"The same," answered his companion, with somewhat of a sigh. "Do you know Lord Ashborough well?"
"I have known him long," replied Burrel; "but to know a man well is a very different thing: for I am afraid that all men have learned nowadays what Sallust regrets in the decline of the Romans--_magis vultum quam ingenium, bonum habere_. Not that I mean to say it is so with Lord Ashborough; far from it. He bears a high character in the world, and is esteemed upright, honorable, and talented, though somewhat stern and haughty."
A grave and rather melancholy expression came over the countenance of the other; and he replied, changing the subject abruptly, "You were speaking of the Dardanelles. Were you ever there?"
"Never," answered Barrel, "though once within little more than a hundred leagues. I should have been well pleased to have gone on, but circumstances called me back to England."
"I have been there," replied the other; "and there is nothing more delightful than the sail from Corfu to Constantinople--except, indeed, some parts of the coast of Sicily."
"You are a naval man, then, I presume!" said Burrel. The other answered in the affirmative, and his companion proceeded:--"For nothing on earth could be more disagreeable to me, and I suppose to most landsmen, than a sail from any one given point of the globe's surface to another. When you speak of Sicily, however, you speak of a land that I, too, know well; and in regard to which I can enter into your enthusiasm. There are few lands more fertile in beauties of nature and association than Sicily, and epicurean Calabria, and the old Etruscan groves! You have of course visited Italy, if you so well know Sicily."
"I have done little more than cruise along the coast," replied Captain Delaware; "but in Sicily I was landed, and remained some months for the recovery of my health."
"Oh, the sweet coasts of the Mediterranean Sea!" said Burrel, "where at every league there is some beauty and some memory--some pleasant dream of the present or the past--from the Imperial City and its wolf-suckled founder, to the gray majesty of Pæstum and the Calabrese peasant with his long gun and his Mother Goose hat, caroling his gay ditty as cheerfully as a pickpocket. In every other corner of the world I feel earth stuffed with stern realities; but in Italy I can fully enter into the feeling of Metastasio, and exclaim, '_Sogno della mia vita e il corso intero?_"
"You are an enthusiast, I see," replied the other, with a smile.
"When I am in company with one," answered Burrel, laughing. His companion colored slightly, but good-humoredly, and the conversation went on in the same easy manner in which it had commenced, through the rest of their journey. It is unnecessary to give any farther details thereof; for such light nothings, though very pleasant to while away the hours in a stage-coach, are most excessively tiresome in the small pages of an octavo. Let it suffice that Captain Delaware, surprised and pleased with his companion, found the journey far shorter than he had expected. Indeed, so captivated was he, that in the whole of Burrel's deportment there was but one thing which he thought might have been altered to advantage, which was a certain air of taking every thing as a matter of course--a tone of indifference which men of the world acquire they know not well how, and which, in the present instance, blended in an extraordinary manner with the high feeling of the beautiful and the excellent, which his conversation breathed throughout.