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She was only in her four-and-twentieth year, but her attire of subdued mourning indicated widowhood already at the stage when it is permitted to make quiet suggestion of freedom rather than distressful reference to loss; the dress, however, was severely plain, and its grey coldness, which would well have harmonized with an English sky in this month of November, looked alien in the southern sunlight.
The four-and-twentieth, we set sail and doubled the Cape of another island next unto it, which we called Dover Cliff, and then came into a fair sound , where we rode all night; the next morning we sent off one boat to discover another cape, that lay between us and the main, from which were a ledge of rocks a mile into the sea, but all above water, and without danger; we went about them, and came to anchor in eight fathoms, a quarter of a mile from the shore, in one of the stateliest sounds that ever I was in.
It was one of the nights in the rainy season in March, the four-and-twentieth year of my first setting foot in this island of solitude, I was lying in my bed or hammock, awake, very well in health, had no pain, no distemper, no uneasiness of body, nor any uneasiness of mind more than ordinary, but could by no means close my eyes, that is, so as to sleep; no, not a wink all night long, otherwise than as follows: It is impossible to set down the innumerable crowd of thoughts that whirled through that great thoroughfare of the brain, the memory, in this night’s time.
He compared twenty months with the life of man. "In life," said he, "is not to be counted the ignorance of infancy or imbecility of age. We are long before we are able to think, and we soon cease from the power of acting. The true period of human existence may be reasonably estimated at forty years, of which I have mused away the four-and-twentieth part.
Neither is this the worst part in a Modus; every determinate sum must in process of time sink from a fourth to a four-and-twentieth part, or a great deal lower, by that necessary fall attending the value of money, which is now at least nine tenths lower all over Europe than it was four hundred years ago, by a gradual decline; and even a third part at least within our own memories, in purchasing almost everything required for the necessities or conveniencies of life; as any gentleman can attest, who hath kept house for twenty years past.
In addition to all this, conceive not the Paris of a dull, spiritless time, but the Paris of the nineteenth century, in which, during three generations, such men as Molière, Voltaire, Diderot, and the like, have kept up such a current of intellect as cannot be found twice in a single spot in the whole world, and you will comprehend that a man of talent like Ampere, who has grown up amid such abundance, can easily be something in his four-and-twentieth year.
I wish you joy of your thousand sequins, signor. Since your Excellency prophesies it I can no longer doubt my success. Memmo. I begin to recover myself! Well, well! let us see the end. Three-and-twenty hours had elapsed since Flodoardo had entered into the rash engagement. The four-and-twentieth now hastened to its completion, and yet Flodoardo came not. The Doge became uneasy.
It is true they might have been there once or twice; but either they made no stay, or at least I did not see them; but in the month of May, as near as I could calculate, and in my four-and-twentieth year, I had a very strange encounter with them; of which in its place.
If an historian had written in the last century, he would have recorded but two places of worship; I am now recording the fourteenth: but my successor, if not prevented by our own imprudence, in driving away the spirit of commerce, may record the four-and-twentieth.
Over against these devotees of the ideal Browning sets his worldlings, ranging from creatures as despicable as the courtiers of Duchess Colombe to such men of power and inexhaustible resource as the Nuncio who confronts Djabal with his Druses, or the Papal Legate whose easier and half-humorous task is to dismiss to his private affairs at Lugo the four-and-twentieth leader of revolt.
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