Page:The Lady's Book Vol. I.pdf/173

DE LINDSAY. 157 ing each other in various directions. The rough coats of some animals, as the sheep, & c., may be worked in lamb's wool, of the proper shades.

To say any thing of the colours to be selected would be useless; it is only necessary to follow, as closely as possible, the colouring and shading of the artist in the ground sketch, and good taste will avail more than a volume of instructions.An attentive and minute inspection of good specimens, will be of the utmost service; and if the aspirants to excellence in this beautiful art, have not heard of the matchless performances of Miss Linwood of London, let us advise them no longer to deny themselves the gratification of reading some of the numerous criticisms that have appeared on this splendid collection of pictures, in which some of the finest paintings of the great English and Italian masters are imitated in a style of almost incredible excellence. It is particularly worthy of admiration, that the flesh parts, and even the features of the face, are worked entirely with the needle; and with such talent and delicacy, that, at a very short distance, they cannot be distinguished from the finest productions of the pencil.

From the New Monthly Magazine. RUPERT DE LINDSAY.

“Man walketh in a vain shadow; and disquieteth himself in vain.”

THERE is one feeling which is the earliest born with us which accompanies us throughout life, in the gradations of friendship, love, and parental attachment and of which there is scarcely one amongst us who can say,” It has been realized according to my desire.” This feeling is the wish to be loved loved to the amount of the height and the fervour of the sentiments we imagine that we ourselves are capable of embodying into one passion. Thus, who that hath nicely weighed his own heart will not confess that he has never been fully satisfied with the love rendered to him, whether by the friend of his boyhood, the mistress of his youth, or the children of his age. Yet even while we reproach the languor and weakness of the affection bestowed on us, we are reproached in our turn with the same charge; and it would seem as if we all all and each possessed within us certain immortal and spiritual tendencies to love which nothing human and earth born can wholly excite; they are instincts which make us feel a power never to be exercised, and a loss doomed to be irremediable.

The simple, but singular story which I am about to narrate is of a man in whom this craving after a love beyond the ordinary loves of earth, was so powerful and restless a passion, that it became in him the source of all the errors and the vices that have usually their origin in the grossness of libertinism; led his mind through the excesses of dissipation to the hardness of depravity and when at length it arrived at the fruition of dreams so wearying and so anxious when with that fruition, virtue long stifled by disappointment, seemed slowly, but triumphantly to awake betrayed him only into a punishment he had almost ceased to deserve, and hurried him into an untimely grave, at the very moment when life became dear to himself, and appeared to promise atonement and value to others.

Rupert de Lindsay was an orphan of ancient family and extensive possessions. With a person that could advance but a slight pretension to beauty, but with an eager desire to please, and a taste the most delicate and refined, he very early learnt the art to compensate by the graces of manner, for the deficiencies of form; and before he had reached an age when other men are noted only for their horses or their follies, Rupert de Lindsay was distinguished no less for the brilliancy of his ton and the number of his conquests, than for his acquirements in literature, and his honours in the Senate. But while every one favoured him with envy, he was, at heart, a restless and disappointed man.

Among all the delusions of the senses, among all the triumphs of vanity, his ruling passion, to be really, purely, and deeply loved, had never been satisfied. And while this leading and master desire pined at repeated disappointments, all other gratifications seemed rather to mock than to console him. The exquisite tale of Alcibiades, in Marmontel, was applicable to him. He was loved for his adventitious qualifications, not for himself. One loved his fashion; a second his fortune; a third, he discovered, had only listened to him out of pique at another; and a fourth accepted him as her lover because she wished to decoy him from her friend. These adventures, and these discoveries, brought him disgust; they brought him, also, knowledge of the world; and nothing hardens the heart more than that knowledge of the world which is founded on a knowledge of its vices made bitter by disappointment, and misanthropical by deceit.

I saw him just before he left England, and his mind then was sore and feverish. I saw him on his return, after an absence of five years in the various courts of Europe, and his mind was callous and even. He had then reduced the art of governing his own passions, and influencing the passions of others, to a system: and had reached the second stage of experience, when the deceived becomes the deceiver. He added to his former indignation at the vices of human nature, scorn for its weakness. Still many good, though-