But he was mortified to find that it did not produce the expected effect, and, after having done the respectful one morning, as he fancied, in the happiest manner, he was vexed to perceive that he not only could not raise Helen’s eyes from her work, but that even Lady Davenant did not attend to him: and that, as he was rounding one of his best periods, her looks were directed to the other side of the room, where Beauclerc sat apart; and presently she called to him, and begged to know what it was he was reading. She said she quite envied him the power he possessed of being rapt into future times or past, completely at his author’s bidding, to be transported how and where he pleased. Beauclerc brought the book to her, and put it into her hand. As she took it she said, “As we advance in life, it becomes more and more difficult to find in any book the sort of enchanting, entrancing interest which we enjoyed when life, and, books, and we ourselves were new. It were vain to try and settle whether the fault is most in modern books, or in our ancient selves; probably not in either: the fact is, that not only does the imagination cool and weaken as we grow older, but we become, as we live on in this world, too much engrossed by the real business and cares of life, to have feeling or time for factitious, imaginary interests. But why do I say factitious? while they last, the imaginative interests are as real as any others.” “Thank you,” said Beauclerc, “for doing justice to poor imagination, whose pleasures are surely, after all, the highest, the most real, that we have, unwarrantably as they have been decried both by metaphysicians and physicians.” The book which had so fixed Beauclerc’s attention, was Segur’s History of Napoleon’s Russian Campaign. He was at the page where the burning of Moscow is described--the picture of Buonaparte’s despair, when he met resolution greater than his own, when he felt himself vanquished by the human mind, by patriotism, by virtue--virtue in which he could not believe, the existence of which, with all his imagination, he could not conceive: the power which his indomitable will could not conquer. Beauclerc pointed to the account of that famous inscription on the iron gate of a church which the French found still standing, the words written by Rostopchin after the burning of his “delightful home.” “_Frenchmen, I have been eight years in embellishing this residence; I have lived in it happily in the bosom of my family. The inhabitants of this estate (amounting to seventeen hundred and twenty) have quitted it at your approach; and I have, with my own hands, set fire to my own house, to prevent it from being polluted by your presence._” “See what one, even one, magnanimous individual can do for his country,” exclaimed Beauclerc. “How little did this sacrifice cost him! Sacrifice do I say? it was a pride--a pleasure.”