Mas estorva y desabre en el camino
Una pequeña legua de desvio
Que la jornada larga de contino.
Whoever has at any time lost his way upon a long journey can bear testimony to the truth of what the Reverend Padre Maestro Fray Marco Antonio de Camos says in those lines. (I will tell you hereafter reader (for it is worth telling), why that namesake of the Triumvir, when he wrote the poem from whence the lines are quoted, had no thoughts of dedicating it as he afterwards did to D. Juan Pimentel y de Requesens.) But you are in no danger of being bewildered, or driven out of your way. It is not in a stage coach that you have taken your place with me, to be conveyed to a certain point, and within a certain time, under such an expectation on your part, and such an engagement on mine. We will drop the metaphor of the omnibus,—observing however by the bye, which is the same thing in common parlance as by the way, though critically there may seem to be a difference, for by the bye might seem to denote a collateral remark and by the way a direct one; observing however as I said, that as Dexter called his work, or St. Jerome called it for him, Omnimoda Historia, so might this opus be not improperly denominated. You have embarked with me not for a definite voyage, but for an excursion on the water; and not in a steamer, nor in a galley, nor in one of the post-office packets, nor in a man-of-war, nor in a merchant-vessel; but in
A ship that's mann'd
With labouring Thoughts, and steer'd by Reason's hand.
My Will's the seaman's card whereby she sails;
My just Affections are the greater sails,
The top sail is my fancy.2
Sir Guyon was not safer in Phædria's “gondelay bedecked trim” than thou art on “this wide inland sea,” in my ship
That knows her port and thither sails by aim;
Ne care, ne fear I how the wind do blow;
Or whether swift I wend, or whether slow,
Both slow and swift alike do serve my turn.3
My turn is served for the present, and yours also. The question who was Mrs. Dove? propounded for future solution in the second Chapter P. I., and for immediate consideration at the conclusion of the 71st Chapter and the beginning of the 72nd, has been sufficiently answered. You have been made acquainted with her birth, parentage and education; and you may rest assured that if the Doctor had set out upon a tour, like Cœlebs, in search of a wife, he could never have found one who would in all respects have suited him better. What Shakespeare says of the Dauphin and the Lady Blanch might seem to have been said with a second sight of this union:
Such as she is
Is this our Doctor, every way complete;
If not complete, O say, he is not she:
And she again wants nothing, to name want,
If want it be not, that she is not he.
He is the half part of a blessed man,
Left to be finished by such a she;
And she a fair divided excellence
Whose fulness of perfection lies in him.
2 QUARLES: mutatis mutandis.
3 SPENSER.
You would wish me perhaps to describe her person. Sixty years had “written their defeatures in her face” before I became acquainted with her; yet by what those years had left methinks I could conceive what she had been in her youth. Go to your looking glasses, young ladies,—and you will not be so well able to imagine by what you see there, how you will look when you shall have shaken hands with Threescore.