of earthly circumstances. But she is not of the earth earthly. Her
thoughts already habitually hover on the dim frontier of some vague
spiritual region in which her love seeks refuge from the hopeless
realities of her life; and, recognising this betimes, we are prepared
to see above the hand of her ill-fated lover, when it strikes her down
in the dark, the merciful and releasing hand of her natural destiny.

But, assuming the author to have adopted Plutarch's chronology,
and deferred the death of Cleonice till the return of Pausanias to
Byzantium (the latest date to which he could possibly have deferred
it), this catastrophe must still have occurred somewhere in the
course, or at the close, of his second volume. There would, in that
case, have still remained about nine years (and those the most
eventful) of his hero's career to be narrated. The premature removal
of the heroine from the narrative, so early in the course of it,
would therefore, at first sight, appear to be a serious defect in the
conception of this romance. Here it is, however, that the credulous
gossip of the old biographer comes to the rescue of the modern artist.
I apprehend that the Cleonice of the novel would, after her death,
have been still sensibly present to the reader's imagination
throughout the rest of the romance. She would then have moved through
it like a fate, reappearing in the most solemn moments of the story,
and at all times apparent, even when unseen, in her visible influence
upon the fierce and passionate character, the sombre and turbulent
career, of her guilty lover. In short, we may fairly suppose that,
in all the closing scenes of the tragedy, Cleonice would have still
figured and acted as one of those supernatural agencies which my
father, following the example of his great predecessor, Scott, did not
scruple to introduce into the composition of historical romance.[4]