THE CHATEAU. 405 



the clock and weathercock no longer owned the influence of time or 

 wind. 



The spirit of solitude could hardly have been stronger than it was on 

 this occasion, to a person of my uncle's feeling heart. The scene around 

 him spoke of days of splendour past, of generations gone perhaps 

 forgotten. How Jaquez could have moralized on such a spot ! The 

 labours of the limner, in spite of damp, and the profuse pall of the 

 spider, still exhibited on the walls of the interior forms of youth and 

 beauty, which my uncle's retrospective faculty could conjure up into 

 their living loveliness, and see them in their shadowy bosquets, the 

 beauteous, happy beings of their transient hour. The church bell of the 

 village was tolling the salut, and the slanting sunbeams hardly gave a 

 cognizable form to the lengthened shadow of the trees that were gilded 

 with his parting rays. Every ingredient in the potent spell of loneliness 

 asserted its pretension ; the shattered volans, the dismantled dove-cote, 

 the sun-dial overgrown with moss, the rank luxuriance of commingled 

 bramble, dog-rose, weed, and wall-flower, that gathered round the 

 porch, impressed my relative with serious fancies and unexpected recol- 

 lections, which subsided into musing melancholy. He had much to do, 

 yet, how to move, when all the host of blighted hopes, and love's remem- 

 brance, and the loss of friendship, and ,the memory of childhood, home, 

 and parentage, beset him at so helpless, at so weak a moment ? He felt 

 himself an isolated exile, in the forsaken mansion of another ; and I 

 doubt if Democritus himself had smiled to see the placid tenderness 

 that dwelt upon my uncle's features, as he sat on a reclining tree, more 

 like a statue than a thing of life, with his sympathizing spaniel, on his 

 haunches, looking sadly in his face, before him. 



My uncle, at the conclusion of his reverie, retired to bed. He slept 

 well, rose early, ate with appetite, felt the invigorating influence of good 

 pure air, and his heart was beginning to dilate with that real luxury of 

 retirement, which is based on the independence of pursuit, and a rational 

 fondness for books, and exercise and meditation when, to his inex- 

 pressible amazement and discomfort, he saw two English figures at his 

 gate, as close in their resemblance to each other as a penny piece and 

 halfpenny of any coinage since the abolition of the Tower coppers. 



My uncle instantly and rightly guessed that these were two compa- 

 triots, resident in his vicinity. The call, though somewhat troublesome 

 to one accustomed to the choice of his associates, being one of pure 

 civility, commanded a polite reception. The two visiters were a Mr. 

 Smith and his only son ; the former a man of easy circumstances, retired 

 from business, and though an absolute vulgarian, infected with the mania 

 of turning " gentleman" abroad. No personage could be imagined 

 more purely English of his kind than Mr. Smith John Smith as he 

 emphatically called himself, apparently glorying in the vulgarity of his 

 laconic names. He was a precise specimen of a man, who carries to the 

 last extreme of supposition the exercise of personal rights ; and the fact 

 was, that with these indisputable pretensions, he was a very just man, a 

 very good man particularly ill-bred, a boring politician, and most 

 insufferably disagreeable. He was a constant student of an old abridged 

 encyclopaedia, which he held to be the standard and extent of human 

 knowledge ; and as he attached the highest possible respect to his edition, 

 chiefly on the score of age, he treated all the novel points of science and 

 discovery as mere "new-fangled humbug," which he scouted as the 



