That we should be severed for so slight a cause--an ungrammatical phrase in my Italian exercise, and three false notes in one of Paisiello's sonatas! But it is a part of my father's character, of whom it is impossible to say whether I love, admire, or fear him the most.

His success in life and in war, his habit of making every obstacle yield before the energy of his exertions, even where they seemed insurmountable--all these have given a hasty and peremptory cast to his character, which can neither endure contradiction nor make allowance for deficiencies.

Then he is himself so very accomplished.

Do you know, there was a murmur, half confirmed too by some mysterious words which dropped from my poor mother, that he possesses other sciences, now lost to the world, which enable the possessor to summon up before him the dark and shadowy forms of future events! Does not the very idea of such a power, or even of the high talent and commanding intellect which the world may mistake for it,--does it not, dear Matilda, throw a mysterious grandeur about its possessor?
You will call this romantic; but consider I was born in the land of talisman and spell, and my childhood lulled by tales which you can only enjoy through the gauzy frippery of a French translation.

O, Matilda, I wish you could have seen the dusky visages of my Indian attendants, bending in earnest devotion round the magic narrative, that flowed, half poetry, half prose, from the lips of the tale-teller! No wonder that European fiction sounds cold and meagre, after the wonderful effects which I have seen the romances of the East produce upon their hearers.' SECOND EXTRACT 'You are possessed, my dear Matilda, of my bosom-secret, in those sentiments with which I regard Brown.