really is. I had filled it with the bugbears of a wild imagination.
I had supposed that mankind made it their business to prey upon each
other. Pardon me, my amiable friend, if I take the liberty to say, that
my St. Julian was more suspicious than he needed to have been, when he
supposed that Naples could deprive me of the simplicity and innocence
that grew up in my breast under his fostering hand at Palermo.




Letter IV

_The Count de St. Julian to the Marquis of Pescara_

_Palermo_

I rejoice with you sincerely upon the pleasures you begin to find in the
city of Naples. May all the days of my Rinaldo be happy, and all his
paths be strewed with flowers! It would have been truly to be lamented,
that melancholy should have preyed upon a person so young and so
distinguished by fortune, or that you should have sighed amidst all the
magnificence of Naples for the uncultivated plainness of Palermo. So
long as I reside here, your absence will constantly make me feel an
uneasy void, but it is my earnest wish that not a particle of that
uneasiness may reach my friend.

Surely, my dear marquis, there are few correspondents so young as
myself, and who address a personage so distinguished as you, that deal
with so much honest simplicity, and devote so large a share of their
communications to the forbidding seriousness of advice. But you have