these words, proved to Adrian that his meaning glanced at Mabel. He contented himself with saying," Such qualities, Sire, are, indeed, seldom to be found conjoined."

"But they are sometimes," replied the King. "Come, come, Count," he continued, smiling, "it is vain to affect unconsciousness.. Fame says that in your own mansion exactly such a Phoenix is caged. Prithee who is this fair incognita? Do you bring her from the banks of the Seine-a Gallic Helen to console her Paris for returning to his dull Troy? Report speaks her beautiful as Fontanges, and gifted as Ninon. It was but yesterday that my kapel-meister told me he never had a pupil with so enchanting a voice—and he spoke of her beauty in a manner that might have made you jealous, Oberfeldt.”

There was much in this speech highly galling to Adrian's feelings-and he muttered an inward curse upon the chattering musician who had thus excited the King's curiosity. There was a lightness in the tone with which Augustus spoke of the woman he loved, which was to Oberfeldt, what many of us must have felt it to

be, one of the most irritating things in the world, when circumstances prevent our crushing the impertinence in an instant. In this case, the privileges of royalty compelled Adrian to swallow the bitter pill as best he might, and even to affect ease, if not gaiety, in his answer :—

"Your Majesty must make allowance for the exaggerations of rumour. There is a young person under my protection, who has some share of beauty, and is not devoid of accomplishment; but both these circumstances are very possible, without her being the Phoenix your Majesty has been pleased to paint: and, if there be no person among your Majesty's comedians, confessedly the best in Germany, capable of representing the heroine of this new. opera, assuredly it were vain to expect it from one so young and so untutored as my protegée."

"Young, I grant it," said the King-" but I question much as to her being so untutored. What! the fastidious Count Oberfeldt, with his ideas formed upon the model of Versailles, never can have a protegée (if that be the word) unpolished and unformed. Moreover, the kapel

meister said he had gathered, when he first attended this fair syren, that it was your object to have her instructed for the stage. Was this so, Count ?"

A second, deeper and direr, curse did Oberfeldt invoke upon the kapel-meister's head. Such, as I have mentioned, had indeed been his original intention—but it had been gradually fading from his mind, and now, recalled thus suddenly, and from such a quarter, it jarred upon it with extreme pain. He foresaw all the consequences of an affirmative, yet to a direct question how could he answer falsely?—He sought refuge in evasion; and, as usual, he incurred the guilt, without obtaining the object, of falsehood.

"As yet, Sire, she is not fitted for such an undertaking."

“Come, Count, a short time more or less can make but slight difference, if she be but the tithe of what she has been represented to me. And, to speak plainly, you would oblige me if you would give the assistance of this young person's talents to the production of the opera of

VOL. II.

D

which I have spoken. It shall be brought out at my own theatre here in the palace; and you may take what time you think fit in its preparation, only let it be set about in earnest and at I will desire the director to wait upon you to-morrow on the subject." So saying, and without waiting for an answer, the King turned away.

once.

The distress of Oberfeldt was extreme. Once having admitted, as, by inference he could not avoid doing, that he had intended Mabel for the stage, he felt that it was impossible to avoid compliance with the King's desire. We must not judge of these things from our own days and our own country. The dignities of courts, more especially of German courts, in the seventeenth century, were but slavery in gilded chains, which were not the less strong, nor, occasionally, the less galling, that they were gilded. In this instance, they cut Oberfeldt to the quick. though he had never formally renounced the intention of bringing Mabel upon the stage,yet, as his affection for her had encreased and

Al

become more fond, he had thought upon the subject less and less, till, at last, as a practical matter, it had almost entirely passed from his mind. It was now recalled, not by his own will, but by the force of external circumstances, and those, too, of a nature the least likely to reconcile him to a measure in itself distasteful. He knew well the King's fondness for women— and he saw plainly that the passion for music was here but the cloak-that the real object was to see, himself, this person, the account of whose beauty had been sufficient to inflame his imagination. Oberfeldt had not the shadow of a doubt of Mabel's faith and truth;-but he wisely, as well as naturally, shrank from exposing her to any solicitations, to say nothing of their being from a royal wooer. And besides this, his feelings for Mabel had, of late, become so domestic, that it galled him even to expose her to the view of an assembled audience, on the stage.

"Fool that I was" said Oberfeldt to himself, as he paced his way homewards—“I might have forseen this when I brought her to Dres