Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/485

Rh When Padilla's popular favour is at its zenith, his rival consoles himself and friends with the assurance that its waning hour must, in the nature of things, be nigh:And Padilla, accordingly, soon finds himself deserted by his men, troop after troop, till "left as bare as a thick grove in winter, sadly deck'd by some few desperate friends that, like dank leaves, which, in their fluttering yellow, cleave through rain and frost to awes-clad boughs," will not forsake him. At length, indeed, he "stands apart," in the words of his wife, "in his own majesty, a tower of refuge which beams from Heaven illumine,"—or, in the figure he prefers, "upon the arid sands a desolate mark for the next lightning." The tragedy of his fall makes both figures true: the lightning strikes the tower, but illumines and glorifies while it scathes, and is rather hailed than dreaded, as coming from Heaven, and charged with fleet orrand of no merely penal fire.

consists of Recollections of a Tour through France, viâ Paris, Dijon, Lyons, Avignon, and Marseilles, to Italy,—where the Rambler visited and gossips about Genoa and Naples, Capua and Antium, Rome, Florence, Bologna, and Milan,—returning homeward by Switzerland; the "home" at which we leave him being at Lausanne, with Charles Dickens, in the long vacation of 1846. Of Dickens and other beloved or admired contemporaries, there is, as was