Page:The lives of celebrated travellers (Volume 2).djvu/84

 *stance compelled him to shadow forth his meaning somewhat obscurely and quaintly for a lover, and deprived him of the advantage of conveying his feelings from his own heart to hers through those glowing trains of words which kindle the souls of the absent almost as effectually as the corporeal presence of the persons beloved. The reply of Lady Mary is conceived with consummate skill: pretending to be in doubt whether she ought to understand him to have been in jest or earnest, she nevertheless confesses, that in her present mood of mind she is more inclined towards the latter interpretation; and then, feeling that her footsteps were straying

per ignes Suppositos cineri doloso,

she starts suddenly out of the dangerous track, and plunges into the description of an opera and a German comedy. Here she is perfectly at her ease; and the coarseness of the subject, which she affects to condemn, so evidently delights her, that she describes in the broadest terms an action the most outrageously gross, perhaps, that was ever endured on the stage.

It has often been remarked, that the interest of a book of travels arises not so much from the newness and strangeness of the objects described, as from the peculiar light which is reflected upon them from the mind of the traveller. This fact is strikingly exemplified in the case of Lady Mary, who, though journeying through places often visited, throws so much of energy and vivacity, and frequently of novelty, into her concise yet minute sketches, that we never pause to inquire whether the objects delineated now come before us for the first time or not. Besides, her sex and the advantages she enjoyed brought many peculiarities both of costume and manners within the range of her observation, of