The gloom and loneliness, however, in which Mordaunt's days were
spent, were far from partaking of that selfishness so common, almost
so necessarily common, to recluses. Wherever he had gone in his
travels through Italy, he had left light and rejoicing behind him. In
his residence at ----, while unknown to the great and gay, he was
familiar with the outcast and the destitute. The prison, the
hospital, the sordid cabins of want, the abodes (so frequent in Italy,
that emporium of artists and poets) where genius struggled against
poverty and its own improvidence,--all these were the spots to which
his visits were paid, and in which "the very stones prated of his
whereabout." It was a strange and striking contrast to compare the
sickly enthusiasm of those who flocked to Italy to lavish their
sentiments on statues, and their wealth on the modern impositions
palmed upon their taste as the masterpieces of ancient art,--it was a
noble contrast, I say, to compare that ludicrous and idle enthusiasm
with the quiet and wholesome energy of mind and heart which led
Mordaunt, not to pour forth worship and homage to the unconscious
monuments of the dead but to console, to relieve, and to sustain the
woes, the wants, the feebleness of the living.

Yet while he was thus employed in reducing the miseries and enlarging
the happiness of others, the most settled melancholy seemed to mark
himself "as her own." Clad in the deepest mourning, a stern and un
broken gloom sat forever upon his countenance. I have observed, that
if in his walks or rides any one, especially of the better classes,
appeared to approach, he would strike into a new path. He could not
bear even the scrutiny of a glance or the fellowship of a moment: and
his mien, high and haughty, seemed not only to repel others, but to
contradict the meekness and charity which his own actions so
invariably and unequivocally displayed. It must, indeed, have been a