To die with their mother than live with their father.
Although a high authority insists that the lunatic and the lover are of imagination all compact, it would not enter an ordinary lover’s head to tell his mistress that loving her was synonymous with madness, as Steele did when he wrote to his dear lovely Prue: ‘It is the hardest thing in the world to be in love and yet attend business. As for me, all who speak to me found me out, and I must lock myself up, or other people will do it for me;’ but fair Mistress Scurlock doubtless took the dubious flattery in as good part as the great animal painter took the king of Portugal’s odd greeting: ‘Ah, Sir Edwin, I am glad to see you; I’m so fond of beasts.’ An unpleasant way of putting the thing was innocently adopted by the New York car-driver, who, blissfully ignorant that his interlocutor was Mr Beecher, replied to that gentleman’s query whether he did not think it possible to dispense with running the cars all day on Sunday: ‘Yes, sir, I do; but there’s no hope for it so long as they keep that Beecher theatre open in Brooklyn; the cars have to run to accommodate that.’
An American newspaper says: ‘The enthusiastic choir-master who adopted Hold the Fort as a processional hymn, has been dismissed by the minister, who considered it personal when the choir burst forth:
See the mighty host advancing,
Satan leading on!
A similar objection might have been raised to the Maine county commissioners quoting Watts’s lines:
Ye sinners round, come view the ground
Where you will shortly lie,
when inviting certain lawyers to inspect the new court-house; although they had less reason to complain than Lord Kenyon and Justice Rooke, who while on circuit, came one Sunday to a little village just as the good folks were going to church; an example the two judges followed. Anxious to shew his appreciation of the unexpected honour, the parish clerk searched for a suitable psalm to sing before the service; and at the proper time gave out the first two verses of the fifty-eighth psalm, and the congregation sang:
Speak, O ye judges of the earth,