have appealed to vulgar sympathy, by painting Lancelot as unamiable in mind and deformed in person. Pellico can afford to endow him with every virtue and every grace-to enlist in the earlier scenes every feeling in behalf of one so deserving and so ill-requited; and then (without divesting him of one jot of our justly awarded admiration) so to veil his crest before that of his yet more accomplished and engaging brother, that we come to wish he was in truth the tyrant and monster he has been by some unnecessarily depicted.

As it is, we are angry with Francisca that she cannot love him better-she is angry with her own gentle self for it. No wonder, then, that her old father sees in her conduct but the extreme of female waywardness, and feels even his grief for his only son, merge in disapprobation of his inconsolable daughter. The grief of the latter, her hus. band hints, has been of late grievously exasperated by the rumoured return of his gallant younger brother Paolo (the chance slayer of her's in the unhappy civil conflicts of the time) from distant and more honorable warfare; and, indeed, such is the aversion and horror inspired in Francisca by his mere name, that to remove all obstacle to the reunion of the doating brothers, as well as to gratify her own unconquerable desire for retirement and solitude, she petitions to accompany her loving parent once more to Ravenna.

In communicating (in her absence) this request to Guido, there is much of deep and heartfelt pathos in the manner in which her fond husband catches up and echoes the old man's fears for her declining health, and half expressed dread of surviving her.

name,

By duty to eternal silence doom'd
What right have I to probe the gentle
And bid it bleed anew? No! buried still
heart,
Be the fond image in its spotless shrine!
And yet shall I proceed?

He hints at expressions of despairing regret-inapplicable, apparently, to a lost brother which have at times escaped her; and gentle as is in general Francisca in her sorrow, there is something very natural in the brunt of womanly indignation with which she repels suspicions of dishonour, and throwing herself into her father's arms, challenges him to refute them for her. Touched, however, by the continued tenderness of her husband, and his readiness to purchase her happiness at the price of his own, and still more by the tears and adjurations of her beloved father, she has just vowed to endeaLancelot deserves, and implored the your to be henceforth a wife such as blessing of heaven on her resolution, when a page announces the arrival of an unknown knight, to avoid meeting whom she retires with her father to his chamber.

the

The knight, it may be foreseen, is

gay and gallant Paolo, whose long estrangement from his father's halls, and subsequent loss of a parent, is compensated by the warmth of his fraternal welcome, and the glory with which he returns loaded from the distant battles of Byzantium. This foreign and mercenary warfare, however, his heart-overflowing on his return to his native land with a whole tide of domestic and national feelings for ever renounces and abjures; and he dedi

Paolo.- What? she love thee-she Unless thou wish it.

'Tis I, Francesca! I Peace, till I've ceased to see this weary

Yet he will weep, I know he

will. Ah! he alone in Rimini will weep When I am gone! Listen! do not tell him

At first, but know thyself, I'll never more Hark! with Return to Rimini. No! grief will kill