You are going too fast if you fancy I am about to record a fruitless passion of my own. Though of "easy wax," I am not stamped, except by will of the imprintress; and my only cobweb thread of personal remembrance is a horseback excursion to Camaldoli, in which I played the propriety-third to the best of my discretion. It is necessary to define thus much, to redeem my estimate of the lady from the imputation of mere fancy. Had I known her intimately, or not known her at all, my judgment of her would be less reliable. In just the position for untroubled and most favorable observation, I studied her in silence through that brilliant season, and laid away her image (as one does without more than one or two choked-down aspirations) to people castles in the air, and fill niches in the temple of dreams. The foregoing prepares you for a portrait of the proposed heroine of my story--but that you would have had, had the story been written. I never could draw a picture of a woman but from the life, and to that fictitious tale I should have transferred, with studied and careful truthfulness, the enamel portrait burnt in upon my memory, and which you would have admired my fancy for conceiving. Oh! the mistake of supposing that we can imagine things brighter than we have seen with our eyes--that there is any kingdom of air, visitable by poets, which is comparable to the glorious world we live in, with its _some_ women, _some_ sunsets, _some_ strains of music, and _some_ fore-tasted heaven-thrills of emotion. The heir to one of the oldest titles of England was the husband of this lady. The fortunes of his family had been wasted; and they had lived for a generation or two in comparative obscurity, when the present Lord ---- came of age. He had been educated carefully, but was of great personal beauty, and I thought when I first saw him, was as fine a model as I had ever seen of the quiet, reserved, self-intrenched school of modern English manners. With his beauty and his title, though with little or no estate, he had easily married a lady of fortune--the only daughter of a retired banker. And this heiress, Lady ----, is the one whose story I would have told through a veil of fiction.