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.

CHAPTER LIII. P. I.

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 equa

tor.

A man may dwell upon words till he becomes at length a mere precisian in speech. Ile 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
The flame we felt; when as we sat and sighed
And looked upon each other, and conceived
Not what we ailed-yet something we did ail;
And yet were well, and yet we were not well,
And what was our disease we could not tell.
Then would we kiss, then sigh, then look: and thus
In that first garden of our simpleness

We spent our childhood. But when years began
To reap the fruit of knowledge, ah, how then

Would she with graver looks, with sweet stern brow,
Check my presumption and my forwardness;

Yet still would give me flowers, still would me show
What she would have me, yet not have me know.

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,
How would she steal a look, and watch mine eye
Which way it went? And when at barley-break
It came unto my turn to rescue her,

With what an earnest, swift, and nimble pace
Would her affection make her feet to run,
And farther run than to my hand! her race
Had no stop but my bosom, where no end.
And when we were to break again, how late
And loath her trembling hand would part with mine;
And with how slow a pace would she set forth
To meet the encountering party who contends
To attain her, scarce affording him her fingers' ends !*

* Hymen's Triumph.

CHAPTER LIV. P. I.

MORE CONCERNING LOVE AND MARRIAGE, AND MARRIAGE WITHOUT LOVE.

Nay, Cupid, pitch thy trammel where thou please,
Thou canst not fail to catch such fish as these.

QUARLES.

WHETHER chance or choice have most to do in the weighty concerns of love and matrimony, is as difficult a question, as whether chance or skill have most influence upon a game at backgammon. Both enter into the constitution of the game; and choice will always have some little to do with love, though so many other operating motives may be combined with it, that it sometimes bears a very insignificant part: but from marriage it is too frequently precluded on the one side, unwilling consent, and submission to painful circumstances supplying its place; and there is one sect of Christians, (the Moravians,) who, where they hold to the rigour of their institute, preclude it on both sides. They marry by lot; and if divorces ever take place among them, the scandal has not been divulged to the profaner world.

Choice, however, is exercised among all other Christians; of where not exercised, it is presumed by a fiction of law or of divinity, call it which you will. The husband even insists upon it in China, where the pig is bought in a poke; for when pigsnie arrives, and the purchaser opens the close sedan chair in which she has been conveyed to his house, if he does not like her looks at first sight, he shuts her up again, and sends her back.

But when a bachelor, who has no particular attachment, makes up his mind to take unto himself a wife, for those reasons to which Uncle Toby referred the Widow Wadman, as being to be found in the Book of Common Prayer, how then to choose is a matter of much more difficulty, than one who has never considered it could suppose. It would not be paradoxical to assert, that in the sort of choice which such a person makes, chance has a much greater part than either affection or judgment. To set about seeking a wife, is like seeking one's fortune, and the probability of finding a good one in such a quest is less, though poor enough, Heaven knows, in both cases.

The bard has sung, God never form'd a soul
Without its own peculiar mate, to meet

Its wandering half, when ripe to crown the whole
Bright plan of bliss, most heavenly, most complete!

But thousand evil things there are that hate

To look on happiness; these hurt, impede,

And leagued with time, space, circumstance, and fate,

Keep kindred heart from heart, to pine and pant and bleed.

And as the dove to far Palmyra flying,

From where her native founts of Antioch beam,
Weary, exhausted, longing, panting, sighing,
Lights sadly at the desert's bitter stream;

So many a soul o'er life's drear desert faring,

Love's pure congenial spring unfound, unquaff'd,
Suffers, recoils, then thirsty and despairing

Of what it would, descends and sips the nearest draught.*

So sings Maria del Occidente, the most impassioned and most imaginative of all poetesses.

According to the new revelation of the Saint Simonians, every individual human being has had a fitting mate created, the one and only woman for every individual man, and the one and only man for every individual woman; and unless the persons so made, fitted and intended for each other, meet and are joined together in matrimonial bonds, there can be no perfect marriage for either, that harmonious union for which they were designed being frustrated for both. Read the words of the chief of the new hierarchy himself, Father Bazard: Il n'y a sur la terre pour chaque homme qu'une seule femme, et pour chaque femme qu'un seul homme, qui soient destinés à former dans le mariage l'union harmonique du couple. Grâce aux lumieres de cette revelation, les individus les plus avancés peuvent aussi dès aujourd'hui sentir et former le lien qui doit les unir dans le mariage.

But if Sinner Simon and his disciples (most assuredly they ought to be unsainted!) were right in this doctrine, happy marriages would be far more uncommon than they are; the man night with better likelihood of finding it look for a needle in a bottle of hay, than seek for his other half in this wide world; and the woman's chance would be so immeasurably less, that no intelligible form of figures could express her fraction of it.

The man who gets in love because he has determined to marry, instead of marrying because he is in love, goes about to private parties and to public places in search of a wife; and there he is attracted by a woman's appearance, and the figure which she makes in public, not by her amiable deportment, her domestic qualities, and her good report. Wateringplaces might with equal propriety be called fishing-places, because they are frequented by female anglers, who are in quest of such prey, the elder for their daughters, the younger for themselves. But it is a dangerous sport, for the fair

* Zophiel