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THE BLAC

vibrations of memory. He forgot that he was old: he could almost have shouted. The light was come again, mother of knowledge and joy! In that exultation his limbs recovered their strength: he started up with his broken dagger and book, and went out under the broad moonlight.

It was a nipping frosty air, but Baldassarre could feel no chill he only felt the glow of conscious power. He walked about and paused on all the open spots of that high ground, and looked down on the domed and towered city, sleeping darkly under its sleeping guardians, the mountains; on the pale gleam of the river; on the valley vanishing towards the peaks of snow; and felt himself master of them all.

en dagger, whi inning of achiev en away the ol ire, when his me Consequence of su defend himself f Overtaken by to save himself. Yes, but if this tim dreary conscious was stronger a at before the morr

That sense of mental empire which belongs to us all in moments of exceptional clearness was intensified for him by the long days and nights in which memory had been little more than the consciousness of something gone. That city, which had been a weary labyrinth, was material that he could subdue to his purposes now: his mind glanced through its affairs with flashing conjecture; he was once more a man who knew cities, whose sense of vision was instructed with large experience, and who felt the keen delight of holding all things in the grasp of language. Names! Images! his mind rushed through its wealth without pausing, like one who enters on a great inheritance.

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Even the fe he thought wit exited vigil of e; and after se re he might lie d garden straw, When he opened moments were fi

But amidst all that rushing eagerness there was one end presiding in Baldassarre's consciousness, a dark deity in the inmost cell, who only seemed forgotten while his hecatomb was being prepared. And when the first triumph in the certainty of recovered power had had its way, his thoughts centred themselves on Tito. That fair slippery viper could not escape him now; thanks to struggling justice, the heart that never quivered with tenderness for another had its sensitive selfish fibres that could be reached by the sharp point of anguish. The soul that bowed to no right, bowed to the great lord of mortals, Pain.

He could search into every secret of Tito's life now: he knew some of the secrets already, and the failure of the

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n dagger, which seemed like frustration, had been the ning of achievement. Doubtless that sudden rage had n away the obstruction which stifled his soul. Twice , when his memory had partially returned, it had been sequence of sudden excitation: once when he had had end himself from an enraged dog; once when he had overtaken by the waves, and had had to scramble up a Osave himself.

s, but if this time, as then, the light were to die out, and eary conscious blank come back again! This time the vas stronger and steadier; but what security was there efore the morrow the dark fog would not be round him P Even the fear seemed like the beginning of feeblehe thought with alarm that he might sink the faster for cited vigil of his on the hill, which was expending his and after seeking anxiously for a sheltered corner he might lie down, he nestled at last against a heap of garden straw, and so fell asleep.

en he opened his eyes again it was daylight. The ments were filled with strange bewilderment: he was with a double identity; to which had he awaked? life of dim-sighted sensibilities like the sad heirship of allen greatness, or to the life of recovered power? the last, for the events of the night all came back to e recognition of the page in Pausanias, the crowding ence of facts and names, the sudden wide prospect had given him such a moment as that of the Mænad glorious amaze of her morning waking on the moun

ook up the book again, he read, he remembered withding. He saw a name, and the images of deeds rose he saw the mention of a deed, and he linked it with a There were stories of inexpiable crimes, but stories guilt that seemed successful. There were sanctuaries t-footed miscreants; baseness had its armour, and the s of justice sometimes broke against it. What then? ness triumphed everywhere else, if it could heap to

itself all the goods of the world and even hold the keys of hell, it would never triumph over the hatred itself awaked. It could devise no torture that would seem greater than the torture of submitting to its smile. Baldassarre felt the indestructible independent force of a supreme emotion, which knows no terror and asks for no motive, which is itself an ever-burning motive, consuming all other desire. And now, in this morning light, when the assurance came again that the fine fibres of association were active still, and that his recovered self had not departed, all his gladness was but the hope of vengeance.

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From that time till the evening on which we have seen him enter the Rucellai gardens, he had been incessantly, but cautiously, inquiring into Tito's position and all his circumstances, and there was hardly a day on which he did not contrive to follow his movements. But he wished not to arouse any alarm in Tito: he wished to secure a moment when the hated favourite of blind fortune was at the summit of confident ease, surrounded by chief men on whose favour he depended. It was not any retributive payment or recognition of himself for his own behoof, on which Baldassarre's whole soul was bent: it was to find the sharpest edge of disgrace and shame by which a selfish smiler could be pierced; it was to send through his marrow the most sudden shock of dread. He was content to lie hard, and live stintedly - he had spent the greater part of his remaining money in buying another poniard: his hunger and his thirst were after nothing exquisite but an exquisite vengeance. He had avoided addressing himself to any one whom he suspected of intimacy with Tito, lest an alarm raised in Tito's mind should urge him either to flight or to some other counteracting measure which hard-pressed ingenuity might devise. For this reason he had never entered Nello's shop, which he observed that Tito frequented, and he had turned aside to avoid meeting Piero di Cosimo.

The possibility of frustration gave added eagerness to his desire that the great opportunity he sought should not be de

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The desire was eager in him on another ground; he ed lest his memory should go again. Whether from ating presence of that fear, or from some other causes, twice felt a sort of mental dizziness, in which the inense or imagination seemed to be losing the distinct f things. Once he had attempted to enter the Palazzo and make his way into a council-chamber where Tito nd had failed. But now, on this evening, he felt that sion was come.

Anasonui nou

da bo CHAPTER XIX.

A Supper in the Rucellai Gardens.

entering the handsome pavilion, Tito's quick glance scerned in the selection of the guests the confirmahis conjecture that the object of the gathering was 1, though, perhaps, nothing more distinct than that ening of party which comes from good-fellowship. ishes and good wine were at that time believed to n the consciousness of political preferences, and in the ease of after-supper talk it was supposed that people ned their own opinions with a clearness quite inle to uninvited stomachs. The Florentines were a and frugal people; but wherever men have gathered Madonna della Gozzoviglia and San Buonvino have ir worshippers; and the Rucellai were among the rentine families who kept a great table and lived ly. It was not probable that on this evening there e any attempt to apply high philosophic theories; re could be no objection to the bust of Plato looking ven to the modest presence of the cardinal virtues in the walls. mult 3000

bust of Plato had been long used to look down on lity of a more transcendental sort, for it had been from Lorenzo's villa after his death, when the meethe Platonic Academy had been transferred to these

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gardens. Especially on every thirteenth of November, reputed anniversary of Plato's death, it had looked down from under laurel leaves on a picked company of scholars and philosophers, who met to eat and drink with moderation, and to discuss and admire, perhaps with less moderation, the doctrines of the great master: on Pico della Mirandola, once a Quixotic young genius with long curls, astonished at his own powers and astonishing Rome with heterodox theses; afterwards a more humble student with a consuming passion for inward perfection, having come to find the universe more astonishing than his own cleverness: -on innocent, laborious Marsilio Ficino, picked out young to be reared as a Platonic philosopher, and fed on Platonism in all its stages till his mind was perhaps a little pulpy from that too exclusive diet: on Angelo Poliziano, chief literary genius of that age, a born poet, and a scholar without dulness, whose phrases had blood in them and are alive still:— or, farther back, on Leon Battista Alberti, a reverend senior when those three were young, and of a much grander type than they, a robust, universal mind, at once practical and theoretic, artist, man of science, inventor, poet: and on many more valiant workers whose names are not registered where every day we turn the leaf to read them, but whose labours make a part, though an unrecognized part, of our inheritance, like the ploughing and sowing of past generations.

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bowl filled with mpany might fingers under t rance of fresh tone of remark E one asked wha if the life could and bone clasp e? And it was ernity would be ve d only know then And while the si tzing delicacies of the supperte point that th to admire the des rass service, and dish for confett patronizing Po gorgeous Ron Ah, I remembe with that negli thing, is rea mmanding rank about his chis , and taking i artist who puts ne into the meltin "And that is not 0's" said Gianno

Bernardo Rucellai was a man to hold a distinguished place in that Academy even before he became its host and patron. He was still in the prime of life, not more than four and forty, with a somewhat haughty, cautiously dignified presence; conscious of an amazingly pure Latinity, but, says Erasmus, not to be caught speaking Latin no word of Latin to be sheared off him by the sharpest of Teutons. He welcomed Tito with more marked favour than usual, and gave him a place between Lorenzo Tornabuoni and Giannozzo Pucci, both of them accomplished young members of the Medicean party.

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