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CHARACTERISTICS OF VICTORIAN LITERATURE

That which in England is conveniently described as the Victorian Age of literature has a character of its own, at once brilliant, diverse, and complex. It is an age peculiarly difficult to label in a phrase; but its copious and versatile gifts will make it memorable in the history of modern civilisation. The Victorian Age, it is true, has no Shakespeare or Milton, no Bacon or Hume, no Fielding or Scott--no supreme master in poetry, philosophy, or romance, whose work is incorporated with the thought of the world, who is destined to form epochs and to endure for centuries. Its genius is more scientific than literary, more historical than dramatic, greater in discovery than in abstract thought.

In lyric poetry and in romance our age has names second only to the greatest; its researches into nature and history are at least equal to those of any previous epoch; and, if it has not many great philosophers, it has developed the latest, most arduous, most important of all the sciences. This is the age of Sociology: its central achievement has been the revelation of social laws. This social aspect of thought colours the poetry, the romance, the literature, the art, and the philosophy of the Victorian Age. Literature has been the gainer thereby in originality and in force. It has been the loser in symmetry, in dignity, in grace.

The Victorian Age is a convenient term in English literature to describe the period from 1837 to 1895: not that we assign any sacramental efficacy to a reign, or assume that the Queen has given any special impulse to the writers of her time. Neither reigns, nor years, nor centuries, nor any arbitrary measure of time in the gradual evolution of thought can be exactly applied, or have any formative influence. A period of so many years, having some well-known name by which it can be labelled, is a mere artifice of classification. And of course an Englishman will not venture to include in his survey the American writers, or to bring them within his national era. The date, 1837, is an arbitrary point, and a purely English point. Yet it is curious how different a colour may be seen in the main current of the English literature produced before and after that year. In the year of the Queen's accession to the throne, the great writers of the early part of this century were either dead or silent. Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Lamb, Sheridan, Hazlitt, Mackintosh, Crabbe, and Cobbett, were gone. There were still living in 1837, Wordsworth, Southey, Campbell, Moore, Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, De Quincey, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Mitford, Leigh Hunt, Brougham, Samuel Rogers:--living, it is true, but they had all produced their important work at some earlier date. Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, Macaulay, Tennyson, Browning, had begun to write, but were not generally known. The principal English authors who belong equally to the Georgian and to the Victorian Age are Landor, Bulwer, Disraeli, Hallam, and Milman, and they are not quite in the very first rank in either age. It is a significant fact that the reign of the Queen has produced, with trifling exceptions, the whole work of Tennyson, the Brownings, Thackeray, Dickens, the Bront?s, George Eliot, Kingsley, Trollope, Spencer, Mill, Darwin, Ruskin, Grote, Macaulay, Freeman, Froude, Lecky, Milman, Green, Maine, Matthew Arnold, Symonds, Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, John Morley, to say nothing of younger men who are still in their prime and promise.

Our literature to-day has many characteristics: but its central note is the dominant influence of Sociology--enthusiasm for social truths as an instrument of social reform. It is scientific, subjective, introspective, historical, archaeological:--full of vitality, versatility, and diligence:--intensely personal, defiant of all law, of standards, of convention:--laborious, exact, but often indifferent to grace, symmetry, or colour:--it is learned, critical, cultured:--with all its ambition and its fine feeling, it is unsympathetic to the highest forms of the imagination, and quite alien to the drama of action.

Side by side with such chastened literary art as that of Thackeray and George Eliot, Matthew Arnold and John Morley, Lecky and Froude, Maine and Symonds, side by side with a Carlylese tendency to extravagance, slang, and caricature, we find another vein in English prose--the flat, ungainly, nerveless style of mere scientific research. What lumps of raw fact are flung at our heads! What interminable gritty collops of learning have we to munch! Through what tangles of uninteresting phenomena are we not dragged in the name of Research, Truth, and the higher Philosophy! Mr. Mill and Mr. Spencer, Mr. Bain and Mr. Sidgwick, have taught our age very much; but no one of them was ever seen to smile; and it is not easy to recall in their voluminous works a single irradiating image or one monumental phrase.

There are eminent historians to-day who disdain the luminous style of Hume and Robertson, and yet deride the colour and fire of Gibbon. Grote poured forth the precious contents of his portentous notebooks with as little care for rhythm and as little sense of proportion as a German professor. Freeman and Gardiner have evidently trained themselves in the same school of elaborate learning, till they would appear to count the graceful English of Froude, Lecky, and Green as hardly becoming the dignity of history. It would seem as if the charge which some of our historians are most anxious to avoid is the charge of being "readable," and of keeping to themselves any fact that they know.

From the death of Scott in 1832 until 1894 are sixty-two years; and if we divide this period into equal parts at the year 1863 , we shall be struck with the fact that the purely literary product of the first period of thirty-one years is superior to the purely literary product of the second period of thirty-one years . The former period gives us all that was best of Tennyson, the Brownings, Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, the Bront?s, Mrs. Gaskell, Trollope, George Eliot, Kingsley, Disraeli, Dr. Arnold, Thirlwall, Grote, Hallam, Milman, Macaulay, Mill, Froude, Layard, Kinglake, Ruskin. The second period gave us in the main, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, G. H. Lewes, Maine, Leslie Stephen, John Morley, Matthew Arnold, Lecky, Freeman, Stubbs, Bryce, Green, Gardiner, Symonds, Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne. Poetry, romance, the critical, imaginative, and pictorial power, dominate the former period: philosophy, science, politics, history are the real inspiration of the latter period.

Poetry began to hover round the problem of Evolution. It wrapped it in mystery, denounced it with fine indignation, and took it for the text of some rather prosaic homilies. Criticism fell into the prevailing theory: so did history, and even romance. Philosophy and Science are not the best foster-mothers of Poetry and Romance. Philosophy and Science grew more solemn than ever; and Poetry and Romance lost something of their wilder fancy and their light heart. Literature grew less spontaneous, more correct, more learned, and, it may be, more absorbed in its practical purpose of modifying social life.

The old notion of literature being a business apart from affairs, of men of letters being an order, of an absorption in books being ample work for a life--all this is far from the rule. At least twenty members of the present and late Governments have been copious writers; Mr. Gladstone and at least three or four of his late colleagues are quite in the front rank of living authors--nay, several of them began their career as literary men. It would be difficult to name an important writer of the Victorian Age who has not at times flung himself with ardour into the great social, political, or religious battles of his time. Thackeray, Trollope, Green, Symonds, are possible exceptions--examples of bookmen who passed their lives with books, and who never wrote to promote "a cause." But all the rest have entered on the "burning questions" of their age, and most of them with the main part of their force. As a consequence "learning," as it was understood by Casaubon, Scaliger, Bentley, Johnson, and Gibbon, as it was understood by Littr?, D?llinger, and Mommsen, may be said to have disappeared in England. Cardinal Newman, Mark Pattison, Dr. Pusey, were said to be very learned, but it was a kind of learning which kept very much to itself. For good or for evil, our literature is now absorbed in the urgent social problem, and is become but an instrument in the vast field of Sociology--the science of Society.

This predominance of Sociology, the restless rapidity of modern life, the omnipresence of material activity, fully account for the special character of modern literature. Literature is no longer "bookish"--but practical, social, propagandist. It is full of life--but it is a dispersive, analytic, erratic form of vitality. It has a most fastidious taste in form--but it often flings the critical spirit aside in its passion for doing, in its ardour to convince and to inspire. It is industrious, full of learning and research--but it regards its learning as an instrument of influence, not as an end of thought. It can work up a poem or an essay, as carefully as Mieris or Breughel polished a cabinet picture--and it can "tear a passion to tatters," or tumble its note-books into a volume all in a heap. It has no "standard," no "model," no "best writer"--and yet it has a curious faculty for reviving every known form and imitating any style. It is intensely historical, but so accurately historical that it is afraid to throw the least colour of imagination around its history. It has consummate poetic feeling, and copious poetic gifts--but it has now no single poet of the first rank. It has infinite romantic resources, and an army of skilful novelists--and yet it has no single living writer worthy to be named beside the great romancers of the nineteenth century.

This rich, many-sided, strenuous literature, which will place the name of Victoria higher than that of Elizabeth in the history of our language, would form a splendid subject hereafter for some one of our descendants who was equal to the task of treating our Victorian literature as a whole. In the meantime, it may be worth while for the men and women of to-day, who are full of all the excellent work around us, to be reminded of the good things produced now nearly sixty years ago. As one who can remember much that was given to the world in a former generation, I shall endeavour in these little sketches to mark some of the characteristics of the best writers in the early Victorian Age, confining myself for the present to prose literature of the imaginative kind.

It is now some time since the country of Shakespeare and of Milton has been without its poet laureate, and to the non-poetical world the absence of that court functionary is hardly perceptible. Nay, the question has begun to arise, If there is to be a laureate in poetry, why not a laureate also in prose romance? And if there were a laureate in prose romance, whom should we choose?

We need not engage in any critical estimate of these writers: we are but too well aware of their failures and defects. Lytton indited not a little bombast, Dickens had his incurable mannerisms, and Thackeray his conventional cynicisms. There are passages in George Eliot's romances which read like sticky bits from a lecture on comparative palaeontology; and Disraeli, who for fifty years threw off most readable tales in the intervals of politics, seems always to be laughing at the public behind his mask. Yet the good sense of mankind remembers the best and forgets the worst, even if the worst be four-fifths of the whole.

We come, then, to this, that for the first time during this whole century now ending, English literature can count no living novelist whom the world, and not merely the esoteric circle of cultured Englishmen, consents to stamp with the mark of accepted fame. One is too eccentric, obscure, and subtle, another too local and equal, a third too sketchy, this one too unreal, that one far too real, too obvious, too prosaic, to win and to hold the great public by their spell. Critics praise them, friends utter rhapsodies, good judges enjoy them--but their fame is partial, local, sectional, compared to the fame of Scott, Dickens, or Thackeray.

What is the cause? I do not hesitate to say it is that we have over-trained our taste, we are overdone with criticism, we are too systematically drilled, there is far too much moderate literature and far too fastidious a standard in literature. Everyone is afraid to let himself go, to offend the conventions, or to raise a sneer. It is the inevitable result of uniformity in education and discipline in mental training. Millions can write good grammar, easy and accurate sentences, and imitate the best examples of the age. Education has been driven at high pressure into literary lines, and a monotonous correctness in literary taste has been erected into a moral code. Tens of thousands of us can put the finger on a bit of exaggeration, or a false light in the local colour, or a slip in perfect realism. The result is a photographic accuracy of detail, a barren monotony of commonplace, and the cramping of real inventive genius. It is the penalty of giving ourselves up to mechanical culture.

There are other things which check the flow of a really original literature, though perhaps a high average culture and a mechanical system of education may be the most potent. Violent political struggles check it: an absorption in material interests checks it: uniformity of habits, a general love of comfort, conscious self-criticism, make it dull and turbid. Now our age is marked by all of these. From the age of Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, the French genius produced almost no imaginative work of really European importance until it somewhat revived again with Chateaubriand in the present century. Nor in England can we count anything of a like kind from the death of Goldsmith until we reach Scott, Byron, and Wordsworth after an interval of forty years. In the United States the great eras of imaginative production have been those which were free from political and military struggles.

The case of France is indeed conclusive proof how suddenly political turmoil kills imaginative work. French literature, which during the greater part of the eighteenth century had shown amazing activity, suddenly seems arrested with Rousseau; and in the latter years of the eighteenth century there is absolutely nothing of even moderate quality in the field of art. The same is true of England for the last thirty years of the same century. Shakespeare's dramas were not produced till his country had victoriously passed through the death-struggle of the religious wars in the sixteenth century. The civil war of the Puritans arrested poetry, so that for nearly thirty years the muse of Milton himself withdrew into her solitary cell. Dryden carried on the torch for a time. But prose literature did not revive in England until the Hanoverian settlement. Political ferment kills literature: prolonged war kills it: social agitation unnerves it; and still more the uneasy sense of being on the verge of great and unknown change.

There is upon us also, both in England and in America, a social ferment that goes deeper than any mere constitutional struggle. It is the vague, profound, multiform, and mysterious upheaval that is loosely called Socialism--not Socialism in any definite formula, but the universal yearning of the millions for power, consideration, material improvement, and social equality. The very vagueness, universality, and unbounded scope of the claim they make constitute its power. All orders and classes are concerned in it: all minds of whatever type are affected by it: every political, social, or industrial axiom has to be reconsidered in the light of it: it appeals to all men and it enters into life at every corner and pore. We are like men under the glamour of some great change impending. The spell of a new order holds us undecided and expectant. There is something in the air, and that something is a vague and indescribable sense that a new time is coming. Men felt it in France, and indeed all over Europe, from 1780 till 1790. It was an uncertain and rather pleasing state of expectancy. It did not check activity, nor enjoyment, nor science. But it diverted the profounder minds from the higher forms of imaginative work.

Comfort, electric light, railway sleeping-cars, and equality are excellent things, but they are the death of romance. The essence of romance is variety, contrast, individuality, the eccentric, the unconventional. Level up society, put nineteen out of every twenty on fairly equal terms, popularise literature, and turn the Ten Commandments into a code of decorum, and you cut up by the roots all romantic types of life. The England of Fielding and the Scotland of Scott were breezy, boisterous, disorderly, picturesque, and jolly worlds, where gay and hot spirits got into mischief and played mad pranks as, in the words of the old song, "They powlered up and down a bit and had a rattling day." Laws, police, total abstinence, general education, and weak digestions have put an end to pranks, as we are all proud to say. The result is that Romance, finding little of romance in the real world, has taken two different lines in the desperate effort to amuse us somehow. The virtuous line is the phonographic reproduction of everyday life in ordinary situations. The disreputable line is Zolaesque bestiality, and forced, unreal, unlovely, and hysterical sensationalism.

The novelist must draw from the living model and he must address the people of his own age. He cannot write for posterity, nor can he live in a day-dream world of his own. The poet is often lost to his own contemporaries. It may need two or three, five or six, generations to reveal him, as Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, and Wordsworth may remind us. But the novelist must live in his generation, be of it most intensely, and if he is to delight at all, like the actor, he must delight his own age. What sons of their own time were Fielding, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope: how intensely did they drink with both hands from the cup of life. George Eliot, George Meredith, Louis Stevenson, Howells, James, look on life from a private box. We see their kid gloves and their opera-glass and we know that nothing could ever take them on to the stage and ruffle it with the world of the day, like men of the world who mean to taste life. There is no known instance of a great novelist who lived obscure in a solitary retreat or who became famous only after the lapse of many generations.

Let us have no nonsense, no topsy-turvy straining after new effects, which is so wearisome to those who love the racy naturalism of Parson Adams and Edie Ochiltree. But let us have no pessimism also. The age is against the romance of colour, movement, passion, and jollity. But it is full of the romance of subtle and decorous psychology. It is not the highest art: it is indeed a very limited art. But it is true art: wholesome, sound, and cheerful. The world does not exist in order to supply brilliant literature; and the march of democratic equality and of decorous social uniformity is too certain a thing, in one sense too blessed a thing, to be denied or to be denounced. An age of colour, movement, variety, and romantic beauty will come again one day, we know not how. There will be then a romance of passion and incident, of strenuous ambition and mad merriment. But not to-day nor to-morrow. Let us accept what the dregs of the nineteenth century can give us, without murmuring and repining for what it cannot give and should not seek to give.

In this little series of studies, I shall make no attempt to estimate the later literature of the Victorian Age, nor will I at all refer to any living writer. Nor shall I deal with social and moral philosophy, poetry, art, or religion. I propose to look back, from our present point of view, on the literature, in the narrower sense of the term, produced in the earlier part of the Queen's reign.

THOMAS CARLYLE

It is now for about half a century that the world has had all that is most masterly in the work of Thomas Carlyle. And a time has arrived when we may very fairly seek to weigh the sum total of influence which he left on his own and on subsequent generations. We are now far enough off, neither to be dazzled by his eloquence nor irritated by his eccentricities. The men whom he derided and who shook their heads at him are gone: fresh problems, new hopes, other heroes and prophets whom he knew not, have arisen. Our world is in no sense his world. And it has become a very fair question to ask--What is the residuum of permanent effect from these great books of his, which have been permeating English thought for half a century and more?

It is a rare honour for any writer--at least for one who is neither poet nor novelist--to have his productions live beyond two generations, and to continue to be a great literary force, when fifty years have altered all the conditions in which he wrote and the purposes and ideas which he treated. It cannot be said that Carlyle's effective influence is less now than it was a generation ago. It has lived through the Utilitarian and Evolution movements and has not been extinguished by them. And Thomas Carlyle bids fair to enter into that sacred band whose names outlive their own century and give some special tone to their national literature.

On the other hand, if these masterpieces of sixty years ago are not quite amongst the great books of the world, it would be preposterous to regard them as obsolete, or such as now interest only the historian of literature. They are read to-day practically as much as ever, and are certain to be read for a generation or two to come. But they are not read to-day with the passionate delight in the wonderful originality, nor have they the commanding authority they seemed to possess for the faithful disciples of the forties and the fifties. Nor can any one suppose that the next century will continue to read them, except with an open and unbiassed mind, and a willingness to admit that even here there is much dead wood, gross error, and pitiable exaggeration. When we begin to read in that spirit, however splendid be the imagination, and however keen the logic, we are no longer under the spell of a master: we are reading a memorable book, with a primary desire to learn how former generations looked upon things.

Confused and agitated, the fair Portuguese half sunk upon her knee, faltering out a few words of humility and gratitude: Sebastian hastened to raise, and clasp her in his arms, while he explained his intention of recalling her father from France in order to witness their immediate marriage. Donna Gonsalva changed colour, averted her eyes, hesitated, panted for breath, and at length apprehensively confessed that she was under engagements to a young nobleman; nay, that her father had given her to him in marriage at the age of seven years.

Had the earth opened at the feet of Sebastian, he could not have felt more horror.--Speechless with emotion, his looks only continued to interrogate Gonsalva: she trembled and wept, but conjured him to believe that after the ceremony was performed, she had almost forgotten it, as her bridegroom had gone out to Goa with his grandfather the viceroy of India, and was but lately returned.

"And you have seen him Gonsalva?" asked the King mournfully. "Yes, I have seen him thrice, but without giving him the least hope that I would ratify the cruel engagement in which my infant mind had no share.--When he visited me last, you were absent, your love was doubtful, your real rank unknown, I was uncertain whether you might ever return to me, and yet I told him my resolution."

"Then you loved me from the first?" cried the transported Sebastian, "let not my Gonsalva ever again torture me with assumed indifference, when this conduct shews that she preferred the pain of concealment to the hazard of losing me by the early mention of this hateful obstacle. Take courage, dearest! ties like these may be broken without dishonour; and thank God! I am a King."

After this conference the rash young monarch dispatched couriers into France with letters to the count Vimiosa, demanding his daughter, and inviting him to return and assist in dissolving the bands which tied her to Don Emanuel de Castro: at the same time he sent a magnificent embassy to Rome, praying for a divorce; and commissioned his cousin Antonio to see and converse with Don Emanuel.

Meanwhile Donna Gonsalva had hinted to Sebastian the impropriety of exposing her reputation to the scandal of being discovered in a clandestine intercourse with her sovereign: having no longer a reason for concealment, Sebastian embraced the permission this hint gave him, and came with a splendid retinue to Vimiosa. His lords saw nothing extraordinary in a young monarch paying a courteous visit to the sister and daughter of one of his greatest subjects, but no sooner did they behold the transcendent beauty of Donna Gonsalva, and the emotion of their royal master, than a suspicion of the truth was awakened amongst them.

Lost in a round of new and delightful enjoyments, Sebastian was from that hour continually at the house of his mistress: his cousin accompanied him in these visits, and warmly applauded his choice. But the eloquence of the latter had been used in vain to obtain an hearing from Don Emanuel De Castro; that young nobleman refusing to converse on the subject of her marriage with any other than the King himself.

Sebastian's nature was too generous not to revolt from some arbitrary measures which Antonio suggested in the height of his zeal and displeasure: he refused to degrade or distress his rival; and the dictates of delicacy forbade him to attempt purchasing his acquiescence by mere honours.

De Castro was indeed worthy of this liberal treatment: he had distinguished himself in the Indies under his grandfather, by the most brilliant services. His intrepidity and genius for war were not the only themes of praise; to these were added justice, temperance, a benevolent attention to the natural propensities, habits, and even prejudices of the Indians, and a conciliating manner which subdued them still more than his arms. Filial piety was the first of his virtues: after twelve years residence in India, a dangerous disease fastened upon his aged parent, which compelled him to return home: Don Emanuel was advised to remain at Goa, where he would in all probability receive an immediate nomination to succeed the viceroy in his government; but he refused to act thus:--abandoning this expectation, and resigning his military command, he left the eastern world, chiefly for the sake of softening the discomforts of a tedious voyage to a relation he revered; though the idea of claiming his young bride sweetened the sacrifice.

On reaching Portugal, the viceroy had gone to his seat at Santaren, from whence Don Emanuel had twice visited Gonsalva: but the death of his beloved grandfather quickly followed, and prevented him from seeing her again, till the first days of his mourning were passed.--Don Emanuel was preparing to appear at court for the first time, when the King's pleasure was intimated to him by the prior of Crato. Refusing to discuss so important a matter with a third person, he was ordered into the presence of his sovereign.--The King alone, and secretly at war with himself, received him with embarrassment: his excessive emotion formed a decided contrast to the grave and dignified composure of De Castro. The latter was just going to pay the usual mark of homage to princes, when Sebastian impetuously caught him by the arm, exclaiming, "Bend not your knee to one who would dismiss from your mind in this conference all thought of his authority: I wish you to hear me, Don Emanuel, not as a King, who might insist, but as a man who is willing to submit to the decision of equity.--In conversing on this interesting topic, let us think only of the rights and the happiness of Donna Gonsalva--let us forget, if possible, our own desires.--Believe me, if I did not flatter myself with being inexpressibly dear to her, if I did not abhor and renounce with my whole heart this unnatural practice of infant nuptials, I would not seek to release her hand, though certain of commanding it the next instant:--nay, had I known earlier of her engagements, preposterous as I deem them, I would have avoided the scandal and the pain of dissolving them."

De Castro fixed his eyes upon the ingenuous though disturbed countenance of the King: esteem and compassion were in the look.--"This is the first time," he said, "in which I have had the honour of seeing and conversing with my sovereign, and I foresee it will add to my former loyalty, the sentiments of gratitude and admiration.--my fortunes, my services, my life, sire, are at your feet, dispose of them henceforth as you will; but I beseech you for your own honour and happiness, for the sake of your people, proceed no further in dissolving my union with Donna Gonsalva."

Embarrassed yet not confounded, Don Emanuel was silent; the king pressed his remark with increased ardour, adding, in a tone of greater emotion, "You were contracted to Donna Gonsalva at the age of thirteen, you went immediately after to India, from whence you are returned but three months; in that period you have seen the fair Gonsalva only thrice, and that in reserved interviews before her aunt, where nothing beyond personal graces could speak to your senses. No charm of varied discourse; no enchantment of sensibility could penetrate to your soul; the coldness of her feelings must have chilled yours: love feeds, grows, lives upon love! Can you then, will you then have the injustice to place your mere admiration of her beauty upon a par with my lively preference of her character, and my tender sympathy with her disinterested affection? Have a care, Don Emmanuel, force me not to resume the King; you may rouse me into measures which otherwise I would have spurned."

"I trust, Sire, to your own conviction of the justice of my claim, replied De Castro firmly, the king of Portugal is born to be the glory and the examplar of Kings: he will teach the Portuguese to obey the laws, by first obeying them himself; he will respect even the simplest rights of his subjects; he will reflect that absolute power tempts to oppression, and renders self-denial the greatest effort of virtue; and in proportion as injustice is easy to him, his magnanimity will render it difficult." Don Emanuel paused, but Sebastian was silent; for there was something in Don Emanuel's manner which at once inspired respect, and rivetted attention: interpreting his sovereign's looks, that nobleman continued--"Pardon my boldness, sire, if I venture to tell you, that in marrying a subject, and that subject a woman ravished from her husband, you will stain your unsullied name, and disappoint your people. Hitherto, monarchs of Portugal have strengthened their power by foreign alliances--you, sire, have refused daughters of France and Spain; and when it is known that you have refused them for a private person, may we not dread the consequences?"

"What! Don Emanuel," interrupted Sebastian, "does your otherwise admirable theory of a prince's duties, lead to this extravagant conclusion, that he is bound to sacrifice his domestic happiness to a mere shew of benefitting his people?--Is a powerful alliance more than a political pageant?--When did you ever find the dearest connections amongst earthly potentates, able to counterbalance the promptings of ambition and opportunity? every solid advantage would be as firmly secured to Portugal by my union with a subject as with a princess. I am not the first King of Portugal who has declared that 'marriage is the prerogative of every man.'"

"De Castro," said the King earnestly, "tell me that you tenderly, exclusively love her--swear it to me by your hope of eternal salvation, and whatever it may cost me, I will relinquish my own happiness, but never again expect to behold the face of your sovereign: for the man who would force to his arms an unwilling bride, must have a soul with which mine can have no fellowship."

Extremely affected by the honourable emotion of his royal master, Don Emanuel's voice faltered as he replied, "My nature, sire, is incapable of deriving gratification from any forced submission; much less from that submission of woman's heart, which must be voluntary to be sweet:--be assured Donna Gonsalva shall not be compelled into my arms. To swear I love her dearer than any thing on earth, would be false, for I love my King better: I take Heaven to witness it is more for his honor and prosperity, than for my own wishes, that I thus desperately risk his displeasure. Time, perhaps, may plead in my justification, and convince you, sire, that though I refuse every other ground of discussion except that of right, yet am I sincere when I repeat, that for loyalty and the most passionate wish for your majesty's real happiness, my heart may challenge any heart in Portugal."

Sebastian's indignant eyes searched the countenance of Don Emanuel; "There is a proud mystery about you, sir," he said, "which displeases me:--I have humbled myself too much.--Since it is to be a question of right, learn to respect the rights of your prince. From this hour know that I will be obeyed."

At this unexpected question, the King lost all command of his passions, and fiercely motioned for Don Emanuel to withdraw; his look and gesture were too violent not to warn de Castro that he trod on the brink of a precipice: that young nobleman rose from the ground, and as he bowed respectfully, a deep sigh escaped him, he bowed again, and left the King to his own thoughts.

Sebastian's mind was a tempest of angry feelings. It was now evident, that unless the presence and arguments of the Count Vimiosa should prevail over De Castro's obstinacy, he must be forced to use compulsion: such measures were so abhorrent to his nature that he felt increased aversion for the man who thus rendered them necessary.

Don Emanuel was forbid to appear at court; yet his still generous, though indignant sovereign, neither abridged his honours nor his liberty: he testified his displeasure merely by banishing him from his presence. The prior of Crato observed this moderation and blamed it: Sebastian answered him by saying, "De Castro has to thank me for much more forbearance: were I to follow the dictates of my proud spirit, I would crush him with benefits, and render this perseverance odious to the whole world. But I disdain to take so unfair an advantage." Antonio was not reconciled to such a refinement of honour, yet he attempted not to ridicule it. The arrival of the Count Vimiosa revived the spirits of the King; from him he expected implicit submission, and he found it. The Count had early learned the court lesson of obedience; and was besides intoxicated with the height to which his daughter's elevation would raise himself: he professed his willingness to repair in person to Rome for the dispensation; inveighing bitterly against the rash and selfish man who thus ventured to contend with his prince.

Sebastian could not conceal from his own thoughts that he despised this pliant father, who boasted acquiescence as the fruit of reverence to royal authority, not as springing from the conviction of woman's right to dispose of her affection and her hand: Sebastian was accustomed to estimate the value of men's actions by their motives; and scorning those of Vimiosa, scarcely brooked his presence even in the society of his daughter. However, for her sake he gave him the palace of Xabregas, to which she was shortly after removed with her discreet aunt from the vicinity of Crato.

Though debarred from personally appearing before the King, Don Emanuel addressed a letter to him full of duteous affection, in which he offered to forego all claim upon Donna Gonsalva, provided she continued to wish it at the expiration of six months: but for that period he stipulated that she must either retire into a convent, or accept the protection of his aunt Donna Garcia di Nugnez, a lady of unblemished reputation, under her roof she might receive his visits, and those of the King also.

This proposal De Castro pressed with such earnestness that Sebastian was induced to consider it--there was such an air of sincerity in the whole of that young nobleman's conduct, and his character had hitherto been so irreproachable, that it was impossible even for the passion-blinded King to refuse believing him innocent of wanton insolence. Whatever romantic notions of right and honour might tempt him into the present opposition, it was evident that he rather sought to give his prince time to recollect himself, than finally to thwart his wishes.

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