CHAPTER LII. P. I. SHOWING HOW THE YOUNG STUDENT FELL IN LOVE-AND HOW HE MADE THE BEST USE OF HIS MISFORTUNE. Il creder, donne vaghe, è cortesia, Per dir qualcosa troppo rara e bella. E pure che mi diate piena fede, De la dubbiezza altrui poco mi cale. RICCIARDETTO. DEAR ladies, I can neither tell you the name of the burgemeester's daughter, nor of the burgemeester himself. If I ever heard them they have escaped my recollection. The doctor used to say his love for her was in two respects like the smallpox; for he took it by inoculation, and having taken it, he was secured from ever having the disease in a more dangerous form. The case was a very singular one. Had it not been so it is probable I should never have been made acquainted with it. Most men seem to consider their unsuccessful love, when it is over, as a folly which they neither like to speak of, nor to remember. Daniel Dove never was introduced to the burgemeester's daughter, never was in company with her, and, as already has been intimated, never spoke to her. As for any hope of ever by any possibility obtaining a return of his affection, a devout Roman Catholic might upon much better grounds hope that Saint Ursula, or any of her eleven thousand virgins, would come from her place in heaven to reward his devotion with a kiss. The gulf between Dives and Lazarus was not more insuperable than the distance between such an English greeny at Leyden and a burgemeester's daughter. Here, therefore, dear ladies, you cannot look to read of Le speranze, gli affetti, La data fe', le tenerezze, i primi Nor will it be possible for me to give you * Metasia. This I cannot do; for I never saw her picture, nor heard her features described. And most likely if I had seen her herself, in her youth and beauty, the most accurate description that words could convey might be just as like Fair Rosamond, Helen, Rachel, or Eve. Suffice it to say that she was confessedly the beauty of that city, and of those parts. But it was not for the fame of her beauty that Daniel fell in love with her: so little was there of this kind of romance in his nature, that report never raised in him the slightest desire of seeing her. Her beauty was no more than Hecuba's to him, till he saw it. But it so happened that having once seen it, he saw it frequently, at leisure, and always to the best advantage: "and so," said he, "I received the disease by inoculation." Thus it was. There was at Leyden an English Presbyterian kirk for the use of the English students, and any other persons who might choose to frequent it. Daniel felt the want there of that liturgy in the use of which he had been trained up and finding nothing which could attract him to that place of worship except the use of his own languagewhich, moreover, was not used by the preacher in any way to his edification-he listened willingly to the advice of the good man with whom he boarded, and this was that, as soon as he had acquired a slight knowledge of the Dutch tongue, he should, as a means of improving himself in it, accompany the family to their parish church. Now this happened to be the very church which the burgemeester and his family attended : and if the allotment of pews in that church had been laid out by Cupid himself, with the fore-purpose of catching Daniel as in a pitfall, his position there in relation to the burgemeester's daughter could not have been more exactly fixed. "God forgive me!" said he; "for every Sunday while she was worshipping her Maker, I used to worship her." But the folly went no further than this; it led him into no act of absurdity, for he kept it to himself; and he even turned it to some advantage, or rather it shaped for itself a useful direction, in this way: having frequent and unobserved opportunity of observing her lovely face, the countenance became fixed so perfectly in his mind, that even after the lapse of forty years, he was sure, he said, that if he had possessed a painter's art he could have produced her likeness. And having her beauty thus impressed upon his imagination, any other ap→ peared to him only as a foil to it, during that part of his life when he was so circumstanced that it would have been an act of imprudence for him to run in love. I smile to think how many of my readers, when they are reading this chapter aloud in a domestic circle, will bring up at the expression of running in love; like a stage-coach man who, driving at the smooth and steady pace of nine miles an hour on a macadamized road, comes upon some accidental obstruction only just in time to check the horses. Amorosa who flies into love; and Amatura who flutters as if she were about to do the same; and Amoretta who dances into it; (poor creatures, God help them all three !) and Amanda-Heaven bless her!-who will be led to it gently and leisurely along the path of discretion-they all make a sudden stop at the words. OF THE VARIOUS WAYS OF GETTING IN LOVE-A CHAPTER CONTAINING SOME USEFUL OBSERVATIONS, AND SOME BEAUTIFUL POETRY. Let cavillers know, that as the Lord John answered the queen in that Italian Guazzo, an old, a grave, discreet man is fittest to discourse of love matters; because he hath likely more experience, observed more, hath a more staid judgment, can better discern, resolve, discuss, advise, give better cautions and more solid precepts, better inform his auditors in such a subject, and by reason of his riper years, sooner divert.-BURTON. SLIPS of the tongue are sometimes found very inconvenient by those persons who, owing to some unlucky want of correspondence between their wits and their utterance, say one thing when they mean another, or bolt out something which the slightest degree of forethought would have kept unsaid. But more serious mischief arises from that misuse of words which occurs in all inaccurate writers. Many are the men who, merely for want of understanding what they say, have blundered into heresies and erroneous assertions of every kind, which they have afterward passionately and pertinaciously defended, till they have established themselves in the profession, if not in the belief, of some pernicious doctrine or opinion, to their own great injury and that of their deluded followers, and of the commonwealth. There may be an opposite fault; for indeed upon the agathokakological globe there are opposite qualities always to be found in parallel degrees, north and south of the equator. A man may dwell upon words till he becomes at length a mere precisian in speech. IIe may think of their meaning till he loses sight of all meaning, and they appear as dark and mysterious to him as chaos and outer night. "Death! grave!" exclaims Goethe's suicide, "I understand not the words!" and so he who looks for its quintessence might exclaim of every word in the dictionary. They who cannot swim should be content with wading in the shallows: they who can may take to the deep water, no matter how deep, so it be clear. But let no one dive in the mud. I said that Daniel fell in love with the burgemeester's daughter, and I made use of the usual expression because there it was the most appropriate for the thing was accidental. He himself could not have been more surprised if, missing his way in a fog, and supposing himself to be in the Breedestraat of Leyden where there is no canal, he had fallen into the water; nor would he have been more completely over head and ears at once. A man falls in love just as he falls down stairs. It is an accident-perhaps and very probably a misfortune; something which he neither intended, nor foresaw, nor apprehended. But when he runs in love it is as when he runs in debt; it is done knowingly and intentionally; and very often rashly and foolishly, even if not ridiculously, miserably, and ruinously. Marriages that are made up at watering-places are mostly of this running sort; and there may be reason to think that they are even less likely to lead to-I will not say happiness, but to a very humble degree of contentment, than those which are a plain business of bargain and sale; for into these latter a certain degree of prudence enters on both sides. But there is a distinction to be made here: the man who is married for mere worldly motives, without a spark of affection on the woman's part, may nevertheless get, in every worldly sense of the word, a good wife; and while English women continue to be what, thank Heaven, they are, he is likely to do so: but when a woman is married for the sake of her fortune, the case is altered, and the chances are five hundred to one that she marries a villain, or at best a scoundrel. Falling in love and running in love are both, as everybody knows, common enough; and yet less so than what I shall call catching love. Where the love itself is imprudent, that is to say where there is some just prudential cause or impediment why the two parties should not be joined together in holy matrimony, there is generally some degree of culpable imprudence in catching it, because the danger is always to be apprehended, and may in most cases be avoided. But sometimes the circumstances may be such as leave no room for censure, even when there may be most cause for compassion; and under such circumstances our friendthough the remembrance of the burgemeester's daughter was too vivid in his imagination for him ever to run in love, or at that time deliberately to walk into it, as he afterward did-under such circumstances, I say, he took a severe affection of this kind. The story is a melancholy one, and I shall relate not it in this place. The rarest, and surely the happiest marriages, are between those who have grown in love. Take the description of such a love in its rise and progress, ye thousands and tens of thousands who have what is called a taste for poetry, take it in the sweet words of one of the sweetest and tenderest of English poets; and if ye doubt upon the strength of my opinion whether Daniel deserves such praise, ask Leigh Hunt, or the laureate, or Wordsworth, or Charles Lamb. Ah! I remember well (and how can I But evermore remember well) when first Our flame began, when scarce we knew what was We spent our childhood. But when years began Would she with graver looks, with sweet stern brow, Yet still would give me flowers, still would me show Take also the passage that presently follows this: it alludes to a game which has long been obsolete; but some fair reader I doubt not will remember the lines when she dances next. And when in sport with other company Of nymphs and shepherds we have met abroad, * Hymen's Triumph. |