uld let him roast by a slow fire if
this would procure her an invitation to a certain ball.

"THE ITALIAN IN ENGLAND" is the supposed adventure of a leading Italian
patriot, told by himself in later years. He tells how he was hiding from
the Austrians, who had put a price upon his head, and were scouring the
country in pursuit of him; how, impelled by hunger, he disclosed his
place of concealment to a peasant girl--the last of a troop of villagers
who were passing by; and how she saved his life at the risk of her own,
and when she would have been paid in gold for betraying him. He relates
also that his first thought was to guard himself against betrayal by not
telling her who he was; but that her loyal eyes, her dignified form and
carriage (perhaps too, the consummate tact with which she had responded
to his signal) in another moment had put the thought to flight, and he
fearlessly placed his own, and his country's destiny in her hands. He is
an exile in England now. Friends and brothers have made terms with the
oppressor, and his home is no longer theirs. But among the wishes which
still draw him to his native land, is one, less acknowledged than the
rest and which perhaps lies deeper, that he may see that noble woman
once more; talk to her of the husband who was then her lover, of her
children, and her home; and, once more, as he did in parting from her,
kiss her hand in gratitude, and lay his own in blessing on her
head.[102]

"PROTUS" is a fragment of an imaginary chronicle: recording in the same
page and under the head of the same year, how the child-Emperor, Protus,
descended from a god, was growing in beauty and in grace, worshipped by
the four quarters of the known world; and how John, the Pannonian
blacksmith's bastard, came and took the Empire; but, as "some think,"
let Protus live--to be heard of later as dependent in a foreign court;
or perhaps to become the monk, whom rumour speaks of as bearing his
name, and who died at an advanced age in Thrace.

A fit comment on this Empire lost and won, is supplied by two busts,
also imaginary, one showing a "rough hammered" coarse-jawed head; the
other, a baby face, crowned with a wreath of violets.

"APPARENT FAILURE" is Mr. Browning's verdict on three drowned men, whose
bodies he saw exposed at the Morgue[103] in Paris, in the summer of
1856. He justly assumes that the death was suicide; and as he reads in
each face its special story of struggle and disappoi