resses of exceedingly
rich fabric and elaborate design. Imagination is whimsical enough to
paint for me the character of the room itself, as having an arcade of
arches running down one side alone, of the fantastic and paganised
Gothic of the Renaissance. At the end is a gallery or balcony for the
musicians, which on its coved front has a florid coat of arms of foreign
heraldry. The shield bears, on a field _or_, a cherub's head blowing on
three lilies--a blazon I have no doubt seen somewhere in my travels,
though I cannot recollect where. This scene, I say, is so nearly
connected in my brain with the _Gagliarda_, that scarcely are its first
notes sounded ere it presents itself to my eyes with a vividness which
increases every day. The couples advance, set, and recede, using free
and licentious gestures which my imagination should be ashamed to
recall. Amongst so many foreigners, fancy pictures, I know not in the
least why, the presence of a young man of an English type of face, whose
features, however, always elude my mind's attempt to fix them. I think
that the opening subject of this _Gagliarda_ is a superior composition
to the rest of it, for it is only during the first sixteen bars that the
vision of bygone revelry presents itself to me. With the last note of
the sixteenth bar a veil is drawn suddenly across the scene, and with a
sense almost of some catastrophe it vanishes. This I attribute to the
fact that the second subject must be inferior in conception to the
first, and by some sense of incongruity destroys the fabric which the
fascination of the preceding one built up."

My brother, though he had listened with interest to what Mr. Gaskell had
said, did not reply, and the subject was allowed to drop.

CHAPTER III

It was in the same summer of 1842, and near the middle of June, that my
brother John wrote inviting me to come to Oxford for the Commemoration
festivities. I had been spending some weeks with Mrs. Temple, a distant
cousin of ours, at their house of Royston in Derbyshire, and John was
desirous that Mrs. Temple should come up to Oxford and chaperone
her daughter Constance and myself at the balls and various other
entertainments which take place at the close of the summer term. Owing
to Royston being some two hundred miles from Worth Maltravers, our
families had hitherto seen little of one another, but during my present
visit I had learned to love Mrs. Temple, a lady of singular sweetness of
d