit of lazy bravos and dissolute vagrants. A more patient man than Roland might well have been exasperated – a more wary man confounded, by this discovery. He took the natural step – perhaps insisting on it too summarily – perhaps not allowing enough for the uncultured mind and lively passions of his wife: he ordered her instantly to prepare to accompany him from the place, and to give up all communication with her kindred.

A vehement refusal ensued; but Roland was not a man to give up such a point, and at length a false submission, and a feigned repentance soothed his resentment and obtained his pardon. They moved several miles from the place; but where they moved, there, some at least, and those the worst, of the baleful brood, stealthily followed. Whatever Ramouna's earlier love for Roland had been, it had evidently long ceased in the thorough want of sympathy between them, and in that absence which, if it renews a strong affection, destroys an affection already weakened. But the mother and son adored each other with all the strength of their strong, wild natures. Even under ordinary circumstances, the father's influence over a boy yet in childhood is exerted in vain, if the mother lend herself to baffle it. And in this miserable position, what chance had the blunt, stern, honest Roland (separated from his son during the most ductile years of infancy) against the ascendency of a mother who humoured all the faults, and gratified all the wishes, of her darling?

In his despair, Roland let fall the threat that, if thus thwarted, it would become his duty to withdraw his son from the mother. This threat instantly hardened both hearts against him. The wife represented Roland to the boy as a tyrant, as an enemy – as one who had destroyed all the happiness they had before enjoyed in each other – as one whose severity showed that he hated his own child; and the boy believed her. In his own house a firm union was formed against Roland, and protected by the cunning which is the force of the weak against the strong.

In spite of all, Roland could never forget the tenderness with which the young nurse had watched over the wounded man, nor the love – genuine for the hour, though not drawn from the feelings which withstand the wear and tear of life – that lips so beautiful had pledged him in the bygone days. These thoughts must have come perpetually between his feelings and his judgment, to embitter still more his position – to harass still more his heart. And if, by the strength of that sense of duty which made the force of his character, he could have strung himself to the fulfilment of the threat, humanity, at all events, compelled him to delay it – his wife promised to be again a mother. Blanche was born. How could he take the infant from the mother's breast, or abandon the daughter to the fatal influences from which only, by so violent an effort, he could free the son?

No wonder, poor Roland! that those deep furrows contracted thy bold front, and thy hair grew gray before its time!

Fortunately, perhaps, for all parties, Roland's wife died while Blanche was still an infant. She was taken ill of a fever – she died delirious, clasping her boy to her breast, and praying the saints to protect him from his cruel father. How often that deathbed haunted the son, and justified his belief that there was no parent's love in the heart which was now his sole shelter from the world, and the "pelting of its pitiless rain." Again I say, poor Roland! – for I know that, in that harsh, unloving disrupture of such solemn ties, thy large generous heart forgot its wrongs; again didst thou see tender eyes bending over the wounded stranger – again hear low murmurs breathe the warm weakness which the women of the south deem it no shame to own. And now did it all end in those ravings of hate, and in that glazing gaze of terror!

CHAPTER LXXXVII

THE PRECEPTOR.

Roland removed to France, and fixed his abode in the environs of Paris. He placed Blanche at a convent in the immediate neighbourhood, going to see her daily, and gave himself up to the education of his son. The boy was apt to learn; but to unlearn was here the arduous task – and for that task it would have needed either the passionless experience, the exquisite forbearance of a practised teacher, or the love, and confidence, and yielding heart of a believing pupil. Roland felt that he was not the man to be the teacher, and that his son's heart remained obstinately closed to him. He looked round, and found at the other side of Paris what seemed a suitable preceptor – a young Frenchman of some distinction in letters, more especially in science, with all a Frenchman's eloquence of talk, full of high-sounding sentiments, that pleased the romantic enthusiasm of the Captain; so Roland, with sanguine hopes, confided his son to this man's care. The boy's natural quickness mastered readily all that pleased his taste; he learned to speak and write French with rare felicity and precision. His tenacious memory, and those flexile organs in which the talent for languages is placed, served, with the help of an English master, to revive his earlier knowledge of his father's tongue, and to enable him to speak it with fluent correctness – though there was always in his accent something which had struck me as strange; but, not suspecting it to be foreign, I had thought it a theatrical affectation. He did not go far into science – little farther, perhaps, than a smattering of French mathematics; but he acquired a remarkable facility and promptitude in calculation. He devoured eagerly the light reading thrown in his way, and picked up thence that kind of knowledge which novels and plays afford, for good or evil, according as the novel or the play elevates the understanding and ennobles the passions, or merely corrupts the fancy, and lowers the standard of human nature. But of all that Roland desired him to be taught, the son remained as ignorant as before. Among the other misfortunes of this ominous marriage, Roland's wife had possessed all the superstitions of a Roman Catholic Spaniard, and with these the boy had unconsciously intermingled doctrines far more dreary, imbibed from the dark paganism of the Gitános.