Scythrop
thought of Lord C. and the Alien Act, and said, 'As you will not
tell your name, I suppose it is in the green bag.' Stella, not
understanding what he meant, was silent; and Scythrop, translating
silence into acquiescence, concluded that he was sheltering an
_illuminee_ whom Lord S. suspected of an intention to take the
Tower, and set fire to the Bank: exploits, at least, as likely to be
accomplished by the hands and eyes of a young beauty, as by a drunken
cobbler and doctor, armed with a pamphlet and an old stocking.
Stella, in her conversations with Scythrop, displayed a highly
cultivated and energetic mind, full of impassioned schemes of liberty,
and impatience of masculine usurpation. She had a lively sense of all
the oppressions that are done under the sun; and the vivid pictures
which her imagination presented to her of the numberless scenes of
injustice and misery which are being acted at every moment in every
part of the inhabited world, gave an habitual seriousness to her
physiognomy, that made it seem as if a smile had never once hovered on
her lips. She was intimately conversant with the German language and
literature; and Scythrop listened with delight to her repetitions of
her favourite passages from Schiller and Goethe, and to her encomiums
on the sublime Spartacus Weishaupt, the immortal founder of the sect
of the Illuminati.
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