And oh, the beautiful landscapes through which their daily excursions lay! Maltravers was an admirable scholar.

The stores of the immortal dead were as familiar to him as his own language.

The poetry, the philosophy, the manner of thought and habits of life--of the graceful Greek and the luxurious Roman--were a part of knowledge that constituted a common and household portion of his own associations and peculiarities of thought.
He had saturated his intellect with the Pactolus of old--and the grains of gold came down from the classic Tmolus with every tide.

This knowledge of the dead, often so useless, has an inexpressible charm when it is applied to the places where the dead lived.

We care nothing about the ancients on Highgate Hill--but at Baiae, Pompeii, by the Virgilian Hades, the ancients are society with which we thirst to be familiar.
To the animated and curious Frenchwoman what a cicerone was Ernest Maltravers! How eagerly she listened to accounts of a life more elegant than that of Paris!--of a civilisation which the world never can know again! So much the better;--for it was rotten at the core, though most brilliant in the complexion.