Well! This man is led in by the monks, supposed dripping wet, and to very natural inquiries he either remains silent, or gives most brief and surly answers, and after three or four of these half-line courtesies, “dashing off the monks” who had saved him, he exclaims in the true sublimity of our modern misanthropic heroism-- “Off! ye are men--there’s poison in your touch. But I must yield, for this” (what?) “hath left me strengthless.” So end the three first scenes. In the next (the Castle of St. Aldobrand,) we find the servants there equally frightened with this unearthly storm, though wherein it differed from other violent storms we are not told, except that Hugo informs us, page 9-- “PIET.--Hugo, well met. Does e’en thy age bear Memory of so terrible a storm? HUGO.--They have been frequent lately. PIET.--They are ever so in Sicily. HUGO.--So it is said. But storms when I was young Would still pass o’er like Nature’s fitful fevers, And rendered all more wholesome. Now their rage, Sent thus unseasonable and profitless, Speaks like the threats of heaven.” A most perplexing theory of Sicilian storms is this of old Hugo! and what is very remarkable, not apparently founded on any great familiarity of his own with this troublesome article. For when Pietro asserts the “ever more frequency” of tempests in Sicily, the old man professes to know nothing more of the fact, but by hearsay. “So it is said.”--But why he assumed this storm to be unseasonable, and on what he grounded his prophecy, (for the storm is still in full fury), that it would be profitless, and without the physical powers common to all other violent sea-winds in purifying the atmosphere, we are left in the dark; as well concerning the particular points in which he knew it, during its continuance, to differ from those that he had been acquainted with in his youth. We are at length introduced to the Lady Imogine, who, we learn, had not rested “through” the night; not on account of the tempest, for “Long ere the storm arose, her restless gestures Forbade all hope to see her blest with sleep.” Sitting at a table, and looking at a portrait, she informs us--First, that portrait-painters may make a portrait from memory, “The limner’s art may trace the absent feature.” For surely these words could never mean, that a painter may have a person sit to him who afterwards may leave the room or perhaps the country? Secondly, that a portrait-painter can enable a mourning lady to possess a good likeness of her absent lover, but that the portrait-painter cannot, and who shall-- “Restore the scenes in which they met and parted?” The natural answer would have been--Why the scene-painter to be sure! But this unreasonable lady requires in addition sundry things to be painted that have neither lines nor colours-- “The thoughts, the recollections, sweet and bitter, Or the Elysian dreams of lovers when they loved.”