here, nor seemingly without justice, capricious and unsteady in her
likings. These clever personages, after a little while, all seemed to
disappoint her expectations of them; she sought the acquaintance of each
with cordial earnestness; slid from the acquaintance with weary languor,
--never, after all, less alone than when alone.

And so wondrous lovely! Nothing so rare as beauty of the high type:
genius and beauty, indeed, are both rare; genius, which is the beauty of
the mind,-beauty, which is the gen ius of the body. But, of the two,
beauty is the rarer. All of us can count on our fingers some forty or
fifty persons of undoubted and illustrious genius, including those famous
in action, letters, art. But can any of us remember to have seen more
than four or five specimens of first-rate ideal beauty? Whosoever had
seen Lady Montfort would have ranked her amongst such four or five in his
recollection. There was in her face that lustrous dazzle to which the
Latin poet, perhaps, refers when he speaks of the--

"Nitor
Splendentis Pario marmore purius . . .
Et voltus, niminm lubricus adspici,"

and which an English poet, with the less sensuous but more spiritual
imagination of northern genius, has described in lines that an English
reader may be pleased to see rescued from oblivion,--

"Her face was like the milky way i' the sky,
A meeting of gentle lights without a name."
(Suckling)

The eyes so purely bright, the exquisite harmony of colouring between the