Necromancer, who perished at the stake, after a career of such power and
splendour as seemed almost to justify the dark belief in his
preternatural agencies.*

* See, for description of this scenery, and the fate of De Retz,
the high-wrought and glowing romance by Mr. Ritchie called
"The Magician."

Here, in a lonely and wretched inn, remote from other habitations,
Maltravers fixed himself. In gentler griefs there is a sort of luxury in
bodily discomfort; in his inexorable and unmitigated anguish, bodily
discomfort was not felt. There is a kind of magnetism in extreme woe, by
which the body itself seems laid asleep, and knows no distinction between
the bed of Damiens and the rose-couch of the Sybarite. He left his
carriage and servants at a post-house some miles distant. He came to
this dreary abode alone; and in that wintry season, and that most
disconsolate scene, his gloomy soul found something congenial, something
that did not mock him, in the frowns of the haggard and dismal Nature.
Vain would it be to describe what he then felt, what he then endured.
Suffice it that, through all, the diviner strength of man was not wholly
crushed, and that daily, nightly, hourly, he prayed to the Great
Comforter to assist him in wrestling against a guilty love. No man
struggles so honestly, so ardently as he did, utterly in vain; for in us
all, if we would but cherish it, there is a spirit that must rise at
last--a crowned, if bleeding conqueror--over Fate and all the Demons!

One day after a prolonged silence from Vargrave, whose letters all
breathed comfort and assurance in Evelyn's progressive recovery of spirit
and hope, his messenger returned from the post-town with a letter in the
hand of De Montaigne. It contained, in a blank envelope (De Montaigne's