THE

SKETCH BOOK OF THE SOUTH.

THE CARDINAL LOVER.

MANY years ago, I was at Milan, and went with my family to see the Ambrosian Library. I was then very young, and the only thing that made any impression upon me, was a lock of beautiful fair hair preserved there, along with some love letters, in Italian, and in Spanish; some of the love letters were folded in the form of notes, and addressed "Al mio carissimo." I inquired to whom they had belonged, and was answered, that the hair, was the hair of a very wicked woman, and that the letters which accompanied it, were hers, and those of a Car

dinal, who had been her lover. The letters, as

well as the explanation, made a great impression How the hair could have been preupon me. served in such beauty above three hundred years-how it could be worth while to preserve a lock of fair hair; how such beautiful golden locks could have belonged to a very wicked woman-and above all, how such a woman could have had an old Cardinal for a lover, was so contrary to all my young ideas of love and romance, that I did not lose sight of the subject for a long while.

I remember all that passed on that day, well: we came home, a large party, to our hotel, in one of the narrow dark streets of Milan-dinedand went in the evening to the Scala; and all the subjects, on which learned or silly travellers would then naturally have talked, were discussed and differed upon. The Ballets-the Austrian government-the carcere duro-the picture of Agar; the jewellers' gold-shops San Carlo Borromeo; Pasta-Virgil-Petrarch

-the colour of Laura's eyes-the powder that the beautiful Madame Falconnieri wears in her hair; the smell of the yellow Cassia flower: all these subjects were severally talked of on that night of gala; but the only matter I had cared about the only history I wished to. hear, that of the lock of fair hair, was never once named, and appeared to interest no one. For a long while, my ideas of Milan and this lock of hair were always associated together, and would probably have ever continued so, had not events connected with that tour, made my feelings concerning it of a more serious

nature.

When Mr. Moore published Lord Byron's Life, it came out, that the imagination of the Poet had been struck, just as mine was, by a something indescribable in the lock of the hair, and the letters.

Lord Byron says, "I have pored over the letters, and the lock of hair, the prettiest and fairest hair imaginable-I never saw fairer; and

shall go repeatedly to read the epistles over and over, and if I can obtain some of the hair by fair means, I shall try. I have already persuaded the librarian to promise me copies of the letters, and I hope he will not disappoint me." It seems, that Lord Byron felt more interest in these letters, than he did in the remains of the vassi tempi, or of the fine arts at Milan.

Time passed on-and I ceased to think of the fair lady, or of the letters; until some time ago I went to see a collection of pictures, and was much struck with a portrait by Titian, which, though it neither represented beauty, youth, or goodness, or wickedness or feeling, had a certain shrewdness of expression, rarely given in painting. The picture is of a man, between fifty and sixty, painted in a Cardinal's dress, holding in his hand a book of prayers; a drapery which is half raised, exhibits a distant landscape; the attitude of the figure is of one deep in thought; the eyes, so shrewd in their expression, look