superiority over his more impulsive comrades; I know he was to have that girl’s love against a rivalry that set life in the issue; and I have a vague impression of how such a character might come by action and experience to develop such traits as make men the rulers of their fellows. Several of the situations occur to me, but not a single clue to the story. There are even now scenes before me of prairie life and lonely rides in passes of the Pampas,--of homes where the civilised man had never seen a brother nor heard a native tongue. It is in vain I endeavour to recall anything like a connected narrative. All that I can well remember is the great hold the characters had taken in my mind--how they peopled the landscape around me, and followed me wherever I went. This was in autumn. As winter drew nigh we moved into an Italian city,* much frequented by foreigners, and especially the resort of our countrymen. * Florence. The new life of this place and the interest they excited, so totally unlike all that I had left at my little villa, effected a complete revolution in my thoughts, utterly routing the belief I had indulged in as to the characters of my story, and the incidents in which they displayed themselves. Up to this all my efforts had been, as it were, to refresh my mind as to a variety of events and people I had once known, and to try if I could not recall certain situations which had interested me. Now the spell was broken, all the charm of illusion gone, and I woke to the dreary consciousness of my creatures being mere shadows, and their actions as unreal as themselves. There is a sort of intellectual bankruptcy in such awakenings; and I know of few things so discouraging as this sudden revulsion from dreamland to the cold _terra firma_ of unadorned fact. There was little in the city we now lived in to harmonise with “romance.” It was, in fact, all that realism could accomplish with the aids of every taste and passion of modern society. That this life of present-day dissipation should be enacted in scenes where every palace, and every street, every monument, and, indeed, every name, recalled a glorious past, may not impossibly have heightened the enjoyment of the drama, but most unquestionably it vulgarised the actors. Instead of the Orinoco and its lands of feathery palms, I had before me the Arno and its gay crowds of loungers, the endless tide of equipages, and the strong pulse-beat of an existence that even, in the highways of life, denotes pleasure and emotion. What I had of a plan was lost to me from that hour. I was again in the whirlpool of active existence, and the world around me was deep--triple deep--in all cases of loving and hating, and plotting and gambling, of intriguing, countermining, and betraying, as very polite people would know how to do,--occupations to watch which inspire an intensity of interest unknown in any other condition of existence. Out of these impressions thus