Barnstaple. Bravo, Ansard, bravo. It appears to me that you do not want assistance in this romance.
Ansard. No, when I do I have always a holy and compassionate friar, who pulls a wonderful restorative or healing balm, out of his bosom. The puffs of Solomon’s Balm of Gilead are a fool to the real merits of my pharmacopoeia contained in a small vial.
Barnstaple. And pray what may be the title of this book of yours, for I have known it take more time to fix upon a title than to write the three volumes.
Ansard. I call it The Undiscovered Secret, and very properly so too, for it never is explained. But if you please, I will read you some passages from it. I think you will approve of them. For instance, now let us take this, in the second volume. You must know, that Angelicanarinella (for that is the name of my heroine) is thrown into a dungeon not more than four feet square, but more than six hundred feet below the surface of the earth. The ways are so intricate, and the subterranean so vast, and the dungeons so numerous, that the base Ethiop, who has obeyed his master’s orders in confining her, has himself been lost in the labyrinth, and has not been able to discover what dungeon he put her in. For three days he has been looking for it, during which our heroine has been without food, and he is still searching and scratching his woolly head in despair, as he is to die by slow torture, if he does not reproduce her—for you observe, the chief who has thrown her into his dungeon is most desperately in love with her.
Barnstaple. That of course; and that is the way to prove romantic love—you ill treat—but still she is certainly in a dilemma, as well as the Ethiop.
Ansard. Granted; but she talks like the heroine of a romance. Listen. (Ansard reads.) “The beauteous and divinely moulded form of the angelic Angelicanarinella pressed the dank and rotten straw which had been thrown down by the scowling, thick-lipped Ethiop for her repose—she, for whom attendant maidens had smoothed the Sybaritic sheet of finest texture, under the elaborately carved and sumptuously gilt canopy, the silken curtains, and the tassels of the purest dust of gold.”
Barnstaple. Tassels of dust of gold! only figuratively, I suppose.
Ansard. Nothing more. “Each particular straw of this dank, damp bed was elastic with delight, at bearing such angelic pressure; and, as our heroine cast her ineffably beaming eyes about the dark void, lighting up with their effulgent rays each little portion of the dungeon, as she glanced them from one part to another, she perceived that the many reptiles enclosed with her in this narrow tomb, were nestling to her side, their eyes fixed upon her in mute expressions of love and admiration. Her eclipsed orbs were each, for a moment, suffused with a bright and heavenly tear, and from the suffusion threw out a more brilliant light upon the feeling reptiles who paid this tribute to her undeserved sufferings. She put forth her beauteous hand, whose ‘faint tracery’—(I stole that from Cooper)—whose faint tracery had so often given to others the idea that it was ethereal, and not corporeal, and lifting with all the soft and tender handling of first love a venerable toad, which smiled upon her, she placed the interesting animal so that it could crawl up and nestle in her bosom, ‘Poor child of dank, of darkness, and of dripping,’ exclaimed she, in her flute-like notes, ‘who sheltereth thyself under the wet and mouldering wall, so neglected in thy form by thy mother Nature, repose awhile in peace where princes and nobles would envy thee, if they knew thy present lot. But that shall never be; these lips shall never breathe a tale which might endanger thy existence; fear not, therefore, their enmity, and as thou slowly creepest away thy little round of circumscribed existence, forget me not, but shed an occasional pearly tear to the memory of the persecuted, the innocent Angelicanarinella!’” What d’ye think of that?
Barnstaple. Umph! a very warm picture certainly; however, it is natural. You know, a person of her consequence could never exist without a little toadyism.
Ansard. I have a good many subterraneous soliloquies, which would have been lost for ever, if I did not bring them up.