"That afternoon I went up to Fort Putnam, for the hundred and twentieth time in my life. I walked round the dismantled ramparts; I looked into their damp and gloomy cells. I thought (as is the duty of every one that visits these martial ruins) on the 'pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war.' But they inspired nothing that I could turn to account in my lady's album; nothing that could serve to introduce the compliment always expected in the last stanza. And, in truth, this compliment was the chief stumbling-block after all. 'But for these vile compliments, I might myself have been an album-poet.'"
"Is it then so difficult to compliment a lady?" inquired Orinda.
"Not in plain prose," replied Sunderland, "and when the lady is a little à l'imbecile, nothing in the world is more easy. But even in prose, to compliment a sensible woman as she deserves, and without danger of offending her modesty, requires both tact and talent."
"Which I suppose is the reason," said Orinda, "that sensible women obtain so few compliments from your sex, and fools so many."
"True," replied Sunderland. "But such compliments as we wish to offer to elegant and intellectual females, are as orient pearls compared to French beads."
Orinda cast down her beautiful eyes under the expressive glance of her admirer. She felt that she was now receiving a pearl.
"But to proceed," continued Sunderland. "I came down from the fort no better poet than I went up, and I had recourse again to the solitude of my own room. Grown desperate, and determined to get the album off my mind and have it over, an idea struck me which I almost blush to mention. Promise not to look at me, and I will amaze you with my candour."
Orinda pretended to hold her fan before her eyes.
"Are you sure you are not peeping between the stems of the feathers?" said Sunderland. "Well, then, now for my confession; but listen to it 'more in sorrow than in anger,' and remember that the album alone was the cause of my desperation and my dishonour. Some Mephistopheles whispered in my ear to look among the older poets for something but little known, and transfer it as mine to a page in the fatal book. I would not, of course, venture on Scott or Moore or Byron; for though I doubted whether my lady-love was better versed in them than in the bards of Queen Anne's reign, yet I thought that perhaps some of the readers of her album might be acquainted with the last and best of the minstrels. But on looking over a volume of Pope, I found his 'Song by a Person of Quality.'"
"I recollect it," said Orinda; "it is a satire on the amateur love-verses of that period,—such as were generally produced by fashionable inamoratoes. In these stanzas the author has purposely avoided every approach to sense or connexion, but has assembled together a medley of smooth and euphonous sounds. And could you risk such verses with your Dulcinea?"