230 PRÆTERITA-I

romance, let me write the epitaph of one of its sweet shadows, which some who knew the shadow may be glad I should write. The ground floor, under my father’s counting-house at Billiter Street, I have already said¹ was occupied by Messrs. Wardell & Co. The head of this firm was an extremely intelligent and refined elderly gentleman, darkish, with spiritedly curling and projecting dark hair, and bright eyes; good-natured and amiable in a high degree, well educated, not over wise, always well pleased with himself, happy in a sensible wife, and a very beautiful, and entirely gentle and good, only daughter. Not over wise, I repeat, but an excellent man of business; older, and, I suppose, already considerably richer, than my father. He had a handsome house at Hampstead, and spared no pains on his daughter’s education.

It must have been some time about this year 1839, or the previous one, that my father having been deploring to Mr. Wardell the discomfortable state of mind I had got into about Adèle, Mr. Wardell proposed to him to try whether some slight diversion of my thoughts might not be effected by a visit to Hampstead. My father’s fancy was still set on Lady Clara Vere de Vere; but Miss Wardell was everything that a girl should be, and an heiress,-of perhaps something more than my own fortune was likely to come to. And the two fathers agreed that nothing could be more fit, rational, and desirable, than such an arrangement. So I was sent to pass a summer afternoon, and dine at Hampstead.

258. It would have been an extremely delightful afternoon for any youth not a simpleton. Miss Wardell had often enough heard me spoken of by her father as a well-conducted youth, already of some literary reputation-author of The Poetry of Architecture-winner of the Newdigate, -First class man in expectation. She herself had been brought up in a way closely resembling my own, in severe

¹ [See above, p. 133.]

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