So the party was soon ready, and they pushed off in the clear genial noontide (for November in Italy is as early as September in the North) across the sparkling and dimpled waters. The children prattled, and the grown-up people talked on a thousand matters. It was a pleasant day, that last day at Como! For the farewells of friendship have indeed something of the melancholy, but not the anguish, of those of love. Perhaps it would be better if we could get rid of love altogether. Life would go on smoother and happier without it. Friendship is the wine of existence, but love is the dram-drinking. When they returned, they found Castruccio seated on the lawn. He did not appear so much dejected at the prospect of Ernest's departure as Teresa had anticipated; for Castruccio Cesarini was a very jealous man, and he had lately been chagrined and discontented with seeing the delight that the De Montaignes took in Ernest's society. "Why is this?" he often asked himself; "why are they more pleased with this stranger's society than mine? My ideas are as fresh, as original; I have as much genius, yet even my dry brother-in-law allows /his/ talents, and predicts that/he/ will be an eminent man! while /I/--No!--one is not a prophet in one's own country!" Unhappy man! his mind bore all the rank weeds of the morbid poetical character, and the weeds choked up the flowers that the soil, properly cultivated, should alone bear. Yet that crisis in life awaited Castruccio, in which a sensitive and poetical man is made or marred; the crisis in which a sentiment is replaced by the passions--in which love for some real object gathers the scattered rays of the heart into a focus: out of that ordeal he might pass a purer and manlier being--so Maltravers often hoped. Maltravers then little thought how closely connected with his own fate was to be that passage in the history of the Italian. Castruccio contrived to take Maltravers aside, and as he led the Englishman through the wood that backed the mansion, he said, with some embarrassment, "You go, I suppose, to London?" "I shall pass through it--can I execute any commission for you?" "Why, yes; my poems!--I think of publishing them in England: your aristocracy cultivate the Italian letters; and, perhaps, I may be read by the fair and noble--/that/ is the proper audience of poets. For the vulgar herd--I disdain it!" "My dear Castruccio, I will undertake to see your poems published in London, if you wish it; but do not be sanguine. In England we read little poetry, even in our own language, and we are shamefully indifferent to foreign literature." "Yes, foreign literature generally, and you are right; but my poems are of another kind. They must command attention in a polished and intelligent circle." "Well! let the experiment be tried; you can let me have the poems when we part."