range were commingled with the attributes
common to a former age,--these, indeed, were of his own. Our age so
little comprehended, while it colours us from its atmosphere! so full of
mysterious and profound emotions, which our ancestors never knew!--will
those emotions be understood by our descendants?

In this stately house were now assembled, as Harley's guests, many of
the more important personages whom the slow length of this story has
made familiar to the reader. The two candidates for the borough in the
True Blue interest,--Audley Egerton and Randal Leslie; and Levy,--chief
among the barons to whom modern society grants a seignorie of pillage,
which, had a baron of old ever ventured to arrogate, burgess and
citizen, socman and bocman, villein and churl, would have burned him
alive in his castle; the Duke di Serrano, still fondly clinging to his
title of Doctor and pet name of Riccabocca; Jemima, not yet with the
airs of a duchess, but robed in very thick silks, as the chrysalis state
of a duchess; Violante, too, was there, sadly against her will, and
shrinking as much as possible into the retirement of her own chamber.
The Countess of Lansmere had deserted her lord, in order to receive the
guests of her son; my lord himself, ever bent on being of use in some
part of his country, and striving hard to distract his interest from
his plague of a borough, had gone down into Cornwall to inquire into the
social condition of certain troglodytes who worked in some mines which
the earl had lately had the misfortune to wring from the Court of
Chancery, after a lawsuit commenced by his grandfather; and a Blue Book,
issued in the past session by order of parliament, had especially
quoted the troglodytes thus devolved on the earl as bipeds who were
in considerable ignorance of the sun, and had never been known to wash
their feet since the day when they came into the world,--their world
underground, chipped off from the Bottomless Pit!

With the countess came Helen Digby, of course; and Lady Lansmere, who
had hitherto been so civilly cold to the wife elect of her son, had,
ever since her interview with Harley at Knightsbridge, clung to Helen
with almost a caressing fondness. The stern countess was tamed by fear;
she felt that her own influence over Harley was gone; she trusted to
the influence of Helen--in case of what?--ay, what? It was because
the danger was not clear to her that her bold spirit trembled:
superstitions, like