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FRANCESCA CARRARA.

cause which, when he has perished, becomes triumphant. I delude myself with vain aspirations for that liberty which the few secure to the many; and I see the servile shackles of old rights and prejudices more closely riveted than ever. Now, a future without hope that can elevate, or aim that can attach, is before me. A worthless mercenary in some foreign service, or an idle loiterer in stranger lands, is all that remains for a life that once believed in its higher and nobler calling." At this moment his page entered with a packet. "Lights!" said Evelyn, carelessly—for, as our readers will have already divined, he was the melancholy soliloquist—"I may as well read the Cardinal's epistle at once;—but I am no tool for his purpose. Whatever may be the wrongs and the discontent of my old companions, it is not to serve the interested views of France, fain to disturb Charles's government, that their energies should be called into dangerous action. A time may come when the spirit of resistance it is now useless to excite may rise hopeful and enlightened in defence of those civil and religious rights, whose value will be more deeply imprinted in men's minds every hour. But not now—their present defenders have lived too soon."

He opened the Cardinal's epistle, which con-