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wishes into intelligible words took refuge in an alias, and announced that "Barkis was willin" an ignominious, shabby refuge indeed, throwing upon the lady all the expense of furnishing the romance which she feels to be essential to the occasion, but which dovetails incongruously enough with such an introduction.

From The Saturday Review. POPPING THE QUESTION IN NOVELS. IT has been cynically suggested that the secrecy, so creditable to woman, hanging over the details of every declaration, is due as much to a sense of failure on her own part, of dissatisfaction at her share in the transaction, as to any nice sense of honour. Probably both parties are con- As the subject of the novel proper is scious that the supreme moment of life has love and courtship, so its moral should be been blundered through, has found them looked for in the conduct of that love-makunprepared. The contact of souls which ing. Many so-called novels do not depend recalls Paradise was arrived at by a pro- on this subject, either for their interest or cess which was not eloquence, nor yet their didactic value. They may be mastergrace. The man knows he bungled the pieces in their way, but because the story thing, and said nothing in the way he owes nothing to its lovers, the title of meant to say it. The lady is conscious of novel is a misnomer. We treat of those a sense of quandary quite obscuring her novels that carry out their title. A good habitual keenness of observation. The novel we regard as a very important guide scene is indistinct and blurred, but she to youth in the conduct of a love affair. fears she was awkward. She wishes she It is at once a school of rhetoric and dehad sustained the dignity of the situation, portment, and a moral counsellor and the crisis of her triumph, in a higher strain director. In the first place, it inculcates of thought and expression. The result is the two virtues of courage and modesty pleasant, and so is the retrospect, but at in equal proportions. People who never the same time each side is glad there read novels are apt to be impudent or was no looker-on. There are indeed some pusillanimous, according to their natural people who like to tell everything that happens to them, who have no restraining impulses, and think it candour to invite the world to a microscopic inspection of themselves; but these are more commonly men. It is men who generally blab on the matter now in question. "Prig" is very justly a masculine designation. In this spirit an American transcendentalist relates the story of his wooing:-"How do you think I offered myself?" he asks his hearer, almost a stranger. "I had never told Miss that I loved her; never told her she was handsome; and I went to her and said, 'Miss I'm come to offer myself; but first I'll give you my character. I'm very poor; you'll have to work. I'm very cross, and irascible; you'll have everything to bear; and I've liked many other pretty girls. Now what do you say?' And she said, 'I'll have you,' and she's been everything to me.' The man who addressed a lady thus, unless he had had very great encouragement, must have had a lofty notion indeed of his place in the scale of being. Such people want no help, but to more modest men a passing review of the subject under the light of fiction may be acceptable in the way of instruction, suggestion, and warning. That such light is available for practical purposes is proved by the fact that at one time the immortal offer of Dickens's carrier had grown into a formula. The man who did not know how to put his

On

tendency, or the tendency of their age.
Mr. Trollope says that in these days men
never expect to be refused. It is a doc-
trine among them that young ladies think
only of getting married, and that few dare
to refuse any man who is at all justified in
proposing to them. Now the best and most
remarkable scene in a novel is often a
spirited refusal. A student of this class
of literature will avoid the scrape which
presumption gets itself into. He would
not, for example, after reading Granby
which Sydney Smith regarded as fulfilling
all the requirements of a novel - make an
offer in a boat, lest he should be subject to
the humiliation of rowing the lady back to
shore a sulky, cowed, rejected man.
the other hand, the whole teaching of ro-
mance counsels him to try his chance, and
holds out hope to every constant lover; it
tells him to be bold, "and everywhere be
bold," but still with the counteracting
whisper in his ear, "be not too bold.”
The men that pass their lives shilly shally,
always meaning to marry and never mak-
ing up their minds, are not novel-readers.
The novel teaches the meaning of oppor-
tunity and its transitoriness, as in that ex-
cellent novel Emilia Wyndham; it shows
the immense importance of a spoken word,
and how, if the moment is allowed to pass
by, people often drift from one another,
never to come together again. On the
other hand, it warns one not to be the
slave of opportunity, a wise man mak-

ing more of such than he finds. Thus, |ance in the third! Other people as conThackeray's Lovel the Widower, finding fident as he have met with as stunning a Elizabeth on the point of being driven reverse. Was it not Darcy, in Pride and from his house, and her boxes corded in Prejudice, who has no doubt of success the hall, makes his offer there and then in when he opens the matter to Elizabeth the presence of his mother and mother-in- with the fatal arrogance, "In vain have I law, his children, and all the servants, hav- struggled. It will not do. My feelings ing first summoned the lady at the pitch will not be repressed. You must allow of his voice to accept this public amends me to tell you how ardently I admire and for the insult she had received. Again, love you"; and, after a scene of unsurthe novel-reader learns many a lesson of passed spirit, is answered by the lady, propriety in manners, for want of which" You could not have made me the offer some young fellows take liberties and ex- of your hand in any possible way that hibit an insufferable arrogance which cuts could have tempted me to accept it"? them off from eligible society and good And yet her feelings by the end of the connexions. The use of the Christian book had undergone such a change as to name, for instance, is made a turning-point make her receive with gratitude and pleasin some novels we know; it is viewed as a ure her arrogant lover's now modest declaration, or tantamount to one. We assurances that his own wishes were think it is Coningsby who shows his deli- unchanged. A good novel's consolations cate sense of the privilege of so address- are lessons as well; it points out to the ing a young lady, condensing a proposal lover his mistakes and how to correct into its use. "Let me call you my Edith, them. for I love you." Mr. Trollope in his ear- But, after all, the main use of this class lier manner made great use of the same of reading is in the vast scope and field it opportunity. "I may call you Rachel, opens to the intelligent inquirer - the then?" asks one of his lovers. "Oh, no, immense variety of alternatives, whether please don't," is the timid reply. "What for warning or example, which the pages would people think?" "Perhaps they of fiction hold out; for every lover in would think the truth," said he. "Per- fiction furnishes material for one or the haps they would imagine I called you other. The unbounded choice is the thing, so because I liked you. But perhaps directed by that insight into character and they might think also that you let me temperament which it is the high office of do so because you liked me. People the novelist to instil. Thus the use of the do make such mistakes." We say Mr. word wife indicates the straightforward Trollope's earlier manner, for we note offer. It pleases simple women. a very material change in his conduct of Thompson, will you be my wife?" is the these affairs, and one which renders him a conventional Quaker's first word of loveless safe guide to ingenuous youth. His making. She says "Yes," and the thing is lovers now are apt to introduce their pro- settled. Also it is effective where the posal with a process which has hitherto advantage of wealth or position is on the been supposed to seal the bargain -a gentleman's side. "Of course, Grace," step which the rash follower of this prece- said Major Grantley, "you know why I dent might, under some circumstances, am here?" He paused, and then rememfind to involve unpleasant consequences; though Mr. Trollope's ladies behave under the infliction much after the pattern of Jenny Dennison. They call the men wicked; "De'ils in the fallow," they seem to say; and then ensue reflections and comparisons altogether in the temper of that incomparable waiting-maid: "He has twice the spunk o' Tam Halliday after a"."

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bering that he had no right to expect an answer to such a question, he continued, "I have come here, dearest Grace, to ask you to be my wife." But there is a confident abruptness in this form that will not do under reverse circumstances. In opposition to this, some women are to be approached with timid, distant entreaty, as Tito to Romola. If you will only let me say, I love you-if you will only think me worth loving a little." Then there is the manly offer of heart and hand, which is perhaps of all modes the most taken for granted by the outside unthinking world. "There is my hand," says Lucius Mason to Sophia Furnival. "There is my hand," says she, as they stand holding one another palm to palm. He quite honest, she

only able to reach the pitch of half honesty. Sometimes more point is made of the shape and quality and action of the hands; thus Felix Graham offers his broad right hand. "If you can take it, you cannot doubt my heart goes with it," and the timid Madeline says not a word, nor does she lift her eyes from the ground; but very slowly she raises her little hand and allows her soft, slight fingers, &c.

ney's clerk in Bleak House, whose delicate attention to his mother's habits does him so much honour? As a happy blending of the real and ideal his proposal deserves quoting at length, though it meets with so chilling a return from the object of his passion:

Kenge and Carboy's is two pounds a week... "My present salary, Miss Summerson, at My mother has a little property which takes the form of a small life-annuity. She is eminently calculated for a mother-in-law. . . . She has her failings, as who has not; but I never knew her do it when company was present, at which time you may freely trust her with wine, spirits, or malt liquors. Miss Summerson! in the mildest language, I adore you. Would you be so kind as to allow me (as I may say) to file a declarato make an offer." Mr. Guppy went down on his knees. I said, "Get up from that ridiculous position immediately, sir, or you will oblige me to ring the bell."

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It is supposed to be the way to a spoilt pretty woman's heart to defer all fine speeches, and to propose through her faults. Some women like it. Thus Felix Holt performs his wooing, if such it is to be called, through mere bullying, and even Mr. Knightly makes his way to Emma's breast through plain-speaking. Some are won through disparagement of person; so Mr. Rochester recommends himself to Jane Eyre. “You, poor, obscure, and small and plain as you are, I entreat you to accept me." Some with an audacious bargaining, Of all pleas, we think that of long acas the cold-blooded love-making between quaintance is the most discouraged by Pendennis and Blanche. 66 You say I take fiction, from Dumbiedikes downwards. you with what you bring. I say I take When Jennie Deans is obliged to be exyou with what you bring." Some with plicit with her extraordinary lover, and to ardour and abandon, as the same Penden-own "I like another man better than you, nis offering his heart at one time to Miss and I canna marry ye," his astonishment Costigan in the words of Byron or Moore, is quite natural. "Another man better while she exclaims, "Oh, 'tis beautiful!" than me, Jeanie! How is that possible, and carries on a mental calculation about woman? ye hae kenned me sae lang." the "turned gown and hashed mutton;' "Dumbiedikes had read no novel. He could and in the last page to Laura, where the not, therefore, understand why habit love-making is compressed into a line or should not work the same results on both two of effective writing and description. sides. Jeanie even, for the same reason, "The great moments of life are but mo- thought the argument plausible. Instead ments like the others. Your doom is of confuting, she accepted it. “Ay, but, spoken in a word or two. A single look Laird, I kenned him langer." It is this from the eyes, a mere pressure of the long acquaintance which at once makes hand, may decide it; or of the lips, though Johnny Eames such a persevering suitor they cannot speak." In a word, "directly and renders his case hopeless. He cannot he entered the room Pen went up to Laura understand the force of a sudden fancy, of the pale face, who had not time even to and expects to supersede it. In fact, howsay, 'What, back so soon,' and seizing her ever, if he had come newly upon the scene outstretched hand, just as she was rising he might have had some chance, but Lily from her chair, fell down on his knees be- had known him long enough to be familiar, fore her, and said quickly, 'I have seen her and it would not do. She no longer cares (Blanche of Mes Larmes), she has engaged for the other man, but he has shattered herself to Harry Foker-and- and now her as a tree is shattered by a storm. “It - Laura?" However, this going down is no longer a tree," she says, "it is a fragon the knees, dear as it may be to romance, ment." He argues, "Then be my fragis out of date - an unsafe proceeding as ment?" "No, dear, it cannot be." Perfar as novels teach us; there is an inherent haps long acquaintance and a readiness to difficulty in getting up again, and as far as be made use of and to put up with fragour memory serves, people are always ments induces contempt, as in the case of caught in the act. Even in this supreme Major Dobbin and his Amelia. The man moment the guilty couple are sure to be who falls into Toot's vein, and treats his interrupted by the entrance of the cynical own time, feelings, and exertions as "of no old lady so dear to Thackeray, with her consequence," will not be accepted till the tall butler peering over her shoulder. Do romance of life is exhausted. our readers recall Mr. Guppy, the attor

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The novel assists the development of

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natural genius and resource. Some people cannot make an offer in a plain way. It must be characteristic of the proposer something enigmatical, and perhaps have a spice of the grotesque in it. Învention shows itself indulgent of idiosyncrasies, and delights in what is original. To the people we indicate, of whatever social standing, how suggestive is the offer of Dickens's Cheap Jack! How admirably he brings his calling and especial gifts into play. What a pretty riddle he makes of the wedding-ring, which, standing on his cart himself in very high feather, and conscious of an appreciative hearer in the lovely "Suffolk Dumpling," who stands listening to him out of a second-floor window he offers for public competition: "Now, what else is it? Come, I'll tell you. It's a hoop of solid gold wrapped in a silver curl-paper that I myself took off the shining locks of the ever-beautiful old lady in Threadneedle Street, London City. Now, what else is it? Its a man-trap and a handcuff, the parish stocks and a leg-lock all in gold, and all in one. Now, what else is it? It's a wedding ring. Now, I'll tell you what I'm going to do with it. I'm not a going to offer this lot for money, but I mean to give it to the next of you beauties that laughs, and I'll pay her a visit to-morrow morning at exactly half after nine o'clock as the chimes go, and I'll take her out for a walk to put up the banns." She laughed, and got the ring handed up to her. When I called in the morning she says, "Oh dear, its never you, and you never mean it?" "Its ever me," says I," and I am ever yours and I mean it."

lection of epitaphs has a tendency to shake the belief we have hitherto entertained that the bagman's acquaintance with a town or parish was limited to the shops of his customers, and the hostelries where he settles his treaties of commerce with due libations of brandy-and-water. The book before us is a token that these worthies are in the habit of varying the traditionally jovial routine of their visits; and it might almost, at first sight, form the ground of a theory that they are the "travellers" whom so many headstones importune "to stay" or "to pause." Of course a little erudition suffices to assure us that "Siste! viator!" is a figure of speech somewhat antecedent to the days of bagmen, and having its original pertinency in the fact that it was used to arrest the passengers along the Appian or Flaminian Ways, which in old Rome were flanked on either side by sepulchres; and a perusal of modern epitaphs generally might suggest how much more practical was the brevity of the monumental inscriptions in ancient times than the longwindedness of those wherewith in modern days we violate Commercial" scarcely goes so far as the But our truth, congruity, and taste. critical or philosophical aspect of his subject; he aims rather, in a very unpretending but still very creditable fashion, to preserve the record of quaint, curious, touching, quizzical, solemn, and satirical epitaphs upon which he has hit in his musings among the tombs of English towns The subject is too full — full to overflow- and parishes. One obvious drawback in ing for connected discussion within our our more pretentious modern books upon limits. We can but touch here and there this subject is that their compilers seldom upon some of its innumerable heads. The give the names of the places where such or question of letters, for instance! But here such an epitaph is to be seen, and leave us it must be owned that fiction has not so in doubt whether many of these "grave much the advantage over fact as in a hand- epigrams" (as Sir Joshua Reynolds called to-hand encounter. Perhaps the whole them to Burke, without intending a pun) matter of a love-letter is condensed in Sam are not rather verses, sentences, and sentiWeller's Valentine: -- "Before I see you I ments that might have been engraven on thought all women alike, but now I find stone or marble, than such as have been. what a soft-headed, incredulous turnip I In the book before us every epitaph is must have been, for there aint anybody | traced to the locality where it met the like you, though I like you better than nothing at all."

From The Saturday Review. EPITAPHS COLLECTED IN SPARE MOMENTS.*

EACH day's experience puts to flight some rooted prejudice; and this little col

Epitaphs Collected in Spare Moments. By A "Commercial." London: F. Maiben. 1870.

collector's eye, although it must occur to any one that it may recur in half a hundred other places. At any rate we here attain an assurance that any given epitaph is actually extant, and this helps us not inconsiderably to gauge the amount of maudlin sentiment, of mistimed pleasantry, of cacography, and of doggrel verse which survivors have thought meet to pile up to the memory of deceased friends and relatives.

It does not appear that our "Commercial" has in any of his travels met with any

epitaph so brief, true, and telling as those typical epitaphs from the Latin," Præivit," "Fui Caius," or "Miserrimus," or the Roman widower's testimony to his deceased spouse that she was "pia, pudica, lanifica, domiseda." The nearest approach to such brevity is perhaps the epitaph found on a stone built in the wall of Finedon Church, Northamptonshire (p. 17):—

Here lieth John Dent,

In his last tenement.-1704.

Even when grieving survivors in this country aim at being succinct, they are apt to be tautological, as in the case of the husband "who recorded on his wife's tomb (p. 30), "She was-what? What a Wife should

voted son" who, putting up a monumental
stone to his father in Highgate Cemetery,
could invite him to look down from the
spirit land, and "watch over and direct"
this child's" frail mortal actions." The
"Commercial's" note at this epitaph is
very much to the point. "Which is better,"
he asks, "to rely on the Spirit of a Father,
or the Father of Spirits?" It would
seem, indeed, that a doubly keen percep-
tion of the ludicrous had need to befriend
any one who essays epitaph-writing, lest
he should be led to perorations like that
which concludes an in memoriam to certain
deceased members of the Ball family, in
Nuneaton churchyard: -

For you will be like to these poor Balls.
When death shall strike, great will be your falls,
No doubt a great deal must depend upon
the propinquity, and also on the sincerity,
of the epitaphiologist. This on a child of
six years old in Eastbourne churchyard
bespeaks at once the outpourings of the
motherly heart:-

When the first wild thrill is past

Of anguish and despair,
To lift the eye of faith to Heaven,

And think "my child is there":
This best can dry the gushing tear,
This yield the heart relief,
Until the Christian's pious hope

Be. She was that!" More commonly they exhaust the catalogue of human and divine gifts, graces, and virtues, and, fearing that they have underdone their work, bid the reader refer to "the last six verses of the last chapter of Proverbs, to know her worth." We are ourselves cognizant of a case where all that could be said of the deceased having been set forth in a mural inscription-the tomb in the churchyard was inscribed with name and date, and the words" for further particulars, see monument in the Church.' It is fair to add that in this case the fault lay with the engraver, who read his instructions too literally. As a rule, however, it cannot be O'ercomes the parent's grief. doubted that long and laboured epitaphs The very lack of finish which makes these are as great a solecism against good taste lines fall short of true poetry is in itself an as the elaborate and excessive sculpture earnest of their genuineness, and we are of the monument of Miss Trewbody, of not sure that there is not more natural which Southey said, in reference to the poetry in them than in the more polished two Cupids with marble tears which sup-quatrain on an infant's tomb in Alverstoke ported the shield bearing her epitaph, that "these were the only tears which her death occasioned, and the only Cupids with whom she had any concern." Lengthy epitaphs, as may be shown from the book before us, as well as from Weever, Le Neve, and other more important contributions to the subject, are apt to be a snare to composers, if imperfectly acquainted with the boundary line between the sublime and the ridiculous. Few would credit, if it were not transcribed in the fifth page of the collection under review, from a tombstone in Bury St. Edmund's churchyard, that a widow, however sad the circumstances of her husband's death by the bursting of a blood-vessel, could have failed to see the revolting incongruity of this one of four couplets: :

A sudden death's a shocking thing to see,
His last life's blood was sprinkled over she!
Or the ignorance of a "bereaved and de-

churchyard (p. 30) : —

On life's wild ocean, tempest-tost and pained,
How many voyagers their course perform :

This little bark a kinder fate obtained,
It reached the haven ere it met the storm.
One of this class of epitaphs in the book
before us, taken from Aston churchyard,
near Birmingham, constitutes as concise
and telling an answer to the heathen's
doubt of a resurrection, by a comparison
of human with vegetable life, as any that
we have found in more elaborate and
aspiring poetry:—

-

She died yet is not dead!
Ye saw a daisy on her tomb;
It bloomed to die -
- she died to bloom,
Her summer hath not sped.

It lays hold of the "sure and certain
hope" as trustfully as that which Le Neve
has preserved from Gloucester Cathe
dral;

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