malicious laugh. "Yet I, too, was young once! Give me a baioccho for a
glass of aqua vitae!"

Tara, rara, ra-rara, tara, rara-ra! There dances Youth! Wrap thy rags
round thee, and totter off, Old Age!



CHAPTER 4.VI.

Whilest Calidore does follow that faire mayd,
Unmindful of his vow and high beheast
Which by the Faerie Queene was on him layd.
--Spenser, "Faerie Queene," cant. x. s. 1.

It was that grey, indistinct, struggling interval between the night and
the dawn, when Clarence stood once more in his chamber. The abstruse
calculations lying on his table caught his eye, and filled him with a
sentiment of weariness and distaste. But--"Alas, if we could be
always young! Oh, thou horrid spectre of the old, rheum-eyed man!
What apparition can the mystic chamber shadow forth more ugly and more
hateful than thou? Oh, yes, if we could be always young! But not [thinks
the neophyte now]--not to labour forever at these crabbed figures and
these cold compounds of herbs and drugs. No; but to enjoy, to love, to
revel! What should be the companion of youth but pleasure? And the gift
of eternal youth may be mine this very hour! What means this prohibition
of Mejnour's? Is it not of the same complexion as his ungenerous
reserve even in the minutest secrets of chemistry, or the numbers of
his Cabala?--compelling me to perform all the toils, and yet withholding
from me the knowledge of the crowning result? No doubt he will still,