warmest admiration. Apollonia received this unbought homage with downcast looks, while the flush of modesty that mantled her cheek seemed to heighten her charms; but Frangipani with the tranquil, unassuming consciousness of desert, which so well becomes the man. Apollonia had hitherto been known as a pattern of all the female virtues: her intimate friends, when speaking of her domestic qualities, and of her reverence and affection for her blind and aged mother, could not describe, in sufficiently glowing colours, the unusual charms that seemed to be diffused over her person, while engaged in these dutiful attentions; so that in fact she looked more like a supernatural being than one of mortal mould. Titian, the celebrated painter, during his residence at Venice as a pupil of the great Bellini, once beheld her thus seated on a low stool at the feet of the venerable sightless matron, while the moon threw its silver light over her touchingly beautiful face, and tempered the fire of her dark eyes. She held the lute in her hand, singing with melodious voice a religious hymn, while the cool sea-breeze, pouring through the open windows, played in her dark hair that waved over her neck and bosom. “O fascinating marchesina!” exclaimed the enraptured painter; “I just need an angel, absorbed in melancholy musing on the beloved but fallen human race: permit me to take you for my model; for here on
