'Mascari,' said the Prince, with a haughty smile, 'through these veins rolls the blood of the old Visconti -of those who boasted that no woman ever escaped their lust, and no man their resentment. The crown of my fathers has shrunk into a gewgaw and a toy;-their ambition and their spirit are undecayed. My honour is now enlisted in this pursuit-Isabel must be mine.'

'Another ambuscade?' said Mascari, inquiringly.

'Nay, why not enter the house itself; the situation is lonely-and the door is not made of iron.'

Surprised and perplexed, the parasite took up the three dice, deposited them gravely in the box, and rattled them noisily, while Zicci threw himself back carelessly in his chair, and said, 'I give the first chance to your Excellency.'

Mascari interchanged a glance with his patron, and threw; the numbers were sixteen.

'It is a high throw,' said Zicci, calmly; 'nevertheless, Signior Mascari, I do not despond.'

Mascari gathered up the dice, shook the box, and rolled the contents once more on the table; the num

Before Mascari could reply, the gentleman of the ber was the highest that can be thrown-eighteen. chamber announced the Signior Zicci.

The Prince involuntarily laid his hand on the sword placed on the table-then with a smile at his own impulse, rose; and met the foreigner at the threshold, with all the profuse and respectful courtesy of Italian simulation.

"This is an honour highly prized,' said the Prince: 'I have long desired the friendship of one so distinguished—.'

'And I have come to give you that friendship,' replied Zicci, in a sweet but chilling voice. To no man yet in Naples have I extended this hand-permit it, Prince, to grasp your own.'

The Neapolitan bowed over the hand he pressed; but as he touched it, a shiver came over him, and his heart stood still. Zicci bent on him his dark, smiling eyes, and then seated himself with a familiar air.

The Prince darted a glance of fire at his minion, who stood with gaping mouth, staring at the dice, and shaking his head in puzzled wonder.

'I have won you see,' said Zicci: may we be friends still.'

'Signior,' said the Prince, obviously struggling with anger and confusion, the victory is already yours. But, pardon me, you have spoken lightly of this young girl-will anything tempt you to yield your claim?"

'Ah, do not think so ill of my gallantry.'

'Enough!' said the Prince, forcing a smile; 'I yield. Let me prove that I do not yield ungraciously: will you honour me with your presence at a little feast I propose to give on the Royal birth-day?' 'It is indeed a happiness to hear one command of yours I can obey.'

Zicci then turned the conversation, talked lightly and gaily; and soon afterwards departed. 'Villain,' then exclaimed the Prince, grasping Mas cari by the collar, 'you betrayed me.'

"Thus it is signed and sealed-I mean our friendship, noble Prince. And now I will tell you the object of my visit. I find, your Excellency, that, unconsciously perhaps, we are rivals. Can we not accommodate our pretensions? A girl of no moment 'I assure your Excellency that the dice were proper-an actress;-bah! it is not worth a quarrel. Shallly arranged: he should have thrown twelve; but he is we throw for her? He who casts the lowest shall the Devil, and that's the end of it.' resign his claim?'

Mascari opened his small eyes to their wildest extent; the Prince, no less surprised, but far too well world-read even to shew what he felt, laughed aloud.

'And were you, then, the cavalier who spoiled my night's chase and robbed me of my white doe? By Bacchus, it was prettily done.'

"You must forgive me, my Prince; I knew not who it was, or my respect would have silenced my gallantry.'

"There is no time to be lost,' said the Prince, quit ting his hold of his parasite, who quietly resettled his cravat.

'My blood is up-I will win this girl if I die for it. Who laughed? Mascari didst thou laugh?' 'I, your Excellency-I laugh?'

'It sounded behind me,' said the Prince, gazing round.

CHAPTER IX.

'All stratagems fair in love, as in war. Of course It was the day on which Zicci had told Glyndon you profited by my defeat, and did not content your- that he should ask for his decision in respect to Isabel self with leaving the little actress at her threshold?' -the third day since their last meeting;-the English'She is Diana herself for me,' answered Zicci, light-man could not come to a resolution. Ambition hither ly; 'whoever wins the wreath will not find a flower

faded.'

'And now you would cast for her-well: but they tell me you are ever a sure player.'

'Let Signior Mascari cast for us.' 'Be it so. Mascari, the dice.'

to the leading passion of his soul, could not yet be silenced by love; and that love, such as it was, unreturned, beset by suspicions and doubts which vanished in the presence of Isabel, and returned when ber bright face shone on his eyes no more, for-les absens ont toujours tort! Perhaps had he been quite alone,

his feelings of honour, of compassion, of virtue, might | why he should seek, even if an impostor, to impose on have triumphed; and he would have resolved either to me. An impostor must have some motive for deluding fly from Isabel, or to offer the love that has no shame. us-either ambition or avarice. I am neither rich nor But Merton, cold, cantious, experienced, wary, (such powerful; Zicci spends more in a week than I do in a a nature has ever power over the imaginative and year. Nay, a Neapolitan banker told me, that the impassioned,) was at hand to ridicule the impres- sums invested by Zicci in his hands, were enough to sion produced by Zicci, and the notion of delicacy purchase half the lands of the whole Neapolitan Noand honour towards an Italian actress. It is true blesse." that Merton, who was no profligate, advised him 'Grant this to be true; do you suppose that the love to quit all pursuit of Isabel; but then the advice was to dazzle and mystify is not as strong with some naprecisely of that character which, if it deadens love, tures as that of gold and power, with others? Zicci stimulates passion. By representing Isabel as one has a moral ostentation, and the same character that who sought to play a part with him, he excused to makes him rival kings in expenditure makes him not Glyndon his own selfishness-he enlisted the Eng-disdain to be wondered at even by an humble Englishlishman's vanity and pride on the side of his pursuit. man.' Why should he not beat an adventuress at her own weapons?

Here the landlord, a little fat oily fellow, came up with a fresh bottle of Lacryma. He hoped their Excellencies were pleased. He was most touchedtouched to the heart that they liked the macaroni. Were their Excellencies going to Vesuvius; there was a slight eruption; they could not see it where they were, but it was pretty, and would be prettier still after sunset.

Glyndon not only felt indisposed on that day to meet Zicci, but he felt also a strong desire to defeat the mysterious prophecy that the meeting should take place. Into this wish Merton readily entered. The young men agreed to be absent from Naples that day. Early in the morning they mounted their horses, and took the road to Baiæ. Glyndon left word at his hotel, that if Signior Zicci sought him, it was in the neigh-Glyndon?' bourhood of that once celebrated watering-place of the ancients that he should be found.

They passed by Isabel's house, but Glyndon resisted the temptation of pausing there; and after threading the grotto of Pausillippo, they wound by a circuitous route back into the suburbs of the city, and took the opposite road which conducts to Portici and Pompeii. It was late at noon when they arrived at the former of these places. Here they halted to dine; for Merton - had heard much of the excellence of the macaroni at Portici, and Merton was a bon vivant.

They put up at an inn of very humble pretensions, and dined under an awning. Merton was more than usually gay; he pressed the Lacryma upon his friend, and conversed gaily.

'Well, my dear friend, we have foiled Signior Zicci in one of his predictions at least. You will have no faith in him hereafter.'

The Ides are come, not gone.'

"Tush! if he is a soothsayer, you are not Cæsar. It is your vanity that makes you credulous: thank Heaven, I do not think myself of such importance, that the operations of nature should be changed in order to frighten me.'

'But why should the operations of nature be changed: there may be a deeper philosophy than we dream of -a philosophy that discovers the secrets of nature, but does not alter, by penetrating, its courses.'

'Ah! you suppose Zicci to be a prophet-a reader of the future; perhaps an associate of Genii and Spirits!' 'I know not what to conjecture; but I see no reason VOL. XXXIII.-JULY, 1838.

55

'A capital idea,' cried Merton. What say you,

'I have not yet seen an irruption; I should like it much.'

'But is there no danger?' said the prudent Merton. "Oh, not at all; the mountain is very civil at present. It only plays a little, just to amuse their Excellencies the English.'

'Well, order the horses, and bring the bill; we will go before it is dark. Clarence, my friend-Nunc est bibendum; but take care of the pede libero, which won't do for walking on lava!'

The bottle was finished, the bill paid, the gentlemen mounted, the landlord bowed, and they bent their way, in the cool of the delightful evening, towards Resina.

The wine animated Glyndon, whose unequal spirits were, at times, high and brilliant as those of a schoolboy released; and the laughter of the northern tourists sounded oft and merrily along the melancholy domains of buried cities.

Hesperus had lighted his lamp amidst the rosy skies as they arrived at Resina. Here they quitted their horses, and took mules and a guide. As the sky grew darker and more dark, the Mountain Fire burned with an intense lustre. In various streaks and streamlets, the fountain of flame rolled down the dark summit, then undiminished by the irruption of 1822, and the Englishmen began to feel increase upon them, as they ascended, that sensation of solemnity and awe, which makes the very atmosphere that surrounds the giant of the Plains of the Antique Hades.

It was night, when, leaving the mules, they as

cended on foot, accompanied by their guide, and a The little party had now arrived nearly at the sum peasant who bore a rude torch. The guide was a con- mit of the mountain: and unspeakably grand was the versable, garrulous fellow, like most of his country spectacle on which they gazed. From the crater arose and his calling; and Merton, whose chief character- a vapour, intensely dark, that overspread the whole istics were a sociable temper and a hardy common back-ground of the heavens; in the centre whereof sense, loved to amuse or to instruct himself on every incidental occasion.

'Ah! Excellency,' said the guide, 'your countrymen have a strong passion for the volcano. Long life to them; they bring us plenty of money. If our fortunes depended on the Neapolitans, we should starve.'

"True, they have no curiosity,' said Merton. 'Do you remember, Glyndon, the contempt with which that old Count said to us, 'You will go to Vesuvius, I suppose; I have never been: why should I go? you have cold, you have hunger, you have fatigue, you have danger, and all for nothing but to see fire which looks just as well in a brazier as a mountain.' Ha! ha! the old fellow was right.'

'But, Excellency,' said the guide, 'that is not all: some Cavaliers think to ascend the mountain without our help. I am sure they deserve to tumble into the crater.'

"They must be bold fellows to go alone; you don't often find such.'

rose a flame, that assumed a form singularly beauti ful. It might have been compared to a crest of gigantic feathers, the diadem of the mountain, high-arched, and drooping downward, with the hues delicately shaded off, and the whole shifting and tremulous as the plumage on a warrior's helm. The glare of the flame spread, luminous and crimson, over the dark and rugged ground on which they stood, and drew an innumerable variety of shadows from crag and hollow. An oppressive and sulphureous exhalation served to increase the gloomy and sublime terror of the place: but on turning from the mountain, and towards the distant and unseen ocean, the contrast was wonderfully great; the heavens serene and blue, the stars still and calm as the eyes of Divine Love. It was as if the realms of the opposing principles of Evil and of Good were brought in one view before the gaze of man! Glyndon-the enthusiast, the poet, the artist, the dreamer-was enchained and entranced by emotions vague and undefinable, half of delight and half of pain. Leaning on the shoulder of his friend, he gazed around him, and heard, with deepening awe, the tumbling of the earth below, the wheels and voices of the Ministry of Nature in her darkest and most inscrutable recess. Suddenly, as a bomb from a shell, a huge stone was

'Sometimes among the French, Signior. But the other night I never was so frightened: I had been with an English party; and a lady had left a pocketbook on the mountain, where she had been sketching. She offered me a handsome sum to return for it, and bring it to her at Naples. So I went in the evening-flung hundreds of yards up from the jaws of the crater, I found it sure enough, and was about to return, when I saw a figure that seemed to emerge from the crater itself. The air there was so pestiferous, that I could not have conceived a human creature could breathe it, and live. I was so astounded that I stood still as a stone, till the figure came over the hot ashes, and stood before me face to face. Santa Maria, what a head!' 'What, hideous!'

'No! so beautiful, but so terrible. It had nothing human in its aspect.'

'And what said the salamander?'

'Nothing! It did not even seem to perceive me, though I was near as I am to you; but its eyes seemed prying into the air. It passed by me quickly, and, walking across a stream of burning lava, soon vanished on the other side of the mountain. I was curious and foolhardy, and resolved to see if I could bear the atmosphere which this visiter had left: but, though I did not advance within thirty yards of the spot at which he had first appeared, I was driven back by a vapour that well nigh stifled me. Cospetto, I have

and falling with a mighty crash upon the rock below, split into ten thousand fragments, which bounded down the sides of the mountain, sparkling and groaning as they went. One of these, the largest fragment, struck the narrow space of soil between the Englishmen and the guide, not three feet from the spot where the former stood. Merton uttered an exclamation of terror, and Glyndon held his breath, and shuddered.

'Diavolo,' cried the guide. 'Descend, Excellencies, descend; we have not a moment to lose: follow me close.'

So saying, the guide and the peasant fled with as much swiftness as they were able to bring to bear. Merton ever more prompt and ready than his friend, imitated their example; and Glyndon, more confused than alarmed, followed close. But they had not gone many yards, before, with a rushing and sudden blast, came from the crater an enormous volume of vapour. It pursued-it overtook—it overspread them. It swept the light from the heavens. All was abrupt and utter darkness; and through the gloom was heard the shout of the guide, already distant, and lost in an instant amidst the sound of the rushing gust, and the groans

'I knew you would say so,' returned Merton, laugh- of the earth beneath. Glyndon paused. He was sepa

ing.

rated from his friend,-from his guide. He was alone