comparative poverty by the mighty magnificence of the court itself.  The Campanian cities proffered to him all that his nature craved—­the luxuries of an unequalled climate—­the imaginative refinements of a voluptuous civilization.  He was removed from the sight of a superior wealth; he was without rivals to his riches; he was free from the spies of a jealous court.  As long as he was rich, none pried into his conduct.  He pursued the dark tenour of his way undisturbed and secure.

It is the curse of sensualists never to love till the pleasures of sense begin to pall; their ardent youth is frittered away in countless desires—­their hearts are exhausted.  So, ever chasing love, and taught by a restless imagination to exaggerate, perhaps, its charms, the Egyptian had spent all the glory of his years without attaining the object of his desires.  The beauty of to-morrow succeeded the beauty of to-day, and the shadows bewildered him in his pursuit of the substance.  When, two years before the present date, he beheld Ione, he saw, for the first time, one whom he imagined he could love.  He stood, then, upon that bridge of life, from which man sees before him distinctly a wasted youth on the one side, and the darkness of approaching age upon the other:  a time in which we are more than ever anxious, perhaps, to secure to ourselves, ere it be yet too late, whatever we have been taught to consider necessary to the enjoyment of a life of which the brighter half is gone.

With an earnestness and a patience which he had never before commanded for his pleasures, Arbaces had devoted himself to win the heart of Ione.  It did not content him to love, he desired to be loved.  In this hope he had watched the expanding youth of the beautiful Neapolitan; and, knowing the influence that the mind possesses over those who are taught to cultivate the mind, he had contributed willingly to form the genius and enlighten the intellect of Ione, in the hope that she would be thus able to appreciate what he felt would be his best claim to her affection:  viz, a character which, however criminal and perverted, was rich in its original elements of strength and grandeur.  When he felt that character to be acknowledged, he willingly allowed, nay, encouraged her, to mix among the idle votaries of pleasure, in the belief that her soul, fitted for higher commune, would miss the companionship of his own, and that, in comparison with others, she would learn to love herself.  He had forgot, that as the sunflower to the sun, so youth turns to youth, until his jealousy of Glaucus suddenly apprised him of his error.  From that moment, though, as we have seen, he knew not the extent of his danger, a fiercer and more tumultuous direction was given to a passion long controlled.  Nothing kindles the fire of love like the sprinkling of the anxieties of jealousy; it takes then a wilder, a more resistless flame; it forgets its softness; it ceases to be tender; it assumes something of the intensity—­of the ferocity—­of hate.