Godolphin, Complete

CONSTANCE AT HER TOILET.--HER FEELINGS.--HER CHARACTER OF BEAUTY DESCRIBED.--THE BALL.--THE DUCHESS OF WINSTOUN AND HER DAUGHTER.--AN INDUCTION FROM THE NATURE OF FEMALE RIVALRI...

They had denied themselves to all the visitors who had attacked the Priory; but on their first arrival, they had deemed it necessary to conciliate their neighbours by concentrat...

Let us pass over Godolphin’s most painful task. What Lucilla’s feelings were, the reader may imagine; and yet, her wayward and unanalysed temper mocked at once imagination and e...

0 much-abused and highly-slandered passion!--passion rather of the soul than the heart: hateful to the pseudo-moralist, but viewed with favouring, though not undiscriminating ey...

On entering the apartment he found Lucilla seated on a low stool beside the astrologer. She looked up when she heard his footsteps; but her countenance seemed so dejected, that...

There was, in the day I now refer to, a certain house in Chesterfield Street, Mayfair, which few young men anxious for the eclat of society passed without a wish for the acquain...

A strange suspicion had entered Constance’s mind, and for Godolphin’s sake she resolved to put it to the proof. She drew her mantle round her stately figure, put on a large disg...

No human heart ever beat with more pure and generous emotions, when freed from the political fever that burned within her (withering, for the moment, the chastened and wholesome...

She was still unmarried, and still the fashion. There was a sort of allegory of real life, in the manner in which, at certain epochs, our Idealist was brought into contact with...

Time went slowly on, and Lucilla grew up in beauty. The stranger traits of her character increased in strength, but perhaps in the natural bashfulness of maidenhood they became...

RETURN TO LADY ERPINGHAM.--LADY ERPINGHAM FALLS ILL.--LORD ERPINGHAM RESOLVES TO GO ABROAD.--PLUTARCH UPON MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS.--PARTY AT ERPINGHAM HOUSE.--SAVILLE ON SOCIETY AN...

It was the evening before Godolphin left Rome. As he was entering his palazzo he descried, in the darkness, and at a little distance, a figure wrapped in a mantle, that reminded...

We must now present the reader to characters very different from those which have hitherto passed before his eye. Without the immortal city, along the Appia Via, there dwelt a s...

The western chamber was that I have mentioned as the one in which Constance usually fixed her retreat, when neither sociability nor state summoned her to the more public apartme...

It was approaching towards the evening as Lucilla paused for a few seconds at the door which led to Godolphin’s apartments. At length she summoned courage. The servant who admit...

THE FEELINGS OF CONSTANCE AND GODOLPHIN TOWARDS EACH OTHER.--THE DISTINCTION IN THEIR CHARACTERS.--REMARKS ON THE EFFECTS PRODUCED BY THE WORLD UPON GODOLPHIN.--THE HIDE.--RURAL...

Godolphin arrived at Rome: it was thronged with English. Among them were some whom he remembered with esteem in England. He had grown a little weary of his long solitude, and he...

The short conversation recorded in the last chapter could not but show to Godolphin the dangerous ground on which his fidelity to Lucilla rested. Never before,--no, not in the y...

While the above events, so fatal to Lucilla, were in progress at Rome, she was holding an unquiet commune with her own passionate and restless heart, by the borders of the lake,...

As in life Saville had never lent a helping hand to the distressed, as he had mixed with the wealthy only, so now to the wealthy only was his wealth devoted. The rich Godolphin...

“Ah!” said Fanny, as she stood in her white Peruvian dress, waiting her turn to re-enter the stage,--“ah, Godolphin! this reminds me of old times. How many years have passed sin...

The rich moonlight that now shone through the windows streamed on little that it could invest with poetical attraction. The room was small, though not squalid in its character a...

“But,” asked Constance, as, the next day, Lady Erpinghain and herself were performing the appointed pilgrimage to the ruins of Godolphin Priory, “if the late Mr. Godolphin, as h...

It was in the midst of spring, and at the approach of night, that our travellers entered London. After an absence of some duration, there is a singular emotion on returning to t...

With a listless step, Godolphin re-entered the threshold of his cottage-home. He passed into a small chamber, which was yet the largest in his house. The poor and scanty furnitu...

In Leicester Square there is a dim old house, which I have but this instant visited, in order to bring back more vividly to my recollection the wild and unhappy being who, for s...

About this time the fine constitution of Lady Erpingham began to feel the effects of that life which, at once idle and busy, is the most exhausting of all. She suffered under no...

The Abigail obeyed the orders, and the young Countess of Erpingham was alone. Alone! what a word for a young and beautiful bride in the first months of her marriage! Alone! and...

All that Constance heard from others of Godolphin’s life since they parted, increased her long-nursed interest in his fate. His desultory habits, his long absences from cities,...

Saville, stretched on the sofa, diverted himself with mixing snuffs on a little table beside him. Nothing is so mournfully amusing in life as to see what trifles the most striki...

This event might indeed have been an era in the life of Percy Godolphin, had that life been spared to a more extended limit than it was; and yet, so long had his ambition been s...

While in scenes like these, alternated with more refined and polished dissipation, Godolphin lavished away his life, Constance, became more and more powerful as one of the ornam...

Daily did the health of Volktman decline; Lucilla was the only one ignorant of his danger. She had never seen the gradual approaches of death: her mother’s abrupt and rapid illn...

Percy pouted, and after a momentary silence replied, “No, father, I think I shall go to Mr. Saville’s. He has asked me to spend a month with him; and he says rightly that I shal...

It was a proud moment for Constance when the Duchess of Winstoun and Lady Margaret Midgecombe wrote to her, worried her, beset her, for a smile, a courtesy, an invitation, or a...

Our travellers stopped at the first inn in the outskirts of the town. Here they were shown into a large room on the ground-floor, sanded, with a long table in the centre; and, b...

When Godolphin returned home the door was open, as Lucilla had left it, and he went at once into his apartment. He hastened to the table on which he had left, with the negligenc...

But then, it is not always a sustainer of the stage delusion to be enamoured of an actress: it takes us too much behind the scenes. Godolphin felt this so strongly that he liked...

Astonished at the silence of Godolphin, whom scenery was usually so wont to kindle and inspire, she turned hastily round, and her whole tide of feeling was revulsed by the absor...

Weeks passed on, and, apparently, Godolphin had reconciled himself to the disappearance and precarious destiny of Lucilla. It was not in his calm and brooding nature to show muc...

“And so,” said Saville, laughing, “you really gave them the slip: excellent! But I envy you your adventures with the player folk. ‘Gad! if I were some years younger, I would joi...

GODOLPHIN’S SOLILOQUY.--HE BECOMES A MAN OF PLEASURE AND A PATRON OF THE ARTS.--A NEW CHARACTER SHADOWED FORTH; FOR AS WE ADVANCE, WHETHER IN LIFE OR ITS REPRESENTATIONS, CHARAC...

Lady Erpingham was a widow; her jointure, for she had been an heiress and a duke’s daughter, was large; and the noblest mansion of all the various seats possessed by the wealthy...

Oh, First Love! well sang the gay minstrel of France, that we return again and again to thee. As the earth returns to its spring, and is green once more, we go back to the life...

What a strange life this is! what puppets we are! How terrible an enigma is Fate! I never set my foot without my door, but what the fearful darkness that broods over the next mo...

The course of life which Godolphin now led, was exactly that which it is natural for a very rich intellectual man to indulge--voluptuous but refined. He was arriving at that age...

Constance, Countess of Erpingham, was young, rich, lovely as a dream, worshipped as a goddess. Was she happy? and was her whole heart occupied with the trifles that surrounded her?

Meanwhile the graced Godolphin floated down the sunny tide of his prosperity. He lived chiefly with a knot of epicurean dalliers with the time, whom he had selected from the wit...

As Godolphin returned to health, and, day after day, the presence of Constance, her soft tones, her deep eyes, grew on him, renewing their ancient spells, the reader must percei...

If Constance most bitterly reproached herself, or rather her slackened nerves, her breaking health, that she had before another--that other too, not of her own sex--betrayed her...

Saville was deemed the consummate man of the world--wise and heartless. How came he to take such gratuitous pains with the boy Godolphin? In the first place, Saville had no legi...

The time we now speak of was the most brilliant the English world, during the last half century, has known. Lord Byron was in his brief and dazzling zenith; De Stael was in Lond...

Goldolphin was welcomed with enthusiasm by the London world. His graces, his manners, his genius, his bon ton, and his bonnes fortunes, were the theme of every society. Verses i...

It was the morning on which Constance and Godolphin were to be married; it had been settled that they were to proceed the same day towards Florence; and Constance was at her toi...

The death of George the Fourth was the birth of a new era. During the later years of that monarch a silent spirit had been gathering over the land, which had crept even to the v...

“I don’t know,” said Godolphin to Radclyffe, as they were one day riding together among the green lanes that border the metropolis--“I don’t know what to do with myself this eve...

It was a fine, picturesque outline of road on which the young outcast found himself journeying, whither he neither knew nor cared. His heart was full of enterprise and the unfle...

Godolphin now came almost daily to the astrologer’s abode. He was shocked to perceive the physical alteration four years had wrought in his singular friend; and, with the warmth...

The present Earl had been for the last two years abroad. He had never, since his accession to his title, visited Wendover Castle; and Lady Erpingham one morning experienced the...

And Godolphin came on the appointed Wednesday. He was animated that day even to brilliancy. Lady Erpingham thought him the most charming of men; and even Constance forgot that h...

Constances’s heart was in her eyes when she saw Godolphin that evening. She had, it is true, as Saville observed, been compelled by common courtesy to invite him; and although t...

It was on the night of this interview that Constance, coming into Godolphin’s room, found him leaning against the wall, pale, and agitated, and almost insensible. “Percy--Percy,...

There are in London two sets of idle men: one set, the butterflies of balls; the loungers of the regular walks of society; diners out; the “old familiar faces,” seen everywhere,...

Meanwhile, Constance Vernon grew up in womanhood and beauty. All around her contributed to feed that stern remembrance which her father’s dying words had bequeathed. Naturally p...

It was perfectly true that there had appeared in London a person of the female sex who, during the last few years, had been much noted on the Continent for the singular boldness...

“The convent, at stated times, is open to strangers, signor; but so far as the young signora is concerned I feel assured, from her manner, that your visits will be in vain.”

Godolphin was about one morning to depart for the convent to which Lucilla had flown, when a letter was brought to him from the abbess of the convent herself; it had followed hi...

sincerely--warmly. God knows I have suffered myself enough from idle words, and from the slighting opinion with which this hard world visits the poor, not to feel deep regret an...

This reconciliation was not so short-lived as matters of the kind frequently are. There is a Chinese proverb which says: “How near are two hearts when there is no deceit between...