inking individuals better or worse than
they really were, and she believed it to be out of the power of anyone
to deceive her. Constant attendance during many years on a dying and
beloved mother, and her deeply religious feelings, had first broken, and
then controlled, a spirit which nature had intended to be arrogant and
haughty. Her father she adored; and she seemed to devote to him all
that consideration which, with more common characters, is generally
distributed among their acquaintance. We hint at her faults. How
shall we describe her virtues? Her unbounded generosity, her dignified
simplicity, her graceful frankness, her true nobility of thought and
feeling, her firmness, her courage and her truth, her kindness to
her inferiors, her constant charity, her devotion to her parents, her
sympathy with sorrow, her detestation of oppression, her pure unsullied
thoughts, her delicate taste, her deep religion. All these combined
would have formed a delightful character, even if unaccompanied with
such brilliant talents and such brilliant beauty. Accustomed from an
early age to the converse of courts and the forms of the most polished
circles, her manner became her blood, her beauty, and her mind. Yet
she rather acted in unison with the spirit of society than obeyed its
minutest decree. She violated etiquette with a wilful grace which made
the outrage a precedent, and she mingled with princes without feeling
her inferiority. Nature, and art, and fortune were the graces which had
combined to form this girl. She was a jewel set in gold, and worn by a
king.

Her creed had made her, in ancient Christendom, feel less an alien; but
when she returned to that native country which she had never forgotten,
she found that creed her degradation. Her indignant spirit clung with
renewed ardour to the crushed altars of her faith; and not before those
proud shrines where cardinals officiate, and a thousand acolytes fling
their censers, had she bowed with half the abandonment of spirit with
which she invoked the Virgin in her oratory at Dacre.

The recent death of her mother rendered Mr. Dacre and herself little
inclined to enter society; and as they were both desirous of residing on
that estate from which they had been so long and so unwillingly absent,
they had not yet visited London. The greater part of their time had been
passed chiefly in communication with those great Catholic families with
whom the Dacres were allied, and to which