When Padilla's popular favour is at its zenith, his rival consoles himself and friends with the assurance that its waning hour must, in the nature of things, be nigh:
Believe me, comrade, when the incense floats
Most thickly round the idol's shrine, its fire
Begins to smoulder.
And Padilla, accordingly, soon finds himself deserted by his men, troop after troop, till "left as bare as a thick grove in winter, sadly deck'd by some few desperate friends that, like dank leaves, which, in their fluttering yellow, cleave through rain and frost to awes-clad boughs," will not forsake him. At length, indeed, he "stands apart," in the words of his wife, "in his own majesty, a tower of refuge which beams from Heaven illumine,"—or, in the figure he prefers, "upon the arid sands a desolate mark for the next lightning." The tragedy of his fall makes both figures true: the lightning strikes the tower, but illumines and glorifies while it scathes, and is rather hailed than dreaded, as coming from Heaven, and charged with fleet orrand of no merely penal fire.
The Supplement to "Vacation Rambles" consists of Recollections of a Tour through France, viâ Paris, Dijon, Lyons, Avignon, and Marseilles, to Italy,—where the Rambler visited and gossips about Genoa and Naples, Capua and Antium, Rome, Florence, Bologna, and Milan,—returning homeward by Switzerland; the "home" at which we leave him being at Lausanne, with Charles Dickens, in the long vacation of 1846. Of Dickens and other beloved or admired contemporaries, there is, as was
Nor has the dramatist neglected the opportunity of enlivening his subject with other historical allusions, appropriate to its spirit, and in harmony with the unities of time and place and action. Isabella the Catholic is glowingly portrayed:
"Whom each Castilian holds
Sacred above all living womanhood;—
Her from whose veins Joanna's life was drawn?
Who, o'er the sags of battles and the toils
Of empire, bent an aspect more imbued
With serious beauty earth partakes with heaven,
Than cloister nurtured in the loveliest saint
It shrined from human cares."—Act III. Sc. 2.
"Who from a cell,
Savagery framed for cruel penance, stepp'd
To the majestic use of courtly arts,
Which luxury makes facile, while he wore
The purple o'er the sackcloth that inflamed
His flesh to torture, with a grace as free
As when it floats o'er worshipped womanhood
Or princely youth; he who had learn'd in vigils
Of lonely night, such wisdom for command
Of the world's issues, as if spirits breath'd
The long experiences of wisest statesmen
Into a single breast; who from a soul
Which men imagined withering like his frame
In painful age, pour'd, as from living urn,
Exhaustless courage into soldiers' hearts
And made them heroes."—Act III. Sc. 2.
