far in advance of his age, and he looked with a high contempt on the coarse villanies and base tricks by which Italian ambition sought its road to power.  The rise and fall of Rienzi, who, whatever his failings, was at least the purest and most honourable of the self-raised princes of the age, had conspired to make him despond of the success of noble, as he recoiled from that of selfish aspirations.  And the dreamy melancholy which resulted from his ill-starred love, yet more tended to wean him from the stale and hackneyed pursuits of the world.  His character was full of beauty and of poetry—­not the less so in that it found not a vent for its emotions in the actual occupation of the poet!  Pent within, those emotions diffused themselves over all his thoughts and coloured his whole soul.  Sometimes, in the blessed abstraction of his visions, he pictured to himself the lot he might have chosen had Irene lived, and fate united them—­far from the turbulent and vulgar roar of Rome—­but amidst some yet unpolluted solitude of the bright Italian soil.  Before his eye there rose the lovely landscape—­the palace by the borders of the waveless lake—­the vineyards in the valley—­the dark forests waving from the hill—­and that home, the resort and refuge of all the minstrelsy and love of Italy, brightened by the “Lampeggiar dell’ angelico riso,” that makes a paradise in the face we love.  Often, seduced by such dreams to complete oblivion of his loss, the young wanderer started from the ideal bliss, to behold around him the solitary waste of way—­or the moonlit tents of war—­or, worse than all, the crowds and revels of a foreign court.

Whether or not such fancies now, for a moment, allured his meditations, conjured up, perhaps, by the name of Irene’s brother, which never sounded in his ears but to awaken ten thousand associations, the Colonna remained thoughtful and absorbed, until he was disturbed by his own squire, who, accompanied by Montreal’s servitors, ushered in his solitary but ample repast.  Flasks of the richest Florentine wines—­viands prepared with all the art which, alas, Italy has now lost!—­goblets and salvers of gold and silver, prodigally wrought with barbaric gems—­attested the princely luxury which reigned in the camp of the Grand Company.  But Adrian saw in all only the spoliation of his degraded country, and felt the splendour almost as an insult.  His lonely meal soon concluded, he became impatient of the monotony of his tent; and, tempted by the cool air of the descending eve, sauntered carelessly forth.  He bent his steps by the side of the brooklet that curved, snakelike and sparkling, by Montreal’s tent; and finding a spot somewhat solitary and apart from the warlike tenements around, flung himself by the margin of the stream.