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."