fine gradations--it has nothing to do with those jerks and starts, those
convulsions and distortions, which belong not to the vigour and health,
but to the epilepsy and disease, of Literature.



CHAPTER VII.

"Being got out of town, the first thing I did was to give my
mule her head."--/Gil Blas/.

ALTHOUGH the character of Maltravers was gradually becoming more hard
and severe,--although as his reason grew more muscular, his imagination
lost something of its early bloom, and he was already very different
from the wild boy who had set the German youths in a blaze, and had
changed into a Castle of Indolence the little cottage tenanted with
Poetry and Alice,--he still preserved many of his old habits; he loved,
at frequent intervals, to disappear from the great world--to get rid of
books and friends, and luxury and wealth, and make solitary excursions,
sometimes on foot, sometimes on horseback, through this fair garden of
England.

It was one soft May-day that he found himself on such an expedition,
slowly riding through one of the green lanes of ------shire. His cloak
and his saddle-bags comprised all his baggage, and the world was before
him "where to choose his place of rest." The lane wound at length into
the main road, and just as he came upon it he fell in with a gay party
of equestrians.

Foremost of its cavalcade rode a lady in a dark green habit, mounted on