He was pleased to find his own importance, and he tasted the sweets of
companionship with more gust than he had yet done. His talents, buried
in obscurity, and uncalled for by the society of Lucilla, were now
perpetually tempted into action, and stimulated by reward. It had never
before appeared to him so charming a thing to shine; for, before, he had
been sated with even that pleasure. Now, from long relaxation, it had
become new; vanity had recovered its nice perception. He was no longer so
absorbed as he had been by visionary images. He had given his fancy food
in his long solitude, and with its wild co-mate; and being somewhat
disappointed in the result, the living world became to him a fairer
prospect than it had seemed while the world of imagination was untried.
Nothing more confirms the health of the mind than indulging its favourite
infirmity to its own cure. So Goethe, in his memoirs, speaking of
Werther, remarks, that "the composition of that extravagant work cured his
character of extravagance."

Godolphin thought often of Lucilla; but perhaps, if the truth of his heart
were known even to himself, a certain sentiment of pain and humiliation
was associated with the tenderness of his remembrance. With her he had
led a life, romantic, it is true, but somewhat effeminate; and he thought
now, surrounded by the gay and freshening tide of the world, somewhat
mawkish in its romance. He did not experience a desire to return to the
still lake and the gloomy pines;--he felt that Lucilla did not suffice to
make his world. He would have wished to bring her to Rome; to live with
her more in public than he had hitherto done; to conjoin, in short, her
society, with the more recreative dissipation of the world: but there were
many obstacles to this plan in his fastidious imagination. So new to the
world, its ways, its fashions, so strange and infantine in all things, as
Lucilla was, he trembled to expose her inexperience to the dangers that
would beset it. He knew that his "friends" would pay very little respect