Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: hold the portentous spectacle. For the remainder of the evening the banqueting tables were unapproached by the guests. The wretched Emperor was surprised among his poultry by that dreaded intelligence. He too, hastened to the windows; and, looking forth, saw the army of avengers passing in contempt his solitary fortress, and moving swiftly onward towards defenceless Rome. Long after the darkness had hidden the masses of that mighty multitude from his eyes, did he remain staring helplessly upon the fading landscape, in a stupor of astonishment and dread; and for the first time since he had possessed them, his flocks of fowls were left for that night unattended by their master's hand. CHAPTER I1J. Rome. The perusal of the title to this chapter will we fear excite emotions of apprehension, rather than of curiosity, in the breasts of experienced readers. They will doubtless imagine that it is portentous of long rhapsodies on those wonders of antiquity, the description of which has long since become absolutely nauseous to them by incessant iteration. They will foresee wailings over the Palace of the Caesars, and meditations among the arches of the Colosseum, loading a long series of weary paragraphs to the very chapter's end; and, considerately anxious to spare their attention a task from which it recoils, they will unanimously hurry past the dreaded desert of conventional reflection, to alight on the first oasis that may present itself, whether it be formed by a new division of the story, or suddenly indicated by the appearance of a dialogue. Animated, therefore, by apprehensions such as these, we hasten to assure them, that in no instance will the localities of our story trench upon the limits of the well worn Forum, or mount the arches of the exhausted Colosseum. It i...
|
