t talk about those names of gentle blood,
familiar to the ear as household words, Uvedale and Scrope, Vavasour and
Ratcliffe? Why not press into the service of instructive novelism truths
stranger than fiction, among characters more marked, and names of higher
note, than the whole hot-pressed family of the Fitzes?

All this might be accomplished, were it worth the worry, in

THE PRIOR OF MARRICK.

And now for a story of idolatry. It seems an absurdity, an insanity; it
is one--both. But think it out. Is it quite impossible, quite
incredible? Let me sketch the outline of so strange infatuation. Our
prior was once a good man--an easy, kind, and amiable: he takes the cowl
in early youth, partly because he is the younger son of an unfighting
family, and must, partly because he is melancholy, and will. And
wherefore melancholy? There was brought up with him, from the very
nursery, a fair girl, the weeping orphan of a neighbouring squire, who
had buckled on his harness, and fallen in the wars: they loved, of
course, and the deeper, because secretly and without permission: they
were too young to marry, and indeed had thought little of the matter;
still, substance and shadow, body and soul, were scarcely more needful
to each other, or more united. But--a hacking cough--a hectic cheek--a
wasting frame, were to blue-eyed Mary the remorseless harbingers of
death, and Eustace, standing on her early grave, was in heart a widower:
henceforth he had no aim in life; the cloister was--so thought he, as
many do--his best refuge, to dream upon the past, to soothe his present
sorrows, and earn for a future world the pleasures lost in this. Time,
the best anodyne short of what Eustace could not buy at
Rome--true-healing godliness--alleviates his grief, and makes him less
sad, but not wiser; years pass, the desire of preeminence in his own
small world has hitherto furnished incentives to existence, and he find
himself a prior too soon; for he has nothing more to live for. Yes:
there is an object; the turmoil of small ambition with its petty cares
is past, and the now motiveless man lingers in yearning thought on the
only white spot in his gloomy journey, the green oasis of his desert
life, that dream of early love. He has long loved the fair, quiet image
of our Lady of Marrick, unwittingly, for another Mary's sake;
half-oblivious of the past in scheming for the present, he has knelt at
midnight before that figure of the Virgin-mothe