One of the Elizabethan minor-poets, speaking of an ideal beauty says,
Into a slumber then I fell,
When fond Imagination
Seemed to see, but could not tell,
Her feature, or her fashion.
But even as babes in dreams do smile,
And sometimes fall a weeping,
So I awaked, as wise this while,
As when I fell a-sleeping.
Just as unable should I feel myself were I to attempt a description from what Mrs. Dove was when I knew her, of what Deborah Bacon might be supposed to have been,—just as unable as this dreaming rhymer should I be, and you would be no whit the wiser. What the disposition was which gave her face its permanent beauty you may know by what has already been said. But this I can truly say of her and of her husband, that if they had lived in the time of the Romans when Doncaster was called Danum, and had been of what was then the Roman religion, and had been married, as consequently they would have been, with the rights of classical Paganism, it would have been believed both by their neighbours and themselves that their nuptial offerings had been benignly received by the god Domicius and the goddesses Maturna and Gamelia; and no sacrifice to Viriplaca would ever have been thought necessary in that household.
CHAPTER CXI.
CONCERNING MAGAZINES, AND THE FORMER AND PRESENT RACE OF ALPHABET-MEN.
Altri gli han messo nome Santa Croce,
Altri lo chiaman l' A. B. C. guastando
La misura, gl' accenti, et la sua voce.
SANSOVINO.
The reader has now been informed who Mrs. Dove was, and what she was on that day of mingled joy and grief when the bells of St. George's welcomed her to Doncaster as a bride. Enough too has been related concerning the Doctor in his single state, to show that he was not unworthy of such a wife. There is, however, more to be told; for any one who may suppose that a physician at Doncaster must have been pretty much the same sort of person in the year 1761 as at present, can have reflected little upon the changes for better and worse which have been going on during the intervening time. The fashions in dress and furniture have not altered more than the style of intellectual upholstery.