2009, ISBN: 9781150716645

Volume: 10General Books publication date: 2009Original publication date: 1900Original Publisher: Houghton, Mifflin Subjects: Fiction / ClassicsFiction / LiteraryHistory / GeneralLiterary … Plus…

Volume: 10General Books publication date: 2009Original publication date: 1900Original Publisher: Houghton, Mifflin Subjects: Fiction / ClassicsFiction / LiteraryHistory / GeneralLiterary Collections / GeneralLiterary Criticism / American / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial Volume: 10General Books publication date: 2009Original publication date: 1900Original Publisher: Houghton, Mifflin Subjects: Fiction / ClassicsFiction / LiteraryHistory / GeneralLiterary Collections / GeneralLiterary Criticism / American / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER XXVI THE PEDIGREE OF MONTE BENI FROM the old butler, whom he found to be a very gracious and affable personage, Kenyon soon learned many curious particulars about the family history and hereditary peculiarities of the Counts of Monte Beni. There was a pedigree, the later portion of which - that is to say, for a little more than a thousand years - a genealogist would have found delight in tracing out, link by link, and authenticating by records and documentary evidences. It would have been as difficult, however, to follow up the stream of Donatello's ancestry to its dim source, as travellers have found it to reach the mysterious fountains of the Nile. And, far beyond the region of definite and demonstrable fact, a romancer might have strayed into a region of old poetry, where the rich soil, so long uncultivated and untrodden, had lapsed into nearly its primeval state of wilderness. Among those antique paths, now overgrown with tangled and riotous vegetation, the wanderer must needs follow his own guidance, and arrive nowhither at last. The race of Monte Beni, beyond a doubt, was one of the oldest in Italy, where families appear to survive at least, if not to flourish, on their half-decayed roots, oftener than in England or France. It came down in a broad track from the Middle Ages; but, at epochs anterior to those, it was distinctly visible in the gloom of the Books, Fiction~~General, complete-writings-of-Nathaniel-Hawthorne~~Nathaniel-Hawthorne, , , , , , , , , , General Books LLC<