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LADY ANNE GRANARD.
279


Our young nobleman, fond of learning, and particularly desirous to please a father, of whom, for many years, he saw very little, applied himself with great diligence to the study of the oriental languages, and at fourteen had made such progress, that his father became desirous of seeing him, to the extreme of anxiety—a feeling awakened the more from the loss of his daughter, and being then engaged in an embassy to Persia, and previously ennobled. Frederic, under due escort, proceeded to Persia, and the long parted brothers had a year of each other's society, alike sweet and beneficial to both, but which did not for an hour disarrange either the wishes or intentions of the younger, who was even then the taller and the older looking, notwithstanding the marked likeness between them. The parting was very painful to both, but most probably got over much the soonest by Arthur, busied by his new duties and perpetual change of scene. Frederic sorrowed so deeply that his father saw a positive necessity for some new motive for exertion, and he soon engaged him in learning all the manly and graceful exercises for which certain races in the East have always been distinguished, possessing already many of those noble Arab horses which might tempt him to exercise them.

The plan succeeded entirely, his health and his stature improved, his timidity vanished, and a proper sense of his own situation, in its value and its duties, succeeded, without destroying that modesty always