“You have decided prudently, my dear Caroline, I acknowledge,” said she. “But now your letter is fairly gone; now that it is all over, and that we are safe, I begin to think you are a little too prudent for your age.—Bless me, Caroline, if you are so prudent at eighteen, what will you be at thirty? Beware!—and in the mean time you will never be a heroine—what a stupid uninteresting heroine you will make! You will never get into any entanglements, never have any adventures; or if kind fate should, propitious to my prayer, bring you into some charming difficulties, even then we could not tremble for you, or enjoy all the luxury of pity, because we should always know that you would be so well able to extricate yourself—so certain to conquer, or—not die—but endure.—Recollect that Doctor Johnson, when his learned sock was off, confessed that he could never be thoroughly interested for Clarissa, because he knew that her prudence would always be equal to every occasion.”
Mrs. Percy began to question whether Johnson had ever expressed this sentiment seriously: she reprobated the cruelty of friendly biographers, who publish every light expression that escapes from celebrated lips in private conversation; she was going to have added a word or two about the injury done to the public, to young people especially, by the spreading such rash dogmas under the sanction of a great name.
But Rosamond did not give her mother time to enforce this moral; she went on rapidly with her own thoughts.
“Caroline, my dear,” continued she, “you shall not be my heroine; you are too well proportioned for a heroine—in mind, I mean: a heroine may—must have a finely-proportioned person, but never a well-proportioned mind. All her virtues must be larger than the life; all her passions those of a tragedy queen. Produce—only dare to produce—one of your reasonable wives, mothers, daughters, or sisters on the theatre, and you would see them hissed off the stage. Good people are acknowledged to be the bane of the drama and the novel—I never wish to see a reasonable woman on the stage, or an unreasonable woman off it. I have the greatest sympathy and admiration for your true heroine in a book; but I grant you, that in real life, in a private room, the tragedy queen would be too much for me; and the novel heroine would be the most useless, troublesome, affected, haranguing, egotistical, insufferable being imaginable! So, my dear Caroline, I am content, that you are my sister, and my friend, though I give you up as a heroine.”
CHAPTER VII.
LETTER FROM GODFREY PERCY TO MRS. PERCY.
“London, the British Hotel.
“You will be surprised, my dear mother, to find that I am in London, instead of being, as I had hoped I should have been by this time, with the army on the continent. Just as we were going to embark, we were countermanded, and ordered to stay at our quarters. Conceive our disappointment—to remain in garrison at the most stupid, idle country town in England.