TOO HANDSOME FOR ANYTHING, TOO HANDSOME FOR ANYTHING. 253 ing. The schoolmaster's wife liked handsome children. "What a genius will Master Ferdinand Fitzroy be, if you take pains with him!" said she to her husband. Pooh, my dear, it is of no use to take pains with him." "And why, love?" "Because he is a great deal too handsome [The Right Hon. Sir Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer, Baron Lytton, D.C.L., &c., born May, 1805; died at Torquay, 18th January, 1873. Poet, novelist, dramatist, and politician. Educated at Cambridge, where he took the chancellors prize medal with his poem Sculpture, When only fifteen years of age he pub-ever to be a scholar." lished Ismael, an oriental tale. Soon after, he issued for private circulation Weeds and Wild Flowers, a small collection of poems. In 1827 appeared O'Neil, or the Rebel, a tale in verse; and Falkland, a love story. At the close of the same year Pelham was published, and won for him a high position as a novelist. Of his numerous works the most important are: The Disowned; Devereux: Paul Chifford; Eugene Aram; Godolphin; The Pilgrims of the Rhine: The Last Days of Pompeii; Rienzi; Ernest Maltravers; Alice, or the Mysteries; chief poems are Milton: King Arthur, an epic in twelve Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy was one of those models of perfection of which a human father and mother can produce but a single example, -Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy was therefore an only son. He was such an amazing favourite with both his parents that they resolved to ruin him; accordingly, he was exceedingly spoiled, never annoyed by the sight of a book, and had as much plum-cake as he could eat. Happy would it have been for Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy could he always have eaten plumcake, and remained a child. "Never," says the Greek tragedian, "reckon a mortal happy till you have witnessed his end." A most beautiful creature was Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy! Such eyes-such hair-such teeth-such a figure-such manners, too,-and such an irresistible way of tying his neckcloth! When he was about sixteen, a crabbed old uncle represented to his parents the propriety of teaching Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy to read and write. Though not without some difficulty, he convinced them, for he was exceedingly rich, and riches in an uncle are wonderful arguments respecting the nurture of a nephew whose parents have nothing to leave him. So our hero was sent to school. He was naturally (I am not joking now) a very sharp, clever boy; and he came on surprisingly in his learn "And that's true enough, my dear!" said the schoolmaster's wife. So, because he was too handsome to be a scholar, Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy remained the lag of the fourth form! "What They took our hero from school. profession shall he follow?" said his mother. "My first cousin is the lord-chancellor,” said his father, "let him go to the bar." The lord-chancellor dined there that day: Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy was introduced to him; his lordship was a little, rough-faced, beetlebrowed, hard-featured man, who thought beauty and idleness the same thing, and a parchment skin the legitimate complexion for a lawyer. "Send him to the bar!" said he, "no, no, that will never do!-Send him into the army; he is much too handsome to become a lawyer." "And that's true enough, my lord!" said the mother; so they bought Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy a cornetcy in the regiment of dragoons. Things are not learned by inspiration. Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy had never ridden at school, except when he was hoisted; he was, therefore, a very indifferent horseman; they sent him to the riding-school, and everybody laughed at him. "He is a damned ass!" said Cornet Horsephiz, who was very ugly; "a horrid puppy!" said Lieutenant St. Squintem, who was still uglier; "if he does not ride better he will disgrace the regiment!" said Captain Rivalhate, who was very good-looking; "if he does not ride better we will cut him!" said Colonel Everdrill, who was a wonderful martinet; "I say, Mr. Bumpemwell (to the riding-master), make that youngster ride less like a miller's sack." "Pooh, sir, he will never ride better." "And why the devil will he not?" "Bless you, colonel, he is a great deal too handsome for a cavalry officer." "True!" said Cornet Horsephiz. "We must cut him!" said the colonel. cut. 254 TOO HANDSOME FOR ANYTHING.” Our hero was a youth of susceptibility—he quitted the — regiment, and challenged the colonel. The colonel was killed! "What a terrible blackguard is Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy!" said the colonel's relations. "Very true!" said the world. The parents were in despair! They were not rich; but our hero was an only son, and they sponged hard upon the crabbed old uncle. "He is very clever," said they both, "and may do yet." So they borrowed some thousands from the uncle, and bought his beautiful nephew a seat in parliament. Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy was ambitious, and desirous of retrieving his character. He fagged like a dragon-conned pamphlets and reviews -got Ricardo by heart-and made notes on the English Constitution. He rose to speak. "We have nothing to leave you," said the parents, who had long spent their fortune, and now lived on the credit of having once enjoyed it. "You are the handsomest man in London; you must marry an heiress." "I will," said Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy. Miss Helen Convolvulus was a charming young lady, with a hare-lip and six thousand a year. To Miss Helen Convolvulus then our hero paid his addresses. Heavens! what an uproar her relations made about the matter. "Easy to see his intentions," said one: "a handsome fortune-hunter, who wants to make the best of his person!" "handsome is that handsome does," says another; "he was turned out of the army, and murdered his colonel ;"-"never marry a beauty," said a third;-" he can admire none but himself;" "will have so many mistresses," said a fourth;-"make you perpetually jea "What a handsome fellow!" whispered one lous," said a fifth;-"spend your fortune,' member. "Ah, a coxcomb!" said another. "Never do for a speaker!" said a third, very audibly. And the gentlemen on the opposite benches sneered and heared!—Impudence is only indigenous in Milesia, and an orator is not made in a day. Discouraged by his reception, Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy grew a little embarrassed. "Told you so!" said one of his neighbours. "Fairly broke down!" said another. "Too fond of his hair to have anything in his head," said a third, who was considered a wit. "Hear, hear!" cried the gentlemen on the opposite benches. Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy sat down-he had not shone; but, in justice, he had not failed. Many a first-rate speaker had began worse; and many a country member had been declared a phoenix of promise upon half his merit. Not so thought the heroes of corn-laws. "Your Adonises never make orators!" said a crack speaker with a wry nose. "Nor men of business either," added the chairman of a committee, with a face like a kangaroo's. "Poor devil!" said the civilest of the set. "He'sa deuced deal too handsome for a speaker! By jove, he is going to speak again-this will never do; we must cough him down!" And Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy was accordingly coughed down. Our hero was now seven or eight and twenty, handsomer than ever, and the adoration of all the young ladies at Almack's. said a sixth ;-"and break your heart," said a seventh. Miss Helen Convolvulus was prudent and wary. She saw a great deal of justice in what was said; and was sufficiently contented with liberty and six thousand a year, not to be highly impatient for a husband; but our heroine had no aversion to a lover, especially to so handsome a lover as Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy. Accordingly she neither accepted nor discarded him; but kept him on hope, and suffered him to get into debt with his tailor and his coach-maker, on the strength of becoming Mr. Fitzroy Convolvulus. Time went on, and excuses and delays were easily found; however, our hero was sanguine, and so were his parents. A breakfast at Chiswick and a putrid fever carried off the latter within one week of each other; but not till they had blessed Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy, and rejoiced that they had left him so well provided for. Now, then, our hero depended solely upon the crabbed old uncle and Miss Helen Con volvulus;-the former, though a baronet and a satirist, was a banker and a man of business, he looked very distastefully at the Hyperian curls and white teeth of Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy. "If I make you my heir," said he—“I expect you will continue the bank." "Certainly, sir!" said the nephew. "Humph!" grunted the uncle, "a pretty fellow for a banker!" Debtors grew pressing to Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy, and Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy grew pressing to Miss Helen Convolvulus. "It is a dangerous thing," said she, timidly, "to LOVE'S HOROSCOPE. marry a man so admired,-will you always be faithful?" By Heaven!" cried the lover"Heigho!" sighed Miss Helen Convolvulus, and Lord Rufus Pumilion entering, the conversation was changed. But the day of the marriage was fixed; and Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy bought a new curricle. By Apollo, how handsome he looked in it! A month before the wedding-day the uncle died. Miss Helen Convolvulus was quite tender in her condolences,-"Cheer up, my Ferdinand," said she, "for your sake I have discarded Lord Rufus Pumilion!" "Adorable condescension," cried our hero; "but Lord Rufus Pumilion is only four feet two, and has hair like a peony. 66 All men are not so handsome as Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy?" was the reply. Away goes our hero, to be present at the opening of his uncle's will. I did "I leave," said the testator (who, I have before said, was a bit of a satirist), "my share of the bank, and the whole of my fortune, legacies excepted, to"-(here Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy wiped his beautiful eyes with a cambric handkerchief, exquisitely brode) "my natural son, John Spriggs, an industrious, painstaking youth, who will do credit to the bank. once intend to have made my nephew Ferdinand my heir; but so curling a head can have no talent for accounts. I want my successor to be a man of business, not beauty; and Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy is a great deal too handsome for a banker; his good looks will no doubt win him any heiress in town. Meanwhile, I leave him, to buy a dressing-case, a thousand pounds." "A thousand devils!" said Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy, banging out of the room. He flew to his mistress. She was not at home. "Lies," says the Italian proverb, "have short legs;' but truths, if they are unpleasant, have terribly long ones! The next day Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy received a most obliging note of dismissal. "I wish you every happiness," said Miss Helen Convolvulus, in conclusion-" but my friends are right; you are much too handsome for a husband!" And the week after, Miss Helen Convolvulus became Lady Rufus Pumilion. "Alas! sir," said the bailiff, as, a day or two after the dissolution of parliament, he was jogging along with Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy, in a hackney-coach bound to the King's Bench,"Alas! sir, what a pity it is to take so handCome a gentleman to prison !" LOVE'S HOROSCOPE, 255 [Richard Crashaw, died at Rome, 1650. Author of Steps to the Temple; Delights of the Muses; Sacred Poems and Translations.] Love, brave Virtue's youngest brother, Ah, my heart, is that the way? Are these the beams that rule thy day? If those sharp rays putting on But if her milder influence move, And gild the hopes of humble Love; O! if Love shall live, O! where? Or, if Love shall die, O! where? 256 THE MOUNTAIN TORRENT. THE MOUNTAIN TORRENT. BY JOHN CHALMERS, M. D. One sunny afternoon in the autumn of 1868, while passing a pleasant holiday in Southern Tyrol, I found myself upon the bridge which spans the Lena a short way below the little hill town of Roveredo. In the morning I had left Trent, which combines so remarkably the arcades, colour, and other characteristics of an Italian town, with Alpine situation and surroundings; and although it is but a dozen or so miles from Roveredo, a love for the rarer charms which by-ways afford led me, after clearing the pass of Calliano, to leave the course of the river Adige, and strike into the hills on a route which consumed the best part of the day. The weather had been sultry, and the rocky pathway leading down to the stream so steep and troublesome to traverse, that a halt upon the bridge afforded an agreeable relief to weary limbs. Here, also, burst upon the view the full grandeur of the little valley. On each side of the rapid Lena, which tumbled darkly along its broken channel to join the Adige, rose rocky banks, and pinecovered heights, stretching away upwards to be lost in the distant chain of snow-capped mountains, against whose white summits rose the sombre towers of the castle of Roveredo, which, standing like a sentinel upon the bank of the river above the bridge, filled up the middle distance with its majestic proportions. Leaning upon the parapet of the bridge, it was impossible not to feel that tranquillity of soul which nature never refuses to those who love her. The beauty of the spot, the air balmy with the odour of the autumn flowers, and musical with the song of birds, so numerous in Southern Tyrol, the buzzing of insects, and the murmur of water below, so soothed me into forgetfulness, that it was not until he stood by my side that I became aware of the approach of a gray-haired old peasant. After bidding him good day, a salutation he courteously returned, I reverted to the subject of my meditations, and asked him how long he had lived in this peaceful and happy valley. "I have lived in this valley, sir," he replied, "ever since the French were obliged to abandon Roveredo, and that was seventy years ago. It is a pleasant place to live in, but not always so very peaceful or so very happy. More than once in my time has the din of war been thrust upon us by our rapacious neighbours, and you may have read about the struggle of 1809, when the Tyrolese won the admiration of Europe by a contest in defence of their liberty as brave as any that history has to record." "The river too," he added, after a short pause, and looking earnestly down upon the gurgling stream, "is quiet enough just now, but see it swollen with thunder showers or melting snow. It makes plenty of noise then, and works sad havoc to property and cattle, aye, and many a human life has been lost too when the Lena is flooded." Observing a sad expression steal over the old man's face as if from some painful recollection, I asked him if he had ever seen any one perish in the flood?" "Aye, that I have, sir," he said, with a sorrowful shake of his head, "and at this very spot, too. But it is an old tale, and may not interest you." "On the contrary," I replied, "I shall be only too glad to sit down and listen to your story. See, we may rest ourselves on this log. Pray be seated." We sat down. The old man lifted his felt hat back from his brow, as if to clear his brain, rested both his hands upon his staff, and began: "When the news reached us about the end of October, 1813, that the ruthless bloodhounds of France, with the fiend Napoleon at their head, had been routed at Leipzic, and driven back in confusion towards the Rhine, the count called a gathering of his people to cele brate a victory which released them, for the time at least, from the fear of another French invasion. The tenantry attending readily to the call, assembled early in the day within the castle of Roveredo; all in good spirits and prepared to spend a merry day. One man alone was absent. Bertollo sat in his cabin a gloomy man. Although a native of Piedmont, he had joined the French forces and fought with them at the taking of our little town. During the occupation of Roveredo he somehow won the heart of a peasant's daughter hereone of the comeliest maidens in the place; married her, and occupied a cottage, which you may see standing a short distance up the stream on the bank opposite the castle. "A passionate disposition, readiness to quarrel, together with a keen sense of the illfeeling his exploits both in love and in war had engendered, kept him apart from his neighbours; it suited his disposition better to roam about spearing fish and trapping wild beasts THE MOUNTAIN TORRENT. than to attend to the wants of his home or the occupations of a peasant's life. He could be generous on occasion, and had the repute of doing many a brave service in aid of his neighbours, but steadily refused any compliment or recognition of such service. The instinct which prompted him to help those in danger, demanded no praise, and pride would not allow it. Even when he rescued the count's young brother from the tusks of an euraged boar in the wood yonder, he treated the count's gratitude with contempt." "What an unhappy life his pretty wife must have led," I said, as the old man paused in his narration. "Not so unhappy, neither," he replied, quickly, "for Bertollo loved his wife, and watched her with a jealous care; and it was love of her and of a little bright-eyed boy, more than the chance of fighting against his old comrades in arms, that led him to evade the small band of mountaineers who left Tyrol to join the Austrians against the French invaders. Whisperings of cowardice touched him to the quick; tidings of the French overthrow added to his discomfiture; while the rejoicings at the castle, in which his part seemed so ignoble, filled his soul with wrath; and this is how, on the morning of the gathering, he sat in his cabin a gloomy man. "You see, sir," said the old man, moralizing, "how a good intention may cast a gloom upon our lives, as the heat of the sun gathers the storm-cloud around yon mountain tops. 66 This 'But," he said, proceeding with his story, "the father's rudeness did not prevent the boy becoming a favourite. The count never met him when abroad but he patted little Pedro on the head, and spoke kindly to him. morning the little fellow was expected at the castle to join the children, and looked forward to the time with joy. The father sternly forbade his going; what did his child want at the castle? And when Pedro placed his head softly on his father's shoulder, and asked to be allowed to go just for a little to see the dancing, instead of receiving the usual kiss he was rudely repulsed and sent into the garden, whither he proceeded, sobbing bitterly. "Then the mother spoke, 257 tortured his brain for weeks, added to the passion already raging within his breast and maddened him. He seized his wife, and would have hurled her to the ground, but a look at her fair face sent a pang of shame to his heart, and he dropped powerless on his seat, burying his face in his hand. With true womanly instinct she left him undisturbed, and moved towards the door. Here a new trouble awaited her. The boy was nowhere to be seen. Not in the garden, not on the road leading to the bridge, the whole of its extent being visible from the cottage. She saw the stream was swollen, and rushing hard and fast against the piers of the wooden structure. A glance up the river showed her the mountains hid in gloom; and the black clouds rolling down towards the castle in large masses, from which low peals of thunder growled and rattled, and the noise of the rushing water made it plain to her that a storm had been raging on the hills which had already flooded the little river, and would soon burst over the valley. "For you must know, sir," the old man paused to explain, "that within one short hour on as fair a day as this I have seen a storm gather and break on these hills, and the Lena from a tiny stream rise suddenly and leap its banks, a roaring flood. This, too, had Bertollo's wife seen, and the thought of it made her start as it flashed upon her brain that the boy might have stolen off to the castle unawares, and would attempt to cross the ford higher up. Imagine her terror on running to the hillock above the cottage, to see him arrested in his course across the stream, looking at the whirling water, and hesitating between leaping to the further stone and turning back. "The current rising rapidly already washed his little feet, and, covering several of the stepping stones, made it almost equally dangerous whichever way he moved. The boy had his father's courage but not his father's skill, for Bertollo took to the water like the otters he hunted. The mother stood in breathless suspense: would he go on or would he leap back? He chose to go on. He leaped and fell. The mother shrieked, for she fancied she could hear above the noise of the stream the splash of her darling boy in the water. "You carry this mood too far, Bert.,' she pleaded; 'the count means nothing but kind-Pedro! Pedro is in the water!' ness to us. You know he owes you a service on his brother's behalf, and he is too good to believe for a moment the foul report that you' "In haste she sought her husband, crying, "Bertollo sprang to his feet. This allusion to a subject that had pained his heart and VOL. VIII. "Bertollo, still struggling with his passion, did not offer to stir. But the mother clutched him by the arm, and with almost superhuman strength dragged him down to the river, just in time to see the boy sweep past. "One glance was enough. 186 Instinctively |