the time when the sun set, nothing could be more picturesque than
the distant view of this joyous scene. The deep red rays of the
departing luminary cast their radiance, partly from behind the church,
over the vast multitude in the Place. Brightly and rapidly the rich
light roved over the waters that leaped towards it from the fountain in
all the loveliness of natural and evanescent form. Bathed in that
brilliant glow, the smooth porphyry colonnades reflected, chameleon
like, ethereal and varying hues; the white marble statues became
suffused in a delicate rose-colour, and the sober-tinted trees gleamed
in the innermost of their leafy depths as if steeped in the exhalations
of a golden mist. While, contrasting strangely with the wondrous
radiance around them, the huge bronze pine-tree in the middle of the
Place, and the wide front of the basilica, rose up in gloomy shadow,
indefinite and exaggerated, lowering like evil spirits over the joyous
beauty of the rest of the scene, and casting their great depths of
shade into the midst of the light whose dominion they despised. Beheld
from a distance, this wild combination of vivid brightness and solemn
gloom; these buildings, at one place darkened till they looked
gigantic, at another lightened till they appeared ethereal; these
crowded groups, seeming one great moving mass gleaming at this point in
radiant light, obscured at that in thick shadow, made up a whole so
incongruous and yet so beautiful, so grotesque and yet so sublime, that
the scene looked, for the moment, more like some inhabited meteor, half
eclipsed by its propinquity to earth, than a mortal and material
prospect.

The beauties of this atmospheric effect were of far too serious and
sublime a nature to interest the multitude in the Place. Out of the
whole assemblage, but two men watched that glorious sunset with even an
appearance of the admiration and attention which it deserved. One was
the landholder whose wrongs were related in the preceding chapter--the
other his remarkable friend.

These two men formed a singular contrast to each other, both in
demeanour and appearance, as they gazed forth upon the crimson heaven.
The landholder was an under-sized, restless-looking man, whose
features, naturally sharp, were now distorted by a fixed expression of
misery and discontent. His quick, penetrating glance wandered
incessantly from place to place, perceiving all things, but resting on
none. In his atten