It was at this time that he kept his father’s books and a leash of hounds, with the latter of which he performed such extraordinary feats, that the Earl of Warwick invited him from the steward’s room to his own table; where Guy’s father changed his plate, and Master Guy twitched him by the beard as he did it.
At the head of the earl’s table sat his daughter “Phillis the Fair,” a lady who, like her namesake in the song, was “sometimes forward, sometimes coy,” and altogether so sweetly smiling and so beguiling, that when the earl asked Guy if he would not come and hunt (the dinner was at 10 A. M.), Guy answered, as the Frenchman did who could not bear the sport, with a Merci, j’ai été! and affecting an iliac seizure, hinted at the necessity of staying at home.
The youth forthwith was carried to bed. Phillis sent him a posset, the earl sent him his own physician; and this learned gentleman, after much perplexity veiled beneath the most affable and confident humbug, wrote a prescription which, if it could do the patient no good would do him no harm. He was a most skilful man, and his patients almost invariably recovered under this treatment. He occasionally sacrificed one or two when a consultation was held, and he was called upon to prescribe secundum artem; but he compensated for this professional slaying by, in other cases, leaving matters to Nature, who was the active partner in his firm, and of whose success he was not in the least degree jealous. So, when he had written the prescription, Master Guy fell a discoursing of the passion of love, and that with a completeness and a variety of illustration as though he were the author of the chapter on that subject in Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy.” The doctor heard him to the end, gently rubbing one side of his nose the while with the index-finger of his right hand; and when his patient had concluded, the medical gentleman smiled, hummed “Phillis is my only joy,” and left the room with his head nodding like a Chinese Mandarin’s.
By this time the four o’clock sun was making green and gold pillars of the trees in the neighboring wood, and Guy got up, looked at the falling leaves, and thought of the autumn of his hopes. He whistled “Down, derry, down,” with a marked emphasis on the down; but suddenly his hopes again sprang up, as he beheld Phillis among her flower-beds, engaged in the healthful occupation which a sublime poet has given to the heroine whom he names, and whose action he describes, when he tells us that
“Miss Dinah was a-walking in her garding one day.”
Guy trussed his points, pulled up his hose, set his bonnet smartly on his head, clapped a bodkin on his thigh, and then walked into the garden with the air of the once young D’Egville in a ballet, looking after a nymph—which indeed was a pursuit he was much given to when he was old D’Egville, and could no longer bound through his ballets, because he was stiff in the joints.
Guy, of course, went down on one knee, and at once plunged into the most fiery style of declaration, but Phillis had not read the Mrs. Chapone of that day for nothing. She brought him back to prose and propriety, and then the two started afresh, and they did talk! Guy felt a little “streaked” at first, but he soon recovered his self-possession, and it would have been edifying for the young mind to have heard how these two pretty things spoke to, and answered each other in moral maxims stolen from the top pages of their copy-books. They poured them out by the score, and the proverbial philosophy they enunciated was really the origin of the book so named by Martin Tupper. He took it all from Phillis and Guy, whose descendants, of the last name, were so famous for their school-books. This I expect Mr. Tupper will (not) mention in his next edition.
After much profitable interchange of this sort of article, the lady gently hinted that Master Guy was not indifferent to her, but that he was of inferior birth, yet of qualities that made him equal with her; adding, that hitherto he had done little but kill other people’s game, whereas there were nobler deeds to be accomplished. And then she bade him go in search of perilous adventures, winding up with the toast and sentiment, “Master Guy, eagles do not care to catch flies.”
Reader, if you have ever seen the prince of pantomimists, Mr. Payne, tear the hair of his theatrical wig in a fit of amorous despair, you may have some idea as to the intensity with which Master Guy illustrated his own desperation. He stamped the ground with such energy that all the hitherto quiet aspens fell a-shaking, and their descendants have ever since maintained the same fashion. Phillis fell a-crying at this demonstration, and softened considerably. After a lapse of five minutes, she had blushingly directed Master Guy to “speak to papa.”
Now, of all horrible interviews, this perhaps is the most horrible. Nelson used to say that there was only one thing on earth which he dreaded, and that was dining with a mayor and corporation. Doubtless it is dreadful, but what is it compared with looking a grave man in the face, who has no sentiment into him, and whose first remark is sure to be, “Well, sir, be good enough to tell me—what can you settle on my daughter? What can you do to secure her happiness?”