King Henry the Eighth.
During the period Reginald had served in the Austrian armies, his mind had undergone a complete revolution. His proud spirit had been subdued by misfortune. In his professional career he had learned to submit to human control. In the field of danger the daring energies of his nature had been fully excited; and, by the frequency of that very excitation, exhausted, whilst the aspect of death, in its various horrors, led him to serious meditation. Often has he passed from the stunning tumult of the field of battle, to the awful stillness of midnight solitude in his own tent; and here he first acknowledged the justice and mercy of Heaven, whose avenging arm had awakened him from the giddy dream of presumptuous passion, to the dreadful consciousness that he had perverted the best gifts of Providence, intended for the benefit and ornament of society, to be its bane and its disgrace. He had previously thought more of forfeited reputation than of violated virtue; and, though what he might have been rose to his mind in agonizing contrast with what he was, yet he mourned rather for the internal sentiment of degradation than of guilt. But he gradually acquired a more fitting penitence, becoming at last resigned even to the ever present sense of his former misdeeds, and submitting to it as their just punishment; at the same time forming the virtuous resolution of endeavouring to atone, if possible, for the past by the future.
Accusing himself of having deprived his child of her inestimable mother, he felt in justice bound to fulfil towards her more than the common duty of a father, and therefore resolved to give up the profession of arms for her sake, in order to devote his existence to her welfare. He would often, as he pressed the little smiling Adelaide to his heart, put forth a prayer that the virtues of the daughter might plead at the bar of offended Heaven, in mitigation of the vices of the father; and would soothe his grief with the hope of giving her that virtuous firmness of character, the want of which had rendered all the blessings of his early lot of no avail to himself. Summoning religion and reason to his aid, he wisely executed the task he had laudably undertaken, of forming his daughter to emulate the perfections of her mother; whilst of the errors he instructed her to shun, he was too fatally enlightened by his intercourse with Mrs. Montague, on the causes of whose defects he had made many deep and painful reflections. Convinced by these that imagination, which is naturally too ardent in the generality of women, is cultivated to a fatal excess by the usual mode of education, confined, as this almost exclusively is, to the study of music, painting, and poetry; he therefore, after establishing the grand principles of religion and morality in his daughter's mind, directed his attention principally to forming her judgment; limiting her fancy to the subordinate office of attendant on reason, never suffering it to usurp the place of guide. He had also observed, that vanity is still more dangerous to the female mind than even imagination. But it is only a long and steadily pursued course of exertion that can reduce this passion, so natural to the human heart, to exercise in its native kingdom only its just power. Solicitous that no latent vanity of his own should counteract his endeavours to limit its dangerous empire in his daughter's mind, he was sparing in the use of that powerful stimulant praise, which, though a very happy consequence, is too often a dangerous motive. As Adelaide had no domestic companion, her vanity was neither excited nor mortified by comparison; and it is one of those enemies to our peace, that suffer more from neglect than defeat. Nor was the baneful passion of envy introduced to her heart under the specious name of emulation, of which all ought to know it is the illegitimate sister, though the friends of emulation do not acknowledge the relationship. Her mind was endowed with knowledge, extensive enough to enable her to estimate justly the insufficiency of all human science, and to show her how far short of the acmé of even that imperfect wisdom her own attainments fell. Being taught never to court display, she was thereby exempted from the torments of envious mortification, and early understood she was educated, not to bring forth her acquirements like a holiday suit, in which to shine occasionally, but to keep them in constant every-day use, to promote her own happiness, and the pleasures of those with whom she associated.
Adelaide's docility, rather than her talents, enabled her to be every thing her father desired (for she was not, in truth, more highly endowed by nature than the generality of well-organized children); and he returned her enthusiastic love and veneration, by an affection little short of idolatry. But a father's too ardent love was beginning to wither in its bloom the plant it had so successfully reared; for Adelaide, when grown up, insensibly acquired an influence dangerous to a young female to possess over the mind of any man, and which is never so unlimited as over that of a father's in the decline of life. The virtues of the parent and child were alike dangerous to the future peace and well-being of the latter. He was too reasonable to subject her to those occasional acts of injustice, or fits of caprice, which every woman in her intercourse with mankind must expect and submit to, as inseparable from her condition. She, from the most laudable motives, was unceasingly occupied in the embellishment of her mind, which, though far preferable to an equally constant attention to externals, will, by a very different route, terminate one part of their course in the same end—selfishness. And as woman owes every thing that is admirable in her nature to a constant sacrifice of self, no acquirements can compensate for the perfection of character she can alone derive from this source. But in truth, the very best education a man alone can bestow on a woman must be defective. He may adorn her with the virtues of his own sex, but he cannot teach her the charities, the decencies, the proprieties of life, which it is the peculiar lot of hers to exercise. A female mind adorned with greater virtues only, without their connecting links, resembles a beautiful country, where the traveller passes from one bright region to another, over deep chasms, where, perhaps, he may fall to inevitable destruction. With all the generous virtues of her heart, with all the high endowments of her mind, Adelaide had yet one more necessary lesson to learn, which was painfully taught her when she lost her father; namely that, however imperative her welfare was to his happiness, she was of small consequence to the world in general, which would go on nearly as well whether she was living or dead, happy or miserable; and that she must thenceforward derive her felicity rather from her attention to the feelings of others, than from theirs to her own.
Until Adelaide was seventeen, Baron Wildenheim resided principally at Vienna: here associating with the most distinguished characters of the day, to whom his talents and his various knowledge made him an acceptable companion; a select number were admitted to his own house, in order to promote the improvement of his daughter by such intercourse. Profiting by the facility which his German rank afforded for the purpose, he visited, in the short intervals of peace which Gallic ambition permitted, Italy, France, and most of the other Continental states; occasional change of scene being almost as necessary for the amusement of his mind, as advantageous for the improvement of his daughter's. But though for this latter purpose it was successful beyond his hopes, yet the slow but constant progress of disease was not thus to be warded off; and a residence in a mild and equable climate being pronounced by the physicians of Vienna absolutely necessary for the preservation of his life, about two years before Adelaide's arrival in England they removed to Sicily, where he made choice of Catania for his residence.
Here for the first time in her life Adelaide enjoyed the pleasures and advantages of female society. The Catanese are amongst the most elegant women in Europe; and the attractive graces of their manners appearing to her with all the force of novelty, she quickly and involuntarily made them her own. Her youthful beauty—her artless elegance, and her cultivation of mind, caused her to be admired to an excess, which gave her father as much pain as pleasure, as he trembled lest it should call forth that vanity and inordinate desire of pleasing, which he had so earnestly laboured to repress, too well aware of its having been the cause of Mrs. Montague's destruction.
"La bella Adelina" was the object, to which the young Catanian nobility paid the most flattering attention, the most exaggerated compliments. Luckily for her she felt so little awe of her father, that she told him without reserve all the feelings this new scene excited in her mind. And he, appealing to her good sense, pointed out to her notice the hyperbole of the praises she received, thus rendering them in a short time more tiresome than agreeable. The Baron had early suffered his daughter to know she was handsome. She had hitherto been as much accustomed and as indifferent to the beauty of the robe in which her soul was enveloped, as she was to the habitual elegance of her every-day apparel.
He now went still further; and as piety was the main spring of all her thoughts and feelings, he taught her to be religiously thankful for a gift, which pre-disposed her fellow creatures in her favour; representing also that it ought to make her still more desirous to retain an approbation thus gratuitously bestowed. By this means her very beauty made her humble; as, in her estimate of her own character, she always attributed the praises she received but to a premature and therefore exaggerated opinion of her merit, which she consequently endeavoured to make in intrinsic worth equal to its received value.
About this period in the formation of Adelaide's character, Frederick Elton arrived at Catania. Though he was perhaps the most ardent of her admirers, his peculiar ideas regarding women in general led him rather to call forth the powers of her mind by rational conversation, than to weaken it by flattery. He was luckily not able, like his Sicilian rivals, to write sonnets, or make improviso stanzas by the hour "to her eye-brow;" and therefore had the less inducement to emulate the laudable endeavours of his competitors, to make her frivolous and silly solely to display their own abilities.