d feel. He was yet
engaged in this easy task, when Cesarini was announced, and the young
brother of the fair Teresa entered his apartment.

"I have availed myself soon of your invitation," said the Italian.

"I acknowledge the compliment," replied Maltravers, pressing the hand
shyly held out to him.

"I see you have been writing--I thought you were attached to literature.
I read it in your countenance, I heard it in your voice," said Cesarini,
seating himself.

"I have been idly beguiling a very idle leisure, it is true," said
Maltravers.

"But you do not write for yourself alone--you have an eye to the great
tribunals--Time and the Public."

"Not so, I assure you honestly," said Maltravers, smiling. "If you
look at the books on my table, you will see that they are the great
masterpieces of ancient and modern lore--these are studies that
discourage tyros--"

"But inspire them."

"I do not think so. Models may form our taste as critics, but do not
excite us to be authors. I fancy that our own emotions, our own sense
of our destiny, make the great lever of the inert matter we accumulate.
'Look in thy heart and write,' said an old English writer,* who did not,
however, practise what he preached. And you, Signor--"

* Sir Philip Sidney.

"Am nothing, and would be something," said the young man, shortly and
bitterly.

"And how does that wish not realise its object?"

"Merely because I am Italian," said Cesarini. "With us there is no
literary public--no vast reading class--we have dilettanti and literati,
and students, and even authors; but these make only a coterie, not a
public. I have written, I have published; but no one listened to me. I
am an author without readers."

"It is no uncommon case in England," said Maltravers.

The Italian continued: "I thought to live in the mouths of men--to stir
up thoughts long dumb--to awaken the strings of the old lyre! In vain.
Like the nightingale, I sing only to break my heart with a false and
melancholy emulation of other notes."

"There are epochs in all countries," said Maltravers, gently, "when
peculiar veins of literature are out of vogue, and when no genius
can bring them into public notice. But you wisely said there were two
tribunals--the Public and Time. You have still the last to appeal to.
Your great Italian historians wrote for the unborn--their works not even
published till their death. That indifference to living reputation has
in it, to me, somethi