no more, that there is a Power, invisible indeed, but certain, who at this moment sees and hears us?”

"We are going too deep," said Lord Cleveland. "You did not think so when you hazarded your observation; for, to come to the conclusion that what we have been speaking of is nothing but conjecture, you must have gone to the very bottom of the subject, and at least settled that our opinion is not capable of proof." The Earl hesitated.

"Lord Cleveland," said De Vere, "you cannot answer this."

A short silence ensued.

"Come," proceeded Herbert; "what would you say, if, wherever you turned, whatever you were doing, whatever thinking, in public or private, with a confidential friend telling your secrets, or alone planning them (but especially the latter); if, I say, you actually saw an eye perpetually fixed upon you, from whose watching, though you strove ever so much, you could never escape?"

"The supposition is awful enough," answered Cleveland; a sentiment which the whole company echoed.

"And even if you closed your own eye to avoid it," continued the Doctor, "you found that to get rid of it was impossible; that it still stared at you, entered your very brain, and into the region of thought itself."

"I beseech you come to your conclusion," cried Cleveland, "for I don't like the supposition at all, though it is merely visionary."

"Well then," said the Divine, "would you hold that such an eye did not demonstrate that there was personality somewhere (though you could not see the rest of it), to which the eye belonged, and which personality was ever near you? Would it, I say, only be conjecture that there was such personality, though all but the eye were invisible?"

"If the supposition were true," answered Cleveland, "I would admit the consequence."

"There is such an eye," observed Herbert.

"Yes!" replied Cleveland, trying to be gay; "but only in the Book of Common Prayer. For I now remember it in a picture at the beginning of the service of the fifth of November; and it interested me much as

a child, because it was drawn with rays issuing out of it, which discovered the gunpowder plot. But I was a child, and only as a child liked and believed it, as other children did."

"Yet the children were right,” replied the Divine, "though they might mistake the process of their belief. When grown to men, from seeing their mistake as to this process, and that there is no such real eye visible to their own, they begin to doubt, or feel hard of belief -as some timorous people are valiant after the disappearance of a ghost. Nevertheless the children's is the true account. And I would again ask, if this does not lead to something far deeper than conjecture?"

The conviction of the company left Herbert without

an answer.

In

"I allow, however," continued the President, "it is not common to have these impressions. The soul must be attuned to them in something like abstraction from the business and struggles of the world. erowds we are too much interrupted; in the race of selfinterest, we are too much perverted; in camps we are struggling for life and death; in courts we see none but the eye of a human sovereign. Nevertheless, the Divine eye is always upon us; and whilst we least think of it, is noting all, and, whatever we may think, be assured, will remember all."

Lord Cleveland tried to laugh off the seriousness which this occasioned; and after a few light speeches which did him no good with Constance, observed with raillery, if not with something like a sneer, that no doubt the Divine, who seemed to know so much about it, must, in his secret communings with supernatural power, have seen this eye.

"To say I have seen it visible to sense," replied Herbert, would not only mock the truth, but my own supposition, which was, that there was no such object operating upon material organs. But these com

munings are not the less real for all that."

"And you have experienced them?"

"I have; and (laugh as you please) have always felt the better for them."

"Perhaps you have heard voices too?""

"I have!"

"Sounding in your ear?" "In the ear,-no!"

"In the heart?"

"Yes!-Nor is there any one, I believe, so sophisticated by bad habits, or corroded by worldliness, as not, at one time or other, to have heard the voice of his Maker, in that Maker's inimitable works. It is not the less real, because we know not how it produces its effects. In this respect, it is like the music of enchantment, which all of you may have admired in the song of that divine man who so well describes it;music which seems

He ceased, and all the party were silent for some minutes. The ideas with which he concluded sank deep into their hearts, and still fascinated their attention. In fact, all were afraid to lose, by interrupting him, whatever farther he might have to say;-and for a while they were lost in mental abstraction.

At length, the President having finally concluded, he received the warm thanks of his little audience for the satisfaction he had afforded them. Constance alone was silent; for her feelings were too deep for utterance: but her looks showed that the obligation was not the less felt, because unexpressed; and when they proceeded with their walk, she found herself, uninvited, putting her arm within Herbert's, in a manner so frank, and at the same time so modest, that whilst it delighted the person whom she so distinguished, it appeared to please almost all the rest of the party. She gained by it with De Vere, as we hope she will with the reader. For, amongst all the traits of a young and naïve girl, we know none so pleasing as the pleasure she sometimes feels, (and shows she feels,) in a familiar and sanctioned intercourse with a man much her senior, to whose wisdom she defers, and on whose kindness she relies. In this instance, Constance's long acquaintance with Herbert, who had known her from a child, her

respect for him, and the obligation he had just seemed to confer upon her, in satisfying her heart on points vital to its happiness, seemed to make this pleasure doubly natural; and her manner of showing it (fresh and charming as her youth) interested all who saw it, and above all, De Vere.

CHAPTER II.

A MORTIFIED MAN OF QUALITY.

Trust me, I am exceeding weary.

Is it come to that? I had thought weariness durst not have attacked one of so high blood.

SHAKSPEARE.

LORD CLEVELAND was not of a temper, any more than of habits, to be satisfied with the situation, in which he was left in the last chapter: for not only he felt he had made no way with Constance during the birth-day, but it was evident that the elder ladies, who had appeared so much his friends at first, were so no longer; and, though for this he would have cared little in itself, yet, as an indication of his position with Constance, it was ruinous to his hopes.

"It is strange, ," said he to himself, "how fond old people are of interfering with young; and stranger still, how the young will permit it. Let us see, however, whether this sober, serious, fair one, can stand a winter in town."

He then remembered his observations on the masque, evidently overheard by these eternal old ladies, and evidently communicated to Lady Constance, with no good result to the critic. The bard cousin was only in greater favour; and now the good Doctor seemed to have given a finishing blow to Cleveland's morning hopes. For, delighted with the distinction with which his young friend treated him, and being a stout and quick walker, Herbert fairly carried off Constance, far

before the rest of the party, to the Dairy-house; nor did the lightness and airiness of her step, or the symmetry and grace which the folds of her drapery, agitated by the breeze, disclosed, at all contribute to deaden the admiration of this once puissant and haughty lord of fashion, whose attention was thought honour by all the rest of the world.

Left behind by the only being whom he sought as a companion, to arrange his feelings, as he might, with persons whom he began to dislike, and almost to hate, his natural moroseness when thwarted, broke out; and he gave himself twenty times to the devil, for having ever thought of talking divinity with a divine. The effects of this did not soothe him: his brow was knit; his chest swelled; and he strove in vain to disguise a sense of mortification, (certainly unusual with him,) by humming an Opera tune. At last, finding his good breeding fast fading before his rising anger, he fairly turned round, after falling back a few paces, and without apology or excuse abandoned his company, and sought to restore his happiness among the political friends he had left at the Castle.

And now, let those who have been used to follow this supposed favourite of fortune with admiring (some of them with envious) eyes-let those whose minds, as ill-regulated as his own, fancied him the happiest of the happy, because apparently the gayest of the gay -dive if possible into his heart, and there gather the lesson that will or will not do good to their own, by the use they make of it.

Thwarted in his pride as much as in his love, and vexed to the quick from disappointment in both, Cleveland endeavoured to fill himself with contempt for the softer passion, as unworthy the aspirations of a man born for power. In particular, he endeavoured to lash himself into resentment against the soft and pure creature who had, but an hour before, been the object of his most fervent admiration.

In this last attempt he completely failed. It is true, he was indignant at finding his high-sounding name, which had been accustomed to give the law both to en and to women, utterly disregarded; and the of