was not exactly in Mr. Swinburne’s manner, and, where historical opinions disagree, no reliance can be placed on speeches which were not taken down by the intelligent reporters. Mr. Slope had his ears boxed when he proposed to Mrs. Bold, but such Amazonian conduct is probably rare, and neither party is apt to boast of it. He also, being accepted, behaved in the manner to which the highest authorities have lent their sanction, or, at least, he meant to do so, when the lady “fled like a roe to her chamber.” For all widows are not like widow Malone (ochone!) renowned in song. When Arbaces, the magician, proposed to Ione, he did so in the most necromantic and hierophantic manner in which it could be done; his “properties” including a statue of Isis, an altar, “and a quick, blue, darting, irregular flame.” But his flame, quick, blue, darting, and irregular as it was, lighted no answering blaze in the ice-cold breast of the lovely lone. When rejected (in spite of a splendid arrangement of magic lanterns, then a novelty, got up regardless of expense) Arbaces swore like an intoxicated mariner, rather than a necromaunt accustomed to move in the highest
circles and pentacles. Nancy, Miss Broughton’s heroine, tells her middle-aged wooer, among other things, that she accepts him, because “I did think it would be nice for the boys; but I like you myself, besides.” After this ardent confession, he “kissed her with a sort of diffidence.” Many men would have preferred to go out and kick “the boys.”
Mr. Rochester’s proposal to Jane Eyre should be read in the works both of Bret Harte and of Miss Brontë. We own that we prefer Bret Harte’s Mr. Rawjester, who wearily ran the poker through his hair, and wiped his boots on the dress of his beloved. Even in the original authority, Mr. Rochester conducted himself rather like a wild beast. He “ground his teeth,” “he seemed to devour” Miss Eyre “with his flaming glance.” Miss Eyre behaved with sense. “I retired to the door.” Proposals of this desperate and homicidal character are probably rare in real life, or, at least, out of lunatic asylums. To be sure, Mr. Rochester’s house was a kind of lunatic asylum.
Adam Bede’s proposal to Dinah was a very thoughtful, earnest proposal. John Inglesant himself could not have been less like that
victorious rascal, Tom Jones. Colonel Jack, on the other hand, “used no great ceremony.” But Colonel Jack, like the woman of Samaria in the Scotch minister’s sermon, “had enjoyed a large and rich matrimonial experience,” and went straight to the point, being married the very day of his successful wooing. Some one in a story of Mr. Wilkie Collins’s asks the fatal question at a croquet party. At lawn-tennis, as Nimrod said long ago, “the pace is too good to inquire” into matters of the affections. In Sir Walter’s golden prime, or rather in the Forty-five as Sir Walter understood it, ladies were in no hurry, and could select elegant expressions. Thus did Flora reply to Waverley, “I can but explain to you with candour the feelings which I now entertain; how they might be altered by a train of circumstances too favourable, perhaps, to be hoped for, it were in vain even to conjecture; only be assured, Mr. Waverley, that after my brother’s honour and happiness, there is none which I shall more sincerely pray for than yours.” This love is indeed what Sidney Smith heard the Scotch lady call “love in the abstract.” Mr. Kingsley’s Tom Thurnall somehow proposed,
was accepted, and was “converted” all at once—a more complex erototheological performance was never heard of before.
Many of Mr. Abell’s thirty-five cases are selected from novelists of no great mark; it would have been more instructive to examine only the treatment of the great masters of romance. But, after all, this is of little consequence. All day long and every day novelists are teaching the “Art of Love,” and playing Ovid to the time. But what are novels without love? Mere waste paper, only fit to be reduced to pulp, and restored to a whiteness and firmness on which more love lessons may be written. [{135}]
MASTER SAMUEL PEPYS.
No man is a hero to his valet, and unluckily Samuel Pepys, by way of a valet, chose posterity. All the trifles of temper, habit, vice, and social ways which a keen-eyed valet may observe in his master Samuel Pepys carefully recorded about himself, and bequeathed to the diversion of future generations. The world knows Pepys as the only man who ever wrote honest confessions, for Rousseau could not possibly be candid for five minutes together, and St. Augustine was heavily handicapped by being a saint. Samuel Pepys was no saint. We might best define him, perhaps, by saying that if ever any man was his own Boswell, that man was Samuel Pepys. He had Bozzy’s delightful appreciation of life; writing in cypher, he had Bozzy’s shamelessness and more, and he was his own hero.
It is for these qualities and achievements that he received a monument honoured in St. Olave’s, his favourite church. In St. Olave’s, on December 23, 1660, Samuel went to pray, and had his pew all covered with rosemary and baize. Thence he went home, and “with much ado made haste to spit a turkey.” Here, in St. Olave’s, he listened to “a dull sermon from a stranger.” Here, when “a Scot” preached, Pepys “slept all the sermon,” as a man who could “never be reconciled to the voice of the Scot.” What an unworthy prejudice! Often he writes, “After a dull sermon of the Scotchman, home;” or to church again, “and there a simple coxcombe preached worse than the Scot.” Frequently have the sacred walls of St. Olave’s, where his effigy may be seen, echoed to the honest snoring of the Clerk of the Navy. There Pepys lies now, his body having been brought “in a very honourable and solemn manner,” from Clapham, where, according to that respected sheet, the Post-boy, he expired on May 26, 1703. No stone marked the spot, when Mr. Mynors Bright’s delightful edition of Pepys was published in 1875.