Liber Amoris  

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"The quickening of time, the new vehemence and historicity of private consciousness, the sudden nearness of the messianic future contributed to a marked change in the tone of sexual relations. The evidence is plain enough. It comes as early as Wordsworth's "Lucy" poems and the penetrating remark on sexual appetite in the 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. It declares itself from a comparison, even cursory, between Swift's Journal to Stella and Keats's letters to Fanny Brawne. Nothing I know of at an earlier period truly resembles the self-dramatizing, self-castigating eroticism of Hazlitt's extraordinary Liber Amoris (1823)." --In Bluebeard's Castle

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Liber Amoris, or The New Pygmalion (1823) is a painful autobiographical examination of William Hazlitt's love-life.

By pouring out his tale of woe to anyone he happened to meet (including his friends Peter George Patmore and James Sheridan Knowles), he was able to find a cathartic outlet for his misery. But catharsis was also provided by his recording the course of his love in a thinly disguised fictional account, published anonymously in May 1823 as Liber Amoris; or, The New Pygmalion. (Enough clues were present so that the identity of the writer did not remain hidden for long.) Critics have been divided as to the literary merits of Liber Amoris, which is quite unlike anything else Hazlitt ever wrote. Wardle suggests that it was compelling but marred by sickly sentimentality, and also proposes that Hazlitt might even have been anticipating some of the experiments in chronology made by later novelists.

One or two positive reviews appeared, such as the one in the Globe, June 7, 1823: "The Liber Amoris is unique in the English language; and as, possibly, the first book in its fervour, its vehemency, and its careless exposure of passion and weakness—of sentiments and sensations which the common race of mankind seek most studiously to mystify or conceal—that exhibits a portion of the most distinguishing characteristics of Rousseau, it ought to be generally praised".

However, there were few such positive reviews, and whatever its ultimate merits, Liber Amoris provided ample ammunition for Hazlitt's detractors, and even some of his closest friends were scandalized. For months he did not even have contact with the Lambs. And the strait-laced Robinson found the book "disgusting", "nauseous and revolting", "low and gross and tedious and very offensive", believing that "it ought to exclude the author from all decent society". As ever, peace of mind proved elusive for William Hazlitt.

Full text[1]

LIBER AMORIS

Or the New Pygmalion

BY

WILLIAM HAZLITT


With an Introduction by RICHARD LE GALLIENNE


LOMDON .

ELKIN MATHEWS <Sr* JOHN LANE

AT THE SIGN OF THE BODLEY HEAD

IN VIGO STREET


THE RIGHT OF EDITORIAL DEDICATION HAS RECENTLY BEEN CALLED IN QUESTION. ALL THE SAME, IT HAS MUCH SUPPORT OF NOTABLE EXAMPLE, ANCIENT AND MODERN ; AND, THEREFORE, AFTER THE FIRST OFFER- ING OF THIS NEW EDITION OF THE "LIBER AMORIS" TO THE HONOURED SHADE OF HIM WHO MADE IT, I DESIRE TO ASSOCIATE MY UNIMPORTANT SHARE IN ITS ISSUE WITH THE NAME OF LORD DE TABLEY, IN RESPECTFUL ADMIRATION OF HIS FINE GIFTS AS A POET, AND EMBOLDENED BY A FELLOWSHIP OF REGARD FOR THE GENIUS OF WILLIAM HAZLITT.

R. LE G.

MAY 10, 1893.


871766


INTRODUCTION.

If the reading of the "Liber Amoris" is not exactly a disappointment, at least it gives -one a different kind of pleasure from that which we very probably expected. One looked, may be, for a beautiful garden of fancy, but soon found that the appeal was not so much to one's sense of beauty, as to one's curiosity, one's sense of humour, one's pity, sometimes even one's contempt. A few fine sentences are to be met with, but singularly few, and it is in fact not as literature, but as a document, V" a document in madness," that the book has its value. Even had it not been written by Hazlitt it would have possessed this value, but in relation to him it becomes doubly interesting : for, at first sight, it seems that no aberration could have


11. INTRODUCTION.

been less characteristic of his morose and unsympathetic nature. De Quincey tells us that the book greatly raised Hazlitt in his opinion, for this very reason " by shewing him to be capable of stronger and more agitating passions than " he " believed to be within the range of his nature/' All the same, though erotic passion may have seemed foreign to Hazlitt, he had passions vehement enough in other directions. The vehemence of his political passions was notorious, his letter to Gifford was as fine a burst of anger as can be imagined, and he had a gift for misunderstanding his friends, of taking petty slights, which was continually hurrying him into ungovernable rage.

He seems to have been incapable, in his daily life, of taking broad views, and he was as irritably alive to every little " insult," or semblance of it, as the most ignorant young miss. When he imagined such, even in the case of friends of proved loyalty, he never stopped to think, never allowed any sense of affection or gratitude to suggest


INTRODUCTION. ill.

that he might be mistaken, but flew at once into absurd passion, and proceeded, if pos- sible, to pillory the offender in his next essay. Mr. P. G. Patmore, in " My Friends and Acquaintance," gives several examples of this curious failing. You had only to < accidentally pass him in the street, without having seen him, and he would at once decide that you had cut him, and go about seeking your scalp.

The persistent attacks upon him in Black- wood's Magazine, low and personal to a degree hardly realisable in our day, when we have seldom the excitement of a really spirited set- to among men of letters, and " knuckle- dusters" are forbidden, doubtless, aggravated this irritable self-consciousness. He could never forget that he was " pimpled Hazlitt," and the epithet made him skulk through the streets like a criminal, and made him especi- ally sensitive in the presence of women, who, he felt sure, were always saying it over to . themselves. It is impossible without a long quotation from Mr. Patmore, to give the reader any idea of the painful extremes of


IV. INTRODUCTION.

feeling to which this morbid sensitiveness subjected him.

For instance, during the first week or fortnight after the appearance of (let us suppose) one of Blackwood's articles about him, if he entered a coffee-house where he was known, to get his dinner, it was impossible (he thought) that the waiters could be doing anything else all the time he was there, but pointing him out to guests as "the gentleman who was so abused last mouth in Blackwood's Magazine".' If he knocked at the door of a friend, the look and reply of the servant (whatever they might be), made it evident to him that he had been reading Black- wood's Magazine before the family were up in the morning ! If he had occasion to call at any of the publishers for whom he might be writing at the time, the case was still worse, inasmuch as there his bread was at stake, as well as that personal civility, which he valued no less. Mr. Colburn would be " not within," as a matter of course ; for his clerks to even ascertain his pleasure on that point beforehand would be wholly superfluous : had they not all chuckled over the article at their tea the evening before ? Even the instinct of the shop-boys would catch the cue from the significant looks of those above them, and refuse to take his name to Mr. Oilier. They would "be- lieve he was gone to dinner." He could not, they thought, want to have anything to say to a person who, as it were, went about with a sheet of Black-


INTRODUCTION. V.

wood's pinned to his coat-tail like a dish-clout !

Then at home at his lodgings, if the servant who waited upon him did not answer his bell the first time Ah ! 'twas clear She had read Black- wood's, or heard talk of it at the bar of the public- house when she went for the beer ! Did the landlady send up his bill a clay earlier than usual, or ask for payment of it less civilly than was her custom how could he wonder at it ? It was Blackwood*s doing. But if she gave him notice to quit (on the score, perhaps, of his inordinately late hours) he was a lost man ! for would anybody take him in after having read Black-wood's ? Even the strangers that he met in the streets seemed to look at him askance, "with jealous leer malignant," as if they knew him by intuition for a man en whom was set the double seal of public and private infamy ; the doomed and denounced of Blackwood's Magazine. x" An inherent lack of humour was pro-

fly the spring- of Hazlitt's defectsj Mr. Patmore says too that " an ingrained sel- fishness, more or less influenced or modified all the other points of his nature,'* and certainly the general complexion of Hazlitt's life seems at least to have been that of gloomy self-absorption. However, it will be fair here to recall Barry Cornwall's more


VI. INTRODUCTION.

complete and certainly more generous view of his character :

Hazlitt himself had strong passions, and a few prejudices ; and his free manifestations of these were adduced as an excuse for the slander and animosity \vith which he was perpetually assailed. He attacked others, indeed (a few only), and of these he expressed his dislike in terms sometimes too violent perhaps, and at no time to be mistaken. Yet, when an opportunity arose to require from him an unbiassed opinion, he was always just. He did not carry poisoned arrows into civil conflict. Subject to the faults arising out of this, his warm temperament, he possessed qualities worthy of affection and respect. He was a simple, unselfish man, void of all deception and pretence ; and he had a clear, acute intellect, when not traversed by some temporary passion or confused by a strong prejudice. . . .Like many others, he was sometimes swayed by his affections. He loved the first Napoleon beyond the bounds of reason. He loved the worker better than the idler. He hated pretensions supported merely by rank or wealth or repute, or by the clamour of factions. And he felt love and hatred in an intense degree. But he was never dishonest. He never struck down the weak, nor trod on the prostrate. He was never treacherous, never tyrannical, never cruel

My first meeting with Mr. Hazlitt took place at the


INTRODUCTION. Vll.

house of Leigh Hunt, where I met him at supper. I expected to see a severe, defiant-looking being. I met a grave man, diffident, almost awkward in manner, whose appearance did not impress me with much respect. He had a quick, restless eye, however, which opened eagerly when any good or bright obser- vation was made ; and I found at the conclusion of the evening, that when any question arose, the most sensible reply always came from him. Although the process was not too obvious, he always seemed to have reasoned with himself before he uttered a sentence.

There is no doubt that his strong passions and determined likings often interfered with his better reason. His admiration of Napoleon would not allow of any qualification.

And then Barry Cornwall refers to the frenzy which was the raison d'etre of the following pages, a reference which will be of interest to us later on.

The following sonnet by Sheridan Knowles printed, a propos of Bewick's chalk drawing of Hazlitt, reproduced in front of his son's edition of his " Literary Remains," is of value as the testimony of a man who. knew him intimately, and was, indeed, with Patmore, the sharer of his confidences in


Vll 1. INTRODUCTION.

regard to that divine impossible she, Sarah Walker :

Thus Hazlitt looked ! There's life in every line !

Soul language fire that colour could not give, See ! on that brow how pale-robed thought divine,

In an embodied radiance seems to live ! Ah ! in the gaze of that entranced eye,

Humid, yet burning, there beams passion's flame,

Lighting the cheek, and quivering through the

frame ; While round the lips, the odour of a sigh

Yet hovers fondly, and its shadow sits Beneath the channel of the glowing thought

And fire-clothed eloquence, which comes in fits Like Pythiac inspiration ! Bewick taught

By thee, in vain doth slander's venom'd dart

Do its foul work 'gainst him. This head must own a heart.

Hazlitt's face in this portrait wears certainly a sensibility of expression, almost amounting to voluptuousness, such as appears but little if at all in his portrait by his brother. Be- wick thus helps us the better to understand the " Liber Amoris."

We have seen that Hazlitt was in other directions a man of strong passions, an.d


INTRODUCTION. IX.

the man who is passionate in one thing may be passionate in any when the spark falls. But, actually, Hazlitt had always been susceptible to woman. Patmore, giving an account of his curious daily habits, tells us how, rising at one or two, he would sit over his breakfast of black tea and toast (his slavery to black tea had, doubtless^ much to do with his misanthropy) " silent, motionless, and self-absorbed,'* till the evening, oppressed by a vis inertia, which he was incapable of resisting, unless at the prospect of absolute destitution (for he never wrote till necessity actually forced it upon him) or "moved to do so by some induce- ment in which female attraction had a chief share." Patmore also makes a mysterious reference to a walk home one evening with Hazlitt, during which, in the " broad part of Parliament Street, opposite to the Admiralty and the Horse Guards/' Hazlitt was addressed by "sundry petition- ers,"^//^ dejoie in fact, apparently acquainted with him, and whose acquaintance he did not affect to disown.


X. INTRODUCTION.

Again, in writing of the evenings spent at the Southampton Coffee-house, Patmore, dwelling on Barry Cornwall's share in them, says :

And, above all other themes, to P[rocte]r, and to him alone (except myself) Hazlitt could venture to relate, in all their endless details those " affairs of the heart " in one of which his head was always engaged, and which happily always (with one fatal exception) evaporated in that interminable talk about them of which he was so strangely fond.

Not that Hazlitt confined his confidences on this head to P[rocte]r and myself. On the contrary, he extended them to almost every individual with whom he had occasion to speak, if he could, by hook or crook, find or make the occasion of bringing in the topic. But, in general, he did this from a sort of physical incapacity to avoid the favourite yet dreaded theme of his thoughts ; and he did it with a perfect knowledge that his confidential communications were a bore to nine-tenths of those who listened to them, and consequently that the pleasure of the communi- cation was anything but mutual. . . .The truth is that Hazlitt was a child in this matter ; yet at the same time he was a metaphysician, a philosopher, and a poet ; and hence the (in my mind) curious and unique interest which attached to his mingled details and dissertations on this the most favourite of all his


INTRODUCTION. XI.

themes of converse, at least in a tete a tete ; for he rarely, if ever, brought up the subject under any other circumstances.

But long before the days of " The South- ampton," Hazlitt appears to have had an experience no less violent in its excess than that "one fatal exception," which is, of course, that celebrated in the present volume. He was then, however, more of an age for such experience, being, apparently, about twenty. The affair happened up at the lakes, during a visit to Wordsworth, whose friendship, as also Southey's, and perhaps Coleridge's too, it cost him. Patmore gives the most significant account of it, and I cannot do better than quote him once more :

I allude, he says, to a story relating to Hazlitt's alleged treatment of some petty village jilt, who, when he was on a visit to Wordsworth, had led him (Hazlitt) to believe that she was not insensible to his attractions; and then, having induced him to "com- mit " himself to her in some ridiculous manner, turned round upon him, and made him the laughing- stock of the village. There is, I believe, too much truth in the statement of his enemies, that the


XU. INTRODUCTION.

mingled disappointment and rage of Hnzlitt on this occasion led him, during the madness of the moment (for it must have been nothing less), to acts which nothing but the supposition of insanity could account for, much less excuse, And his conduct on this occasion is. understood to have been the immediate cause of that breach between him and his friends above-named (at least Wordsworth and Southey), which was never afterwards healed,

Here we catch a glimpse of that daemonic frenzy which later on seems, and no wonder, to have agitated even the phlegmatic nerves of Sarah Walker. Lamb makes a waggish allusion to the incident in a letter to Words- worth during 1814, from which we gather that Hazlitt narrowly missed a ducking in the horse-pond for his eccentricities. Wordsworth had evidently been writing Lamb on the subject.

The " scapes " of the great god Pan, who appeared among your mountains some dozen years since, and his narrow chance of being submerged by the swains, afforded me much pleasure. I can conceive the water-nymphs pulling for him. He would have been another Hylas W. Hylas. In a mad letter which Capel Lofft wrote to M\onthly\ M[agazine] t Philips (now Sir Richard), I remember his noticing


INTRODUCTION. Xlll.

a metaphysical article of Pan, signed H., and adding " I take your correspondent to be tbe same with Hylas." Hylas had put forth a pastoral just before. How near the unfounded conjecture of the certainly inspired Lofft (unfounded as \ve thought) was to being realised ! I can conceive him being "good to all that wonder in that perilous flood !"

De Quincey used to hint also that Hazlitt was attached to Miss Wordsworth, the poet's sister, Dorothy, but Mr. W. C. Hazlitt thinks that very little stress must be laid on the conjecture.

The next authentic name in the legend of Hazlitt's loves is that of Miss Railton, of Liverpool. Her father was a friend of Ilazlitt's father, and when William went touring as a roving portrait painter through the provinces, he gave him one or two com- missions. It was not William, however, but his brother John, the miniature-painter, who has preserved for us the "very dark danger- ous eyes " of Miss Railton. She was about twenty-five when Hazlitt first met her about his own age and he seems to have been very much in love. But a match with a struggling artist did not commend itself


XIV. INTRODUCTION.

to the parents of the lady, and so the affair came to nothing.

Another name, presented to us merely by a bantering allusion of his wife, was "Sally Shepherd." Mr. W. C. Hazlitt says that Mrs. Hazlitt would " tax him from time to time with having had a sweetness once for Sally Shepherd," and that the only conjecture as to the owner of this pretty name is that she was perhaps the daughter of Dr. Shep- herd of Gateacre, whose portrait he painted in 1803.

Still another lady seems to have swayed the ardent soul of William Hazlitt : Miss Windham, only daughter of the Hon. Charles Windham, of Norman Court, near Salisbury. She is described as having been very hand- some, though pitted with smallpox, and we are told that a lady once remarking to Haz- litt what a terrible disfigurement smallpox was, he had replied that the most beautiful woman he ever knew was so marked, and, lowering his voice, he mentioned the name of Miss Windham. Miss Windham, how- ever, married otherwhere, and, curiously


INTRODUCTION. XV.

enough, when Hazlitt came to live at Winter- slow, in their near neighbourhood, her husband offered him the free use of apart- ments in Norman Court an offer such as Hazlitt's (somewhat small) pride could, under no circumstances, have entertained. In one of his essays he has a pathetic apostrophe beginning: "Ye woods, that crown the clear low brow of Norman Court," in which he speaks of " that face, pale as the primrose, with hyacinthine locks, for ever shunning and for ever haunting me. ." However, Hazlitt's fate, as the gipsies say, seemed to lie about Winterslow. A certain Dr. Stoddart and his sister Sarah lived in retirement on a small property there. Dr. Stoddart was a friend of John Hazlitt's, and he and Miss Stoddart were also friends of the Lambs. William would thus naturally become acquainted with Sarah, though we have no record of his first introduction to her. Mary Lamb and Sarah Stoddart seem indeed to have been quite intimate friends, and it is only through Mary's letters to Sarah that we catch any glimpses of the develop-


XVI. INTRODUCTION.

ment of relations between Sarah and William. Indeed, one cannot quite absolve Mary from indulgence in that alluring game of match- making. Could it have been of the gentle Mary that Hazlitt was thinking when in his " Advice to a Schoolboy," he bids his son beware, in the choice of a wife, of meddle- some friends ?

We gather from a letter of hers, dated 2ist September, 1803, that Sarah was then engaged to another, but that she was of two minds whether or not to jilt him for William. Mary begins by advising her " to drop all correspondence with William," but ends in this strain : " God bless you, and grant you may preserve your integrity, and remain unmarried and penniless, and make William a good and happy wife." Early in 1804, we find the good Mary slyly hinting at the subject again : " Rickman wants to know if you are going to be married yet. Satisfy him in that little par- ticular when you write."

I should say that towards the end of 1803 Dr. Stoddart had, as a professional specu-


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INTRODUCTION. XV11.

lation, settled, with his sister, in Malta, at the time Coleridge made his ill-fated ex- pedition there. In thanking Sarah for news of Coleridge's safe arrival, Mary cannot resist further allusions to what would really seem to have been a pet project with her. Dr. Stoddart's venture apparently had not been successful. " I cannot condole with you very sincerely/* writes Mary, "upon your little failure in the fortune - making way. If you regret it, so do I. But I hope to see you a comfortable English wife, and the forsaken, forgotten William, of English partridge memory, I have still a hankering

after I trust you will at last find some

man who has sense enough to know you are well worth risking a probable life of poverty for. I shall yet live to see you a poor, but happy English wife." The allusion to partridges is an extinct joke to-day, but it had evidently tickled Mary, for in September 1805 it was still alive. " Has the partridge season opened any communication between you and William ?" wrote Mary. "As I allow you to be imprudent till I see you, I shall


XV111. INTRODUCTION.

expect to hear you have invited him to taste his own birds. Have you scratched him out of your will yet ? "

A month or two later we read : " I .want to know if you have seen William, and if there is any prospect in future there. All you said in your letter from Portsmouth that related to him was burnt so in the fumiga- ting" [for disinfecting purposes] "that we could only make out that it was unfavour- able, but not the particulars. Tell us again how you go on, and if you have seen him. I conceit affairs will somehow he made up between you at last."

Space forbids that we follow Miss Stoddart through all the ups and downs of her variable affections. Her vacillations continued for another three years, a Mr. \yhite and a Mr. Dowling being added to the game, or ever the tale was told. However, in the long run Mary Lamb was to have her wish, though, like many who have contributed to an event, she seems to have grown a little anxious as it really approached. Toward the end of 1807 she writes: "Farewell! Determine


INTRODUCTION. XIX.

as wisely as you can in regard to Hazlitt ; and if your determination is to have him, heaven send you many happy years together, ... .if I were sure you would not be quite starved to death, nor beaten to a mummy^ I should like to see Hazlitt and you come together, if (as Charles observes) it were only for the joke sake."

The joke came off on the ist of May, 1808, at St. Andrew's Church, Holborn. The Lambs were at the marriage, and, writing to Southey seven years after, Lamb thus alludes to it : " I was at Hazlitt's marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh."

The first and only fruits of their union was the birth on the 26 September, 1811, of their son William, who was soon to be the only bond between them.

It was necessary thus to sketch the story of Hazlitt's heart prior to his meeting the heroine of Liber Amoris because of the light it throws upon his temperament, and also upon his relations with his wife.


XX. INTRODUCTION.

We have seen that Miss Stoddart did not accept him before she had flirted consider- ably with others, and one is bound to feel in reading Mr. W. C. Hazlitt's " Memoirs," that these flirtations were not the attractions of an ardent temperament, but merely the experiments of a worldly one. She seems to have been a woman of amiable enough disposition and even exceptionally cultured though she does not seem to have sympathised with her husband's work but utterly matter-of-fact and devoid of poetic sensibility. She hadn't a half-pennyworth of romantic love in her. An extra thousand a year, apparently, would have moved her heart beyond the most heroic devotion ; and we can but conclude that she accepted Hazlitt as a forlorn hope. , Yet she was a good wife, so far as wifely duty goes, and especially a good mother. The rift between them was in the absolute lack of tempera- mental sympathy. So far as one can make out she was a better wife than Hazlitt was a husband ; for Hazlitt must have been very difficult to live with, and though of actual


INTRODUCTION. XXI.

inconstancy we have no hint, it was against his nature to remain long constant to one affection.

In his edition of his father's literary re- mains, young William Hazlitt speaks of the failure of mutual happiness between his father and mother, " owing in great measure to an imagined and most unfounded idea, on my father's part, of a want of sympathy on that of my mother."

Whosever the fault mostly was, the fact remains that Hazlitt and his wife were an uncomfortable pair, and before the autumn of 1819 we find them living apart.

And here we at last arrive at the print- dress divinity celebrated in the following pages.

In letter IV. one reads of "the time I first saw the sweet apparition, August 16, 1820." The "sweet apparition" was Sarah Walker, daughter of a Mr. Walker, tailor and lodging-house keeper at No. 9, Southamp- ton Buildings, Chancery Lane, where Hazlitt had come to take up his solitary abode. The superstitious reader may notice that the


XX11. INTRODUCTION.

name Sarah seems to have been of sinister significance to Hazlitt' s fate : Sarah Shep- herd, Sarah Stoddart, and now Sarah Walker. Mr. W. C. Hazlitt says that Mr. Walker had two daughters, but surely he had three, for in "The Quarrel" (p. 18), arising out of Sarah's little sister Betsey playing eaves- dropper to the embraces of the fond lovers, Sarah speaks of an eldest sister, and implies

her marriage to "Mr. M ." De Quincey,

too, says that " her sister had married very much above her rank." Obviously he could not have been referring to little Betsey, but

to the wife of " Mr. M ." Mr. W. C.

Hazlitt says that Betsey Walker afterwards married a gentleman named Roscoe, whom,

however, he identifies with " Mr. M. ."

In 1822 Hazlitt writes to his friend (Letter

XII. p. 99) asking him "to call on M

in confidence." In the original MS. of this in "Memoirs" the blank reads "to call on Roscoe in confidence," and Mr. W. C. Haz- litt remarks in a foot-note : " the gentleman who had married the sister, and was said to be very happy in his choice " the " sister "


INTRODUCTION. XX111.

being apparently Betsey, who, according to the Liber Amoris, was still a little girl ! Evidently there is some confusion here, which can only be explained by Sarah having two sisters, or on the supposition that Haz- litt invented the Flibbertigget little sister for dramatic purposes. But that seems very im- probable, and quite out of keeping with the general treatment of his confession, which is all through marked with a quite sordid adherence to fact. Besides , the petty humili- ation of the child's running out of hiding, and saying " He thought I did not see him !" is too lifelike for invention. It makes one blush with pity for the poor nympholepht, reduced by his passion to such degrading familiarities.

For descriptions of Sarah Walker, pro- bably the most absurdly idealised of all literary goddesses which is saying much we are not entirely dependent on Hazlitt's raptures. Barry Cornwall describes her with some care, and I cannot do better than quote the whole passage, as it gives the completest and most circumstantial account of Hazlitt's


XXIV. INTRODUCTION.

frenzy left by his contemporaries :

His intellect was completely subdued by an insane passion. He was, for a time, unable to think or talk of anything else. He abandoned criticism and books as idle matters, and fatigued every person whom he met by expressions of her love, of her deceit, and of his own vehement disappointment. This was when he lived in Southampton Buildings, Holborn. Upon one occasion I know that he told the story of his attachment to five different persons in the same day. And at each time entered into minute details of his love-story. " I am a cursed fool," said he to me. "I

saw I going into Wills' Coffee-house yesterday

morning ; he spoke to me. I followed him into the house, and whilst he lunched I told him the whole story. Then I wandered into the Regent's Park,

where I met one of M 's sons. I walked with

him some time, and on his using some civil expressions, by Jove, Sir, I told him the whole story ! " [Here he mentioned another instance which I forget.] " Well, sir " (he went on), " I then went and called on Hayden, but he was out. There was only his man, Salmon, there ; but by Jove ! I could not help myself. It all came out ; the whole cursed story. Afterwards I went to look at some lodgings at Pimlico. The landlady at one place, after some explanations as to rent, &c., said to me very kindly, "I am afraid you are not well Sir?" " No, Ma'am," said I, "lam not well ; " and on enquiring further, the devil take


INTRODUCTION. XXV.

me if I did not let out the whole story from beginning to end." I used to see this girl, Sarah Walker, at his lodgings, and could not account for the extravagant passion of her admirer. She was the daughter of the lodging-house-keeper. Her face was round and small, and her eyes were motionless, glassy, and without any speculation (apparently) in them. Her move- ments in walking were very remarkable, for I never observed her to make a step. She went onwards in a sort of wavy, sinuous manner, like the movements of a snake. She was silent, or uttered monosyllables only, and was very demure. Her steady, unmoving gaze upon the person whom she was addressing was ex- ceedingly unpleasant. The Germans would have ex- tracted a romance from her, enduing her perhaps with some diabolic attribute. To this girl he gave all his valuable time, all his wealth of thought, and all the loving frenzy of his heart. For a time I think that on this point he was substantially insane certainly beyond self-control. To him she was a being full of witching, full of grace, with all the capacity of tenderness. The retiring coquetry, which had also brought others to her, invested her in his sight with the attractions of a divinity.

Making allowance for the fact that in almost every passion,

"some hidden hand Reveals to him that loveliness

Which others cannot understand,"


XXVI. INTRODUCTION.

it seems to me from this description, written, one must not forget, in cold blood, that Sarah Walker was physically by no means unattractive. She was evidently a sensuous creature, not unskilled in the arts of the body. That sinuous movement, that gliding walk, that general suggestion of Melusine, may well have appealed to a man so predisposed to erotomania as Hazlitt, and before we dismiss Hazlitt's conception of her charms as entirely hallucination De Quin- cey does well to remind us that Hazlitt's " eye had been long familiar with the beauty (real and ideal) of the painters." De Quin- cey also adds another touch to her portrait. jHazlitt had confessed, he said, in conversa- tion that one characteristic of her complexion made somewhat against her charm, " that she had a look of being somewhat jaded, as if she were unwell, or the freshness of the animal sensibilities gone by." May not this have been the passion-pallor, so much in evidence in aesthetic poetry another mark of a strongly sexual nature. \

Whatever may have been the truth about


INTRODUCTION. XXV11.

her physical charms, Hazlitt certainly at- tributed to her spiritual, moral and mental qualities which she was far from possessing. For us, who have no opportunity of appreci- ating the glamour of her walk, and can only judge her by her talk, she seems the very type of a servant girl. Predisposed to im- morality, yet she is full of petty convention- ality, of sententious propriety, very nice of her " honour," studiously sensitive of " in- sult," "has no secrets from her mother," and cannot be more to him than a friend, al- lows no " liberties," and yet has no scruples about sitting by the hour on lodgers' knees. She is lumpish, unresponsive, full of ignorant pride, and is, of course, no little pious.

Towards the end Hazlitt began to see her more in this light. He calls her "little yes and no," and even so early as Letter II., in a fit of pique, he is impious enough to exclaim : "After all, what is there in her but a pretty figure, and that you can't get a word out of her ? " A momentary gleam of sane criticism. On one occasion even a gleam of humour breaks from his owlish absorption.


XXV111. INTRODUCTION.

" I have high ideas of the married state !" says the sententious little hussey.

" Higher than of the maiden state ?" asks Hazlitt slyly, irony which nearly lost him his parting kiss.

If she was a tradesman's daughter, she had as nice a sense of honour, &c. " Talk of a tradesman's daughter," cries the en- amoured essayist, with a confusion of pro- nouns often observable in emotion of the kind "you would ennoble any family, thou glorious girl by true nobility of mind/'

Hazlitt had met Sarah Walker, August 1 6,

1820. Later in the same year, or early in

1821, the idea of a formal separation between him and his wife seems first to have been mentioned, but no steps seem to have been taken till early in 1822, when we find Hazlitt in Scotland. The original MS of the " Liber Amoris," in the possession of Mr. W. C. Hazlitt, is dated Stamford, January 29, 1822. " I was detained at Stamford," he says in his first letter, "and found myself dull, and could hit upon no other way of employing my time so agreeably." Hazlitt remained in





INTRODUCTION. XXIX.

Scotland, with the exception of a freakish journey Londonwards (see Letter to J. S. K.) till about July 18. Meanwhile he had lived partly at Edinburgh, partly at Renton Inn (the "Bees Inn" of the "Liber Amoris") in Berwickshire. At Renton Inn he wrote a whole volume of his Table Talk" (see Letter X.). Mrs. Hazlitt landed at Leith on April 21, and with her coming the arrange- ments for divorce seem to have been acceler- ated. On May 6, Hazlitt lectured at Glasgow on Milton and Shakespeare, and on May 13 on Thomson and Burns. On June 17 Mrs. Hazlitt went for a short tour in the High- lands, returning to Edinburgh on June 28. The divorce seems to have been settled on July 17, as Hazlitt sailed for London on the 1 8th, and Mrs. Hazlitt on the igth of that month.

It is unnecessary for me to dwell on the details of the divorce, or of the time spent in Edinburgh pending it, as (owing to the kindness of Mr. W. C. Hazlitt), I have been able to reprint the whole of the extracts from Mrs. Hazlitt' s diary of the time, first


XXX. INTRODUCTION.

printed in "The Memoirs." This will enable the reader to fill in for himself the back- ground to certain allusions to Hazlitt's Edin- burgh exile in the " Liber Amoris."

It is surely one of the most curious documents in the history of " love." The whole affair is seen to have been so purely a matter of business with them. It certainly throws a light on the incompatibility of their union. Mrs. Hazlitt had, doubtless, many good qualities, but this diary reveals a coldness of temperament which, when we remember Hazlitt's subterranean volcanoes, goes far to explain their want of sympathy. A little temper would have been a hopeful sign. But, no ! they are each evidently too pleased at the prospect of release for that. So they talk pictures and take tea together like old friends, and, one must add, like sensible people. The only touch of feeling is in reference to their child. What- ever love they ever had for each other centres in it.

One quaint incident of the affair, not mentioned either in Mrs. Hazlitt's diary or


INTRODUCTION. XXXI.

" The Memoirs," is to be found in Forster's " Life of Landor." The anecdote was related in a letter from Seymour Kirkup to John Forster. Hazlitt, on his second wedding tour, paid a visit to Landor at the Palazzo Medici, in the spring of 1825.

"As Hazlitt's present continental journey," wrote Kirkup, " was in the nature of a holiday wedding-trip with his second wife, whose small independence had enabled him to give himself that unusual enjoyment, he appears to have had no scruple in dilating to his friends on those facilities of Scottish law which had opened to him such advantages."

" He related to Landor, Brown and myself one day the history of his own divorce. He told us that he and his wife, having always some quarrel going on, determined at last, from incompatibility of temper, to get separated. So, to save Mrs. H.'s honour, and have all their proceedings legal, they went to work in this way. They took the steamboat to Leith, pro- vided themselves each with good law advice, and continued on the most friendly terms in Edinburgh till everything was ready ; when Hazlitt described himself calling in from the streets a not very respect- able female confederate, and for form's sake, putting her in his bed and lying down beside her. * Well, sir,' said Hazlitt, turning more particularly to Landor, who had by this time thrown out signs of the most


XXX11. INTRODUCTION.

lively interest, down I lay, and the folding-doors opened, and in walked Mrs. H., accompanied by two gentlemen. She turned to them and said : Gentle- men, do you know who that person is in that bed along with that woman ? Yes, madam, they politely replied, 'tis Mr. William Hazlitt. On which, sir, she made a courtesy, and they went out of the room, and left me and my companion in statu quo. She and her witnesses then accused me of adultery, sir, and obtained a divorce against me, which, by gad, sir, was a benefit to both.'*

We are told that Landor listened to this story with " eager anxiety," and hailed its conclusion with " irrepressible delight." " On other points, too," adds Kirkup, " Hazlitt and his host found themselves in unaccustomed yet perfect sympathy; and so heartily did each enjoy the other's wilfulness and caprice, that a strong personal liking characterised their brief acquaintance."

Does this odd story mean that these business-like people had or had not a sense of humour ? While these legalities were trailing their slow length along, Hazlitt' s soul was pouring out his fiery love for Sarah Walker in the letters which chiefly compose the


INTRODUCTION. XXX111.

following pages. The majority of them were written to Mr. P. G. Patmore, who is the " C.P." of the series. Mr. Patmore published a selection from the original versions in "My Friends and Acquaintance^," and that I am fortunately able to reprint here, so that the reader may compare the two versions for himself. He will remark that two or three of the letters in the ** Liber Amoris " are out of their proper order.

The two final letters to "J.S.K " were written to James Sheridan Knowles, the dramatist, who regarded Hazlitt with some- thing like hero-worship. In a letter to Mr. Patmore not included either in " My Friends and Acquaintances," or the " Liber Amoris" (see Appendix, p. Ixxxix.) and probably written between June 3rd and 9th, Hazlitt

says " I am going to see K , to get him

to go with me to the Highlands, and talk about her." A cheerful prospect for poor

Knowles ! However, " K " seems to

have proved himself a friend in a thousand, and to have suffered his friend's maunderings with an unexampled fortitude. The reader


XXXIV. INTRODUCTION.

will find references to their Highland walks and talks on pages 121 125, pages too in which one gains grateful glimpses of the more robust Hazlitt, who wrote so finely on walking tours. With the bracing in- fluences of Highland scenery around him, Sarah Walker was not quite without a rival, and Hazlitt seems to have been not so trying a companion after all.

This letter to "J.S.K." gives so literal a version of the conclusion of Hazlitt's passion that there is no necessity for me to recapitulate it here. Suffice it that on his return to London, he humiliated himself before her to a still more ludicrous degree, and on her still remaining a Galatea no prayers could warm to life, gave way to frenzies of passion that , very naturally alarmed the whole Walker household. This seems to have been the final flare-up of his feelings, for on his suddenly discovering that his old fellow lodger, had, as he sus- pected, been her lover all the time, he gives up the game as suddenly as he took it up, and we leave him talking the calmest philo-


INTRODUCTION. XXXV.

sophy, with an eye that is already beginning to suspect a humorous side to the whole absurd drama. " Her image," he says, "seems fast * going into the wastes of time' like a weed that the wave bears farther and farther from me."

How, after so much illumination, he came to publish the story, how it was that his friends did not combine to dissuade him, seems hard to understand. He had already, in an essay on " Great and little Things," published in the New Monthly Magazine early in 1822 (and reprinted in " Table Talk"), committed himself by a rhapso- dical reference to his "Infelice" dragged in head and shoulders. Mrs. Hazlitt refers to the indiscretion in her diary for July iyth. "I told him," she writes, "he had done a most injudicious thing publishing what he did in the Magazine about Sarah Walker, particularly at this time, and that he might be sure it would be made use of against him, and that everybody in London had thought it a most improper thing, and Mr. John Hunt was quite sorry


XXXVI. INTRODUCTION.

that he had so committed himself." I have quoted the passage in question in a note to Mrs. Hazlitt's Journal, pp. Ixx. Ixxiv.

John Hunt's regret at the indiscretion seems to have been short-lived, for it did not prevent his publishing the still greater indiscretion of the " Liber Amoris," within a few months afterwards. Though Hunt published it, Mr. C. H. Reynell was, for

ioo, the purchaser of the copyright. Was

it that Hazlitt had one of his periodical fits of impecuniosity on him, and could not resist this opportunity of coining his heart in guineas ? However it happened, a man could hardly have done a more deliberately stupid injury to his fame. He had thus freely given his " Blackwood's" enemies an opportunity for which they, had thirsted for years, and for which they would have gladly paid any price. And you may be sure they did not miss the opportunity. He was no longer to be "pimpled Hazlitt," but "the new Pygmalion ! "

In the number for June, 1823, appeared a long review in their most cut-throat style,


INTRODUCTION. XXXV11.

garnished with long quotations of the most outspoken passages, which lost none of their piquancy by the aid of copious capitals and italics. As this seems a more than usually interesting " cobweb of criticism," I venture to make a somewhat lengthy extract.

After some preliminary banter, the re- viewer thus settles down to his scalping in real earnest :

"To be serious : we have long wished that some of this precious brotherhood would embody in a plain English narrative, concerning plain English trans- actions, the ideas of their school concerning morality, and the plain household relations of society. We now have our wish ; and it is certainly not the less desirably accomplished, because the work is not a novel, but a history ; not a creation of mere Cockney imagination^, but a 'veritable transcript of the feelings and doings of an individual living LiBER^xA We shall make a few extracts, and leave our readers to form their opinion of this H ."

" The following fragments are extracted from the

correspondence of our romantic H , who, it will

be seen, is an active gentleman of the press, and writes lustily at the rate of five pounds odd a sheet (for the Liberal ? or the Examiner ?} in the midst of his calamities."


XXXV111. INTRODUCTION.

The reviewer then proceeds to extract some of those passages referring to what Sarah Walker described as "liberties" not forgetting to draw eloquent attention to the reference to "Endymion" also the conver- sation between Hazlitt and her father (see pp. 137 142) which, somewhat incompre- hensibly, winds him up to a perfect moral fury :

" ' Would she have me, or would she not ? * HE

SAID HE COULD NOT TELL.

Reader, this scene passes between H and the

father of the young woman he wishes to make his wife ! What delicacy ! what manliness ! what a veil is here rent away ! what abomination is disclosed ! What, after this, is a COCKNEY and A LIBERAL ? * "

Then in his most impressive manner :

"Good public, since we first took pen in hand, nothing so disgusting as this has ever fallen in our way. We have gone through with it, because we conceived that not to do so would be a most serious breach of public duty in a journal which may trace five-sixths of all the vulgar abuse that has been heaped upon its character and conduct to this one single fact, that

IT HAS EXPOSED AND RUINED THE COCKNEY

SCHOOL. So long as examples were to be drawn


INTRODUCTION, XXXIX.

from Italianized poetasterisms, and unintelligible essays, it might be that some should hesitate about adopting all our conclusions. We now bid them farewell : we now leave them for once and for ever in the hands of every single individual, however humble in station, however limited in knowledge and acquire- ment, who has elevation enough to form the least notion of what 'virtue,' 'honour' and 'manliness,' and, we may add, 'love,' mean and penetration enough to understand a plain English story told in plain English.

This book is printed for the same JOHN HUNT who is the publisher of the Liberal and the Examiner, and the brother of Leigh Hunt, the author of 'Rimini,' and the 'Letters from Abroad.' The elegant, polite, chivalrous, pure, high-spirited, five- guinea-per-sheet gentleman of the press, who writes this book, and tells this story, is a fair specimen of the tribe of authors to which he belongs (at this moment they are all busy in puffing him as a new Rousseau), and he speaks in the course of his work elegantly, kindly, and familiarly, of ' CRAIGCROOK, WHERE

LIVES THE FIRST OF CRITICS, AND THE KlNG OF

MEN.' So then it seems H is a friend of

Mr. Jeffrey's ! well, we wish Mr. H much joy

of the acquaintance but no we correct ourselves Mr. Jeffrey could not then have known the story of

' Sally in our Alley ! ' and Mr. H will not

speedily nestle again at Craigcrook ! "

We leave ' H ' in the hands not of the ' First


Xl. INTRODUCTION.

of Critics and the King of Men,* but of the British public ; and we call down upon his head, and upon the heads of those accomplished reformers in ethics, religion and politics, who are now enjoying his chef d'ceuvre, the scorn and loathing of every thing that bears the name of MAN. Woman ! But it would be insult to go farther."

It will no doubt interest the reader to know what " those accomplished reformers in ethics, &c.," actually had to say of the "Liber Amoris." The Blackwoodsman evi- dently refers to a review which had appeared in the Examiner of May nth. It is a sly and witty piece of writing, and one still smiles at the way in which the critic, while assuming with much seriousness that the author was dead, as stated in the advertise- ment, keeps significantly referring to "the unhappy person deceased in the Nether- lands," " the gentleman who died in the Netherlands " as with an " ahem ! " in the voice. The reader, too, will notice the clever application of the Berkeleyan theory :

"The lover, the poet, and another sort of person, we are told by Shakespeare," begins * the Examiner * reviewer :


INTRODUCTION. xli.

" ' Are of imagination all compact ; '

and if so, singly considered, what must be the state of the case when two or more of them are united in the same person ? In the common acceptation of the term, we have no evidence to prove that the St. Preux of this little book is a poet, but in its higher and more enlarged sense he is clearly so ; and admitting the two former characteristics to be self- existent, and the last ' proceeding,' we have an exemplification of the imaginative trio of Shakes- peare in the single author of Liber Amoris. We are not aware indeed of the publication of anything so indicative of the Ideal theory of Bishop Berkeley, since the publication of ' The Academical Questions * of Sir William Drummond nothing so approaching to a demonstration that mind is the great creator, and matter a fable. ... Its essence consists in the eloquence of soul and of passion which these trite and by no means exalted events indicate. What- ever Werter may be in the original garb of Goethe, we have always thought him a somewhat spiritless personage in his English dress ; but whether this be so or no, the incident of that German production is by no means of the first order. The St. Preux of Rousseau is a very different creation, and with a somewhat stronger breathing of physical ardour V amour physique, as Gil Bias calls it the gentle- man who died' in the Netherlands in some degree resembles him. . . .


X. INTRODUCTION.

We regret exceedingly the death of the impassioned author, because we are of opinion, from the close of the book, that if he had lived for some time longer he would have survived his passion. . . .

At all events, Liber Amoris ' is a novelty in the English language, and we doubt not will be received as a rara avis in this land of phlegm and sea-coal."

The modern reader will hardly take the " Liber Amoris" as seriously as either of these critics. It will not on the one hand seem so dangerously immoral, or on the other so finely artistic a piece of work here at the end as it did there at the beginning of the century. Perhaps that highly proper Black- woodsman was not really quite so shocked as he felt it necessary to appear. More recent examples have proved that the sins of one's political adversaries are as scarlet. Far from taking so grave a view of Hazlitt's amour, we are more likely to see in the very violence of the aberration a witness to the essential innocence of his nature at the time. It seems to say that, despite those confidences with Patmore and others at " The Southampton," Hazlitt's life had actually been freer from taint than the lives of most men. Few men


INTRODUCTION. xliii.

of his years remain capable of taking any woman so seriously, not to speak of a little servant-girl. Possibly Sarah Walker's station a serving-maid, "out of thy star " will seem the least forgivable part of the affair to certain natures, to whom the charm of print- stuff, save in the authorised forms of blouse or boating costume, has not been revealed. Some will perhaps be able to forgive Hazlitt all the easier on that account. Cophetua's was a true story. For Hazlitt, the reader must make sure not to forget, meant honour- ably by his beggar-maid. It is a pity his assurances of those honourable intentions make such ludicrous reading. Indeed, the one sin which we find in his book to-day is the sin against humour. Though, as we have said, the illusion did credit to Hazlitt's heart, it is impossible not to feel that no man of forty should be able to mistake a woman for a goddess or an angel, and he should certainly never quote Milton or any good poet to her. It is unnatural, uncanny, in the bearded man. Nai'vet6 is charming up to twenty, but the naivete* of middle -age


Xliv. INTRODUCTION.

is unattractive, and the " Liber Amoris " is full of that unattractive quality, much like the naivete we sometimes find in the poetical effusions of criminals.

To think of poor Hazlitt gravely lavishing his choice Elizabethan quotations on the hussey, not sparing even to lay at her feet his sacred passion for Napoleon ! Was ever in the history of amorous sentiment any- thing more ludicrous than the tiresome nonsense about " the little image " ! There is indeed, as Hazlitt himself says, something in it all " discordant to honest ears."

Viewed as literature, it is impossible to agree with the reviewer in "The Examiner" that "the gentleman who died in the Nether- lands" is worthy to be mentioned in the same day as Rousseau. Remembering Haz- litt' s devotion to The New Helo'ise, it seems strange that he should not have succeeded better. The reader will remember how he used to carry it in his pocket during his walking-tours, and will recall especially that passage where he tells us : " It was on the loth of April, 1798, that I sat down to a


INTRODUCTION. xlv.

volume of the New Elo'ise, at the Inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken/' It is not inappropriate that we have thus recalled that other robuster Hazlitt, who in his other writings, so full of bracing man- liness, seems so little related to the maudlin sentimentalist of the book before us. Un- likely as it seems, should any reader encounter this book who has not previously made Hazlitt's acquaintance, I must beg him in justice to a fine writer to acquire his other books at once. To those who know the Hazlitt of the glorious essays " On Going a Journey," "My First Acquaintance with Poets," " On the Fear of Death," the " Liber Amoris" may be entrusted without fear. They will know where to place it, in a very subsidiary relation indeed to the Hazlitt beloved of Mr. Stevenson and all honest men who love virile English. It is but as a literary curiosity, a document of nympholepsy, a biographical appendix, that tffe "TLiber Amoris " has any value unless one sees in the literal tone of its opening conversations a naive promise of modern


Xlvi. INTRODUCTION.

realism, a prophecy of Mr. George Moore. Properly speaking, it is necessary to the understanding of Hazlitt's curious dis- position. Many critics now-a-days advo- cate doctored biography. In view of a public which is far too inclined to magnify all the warts of its great men, there is, doubtless, something to be said for such a theory. Truth of presentation, under the most favourable circumstances, is so hopeless a quest, that we might as well, per- haps, frankly regard biography as a form of fiction, founded upon fact. But, so long as we keep up the pretence of truth-telling, I cannot see how we can logically hush up any side of our great men. It is only a very childish, incomplete view of human nature that would ask it. Surely a great man hangs together like any other organism, and to ignore any one element in him is to stultify the rest. To pretend to know Hazlitt and to ignore the *' Liber Amoris " is, in a less degree, as though you should write a life of Coleridge and never even whisper " opium." But, whereas Coleridge's weakness was dis-


INTRODUCTION. xlvii.

astrous, Hazlitt's was only silly. It did no one any harm but himself.

RICHARD LE GALLIENNE.


NOTE. In the following reprint of the "Liber Amoris " the text of the original edition (1823) has been scrupulously followed. There has been but one other reprint, that in the " Bibliotheca Curiosa " [? 1884]. My best thanks are due: to Mr. W. C. Hazlitt for his kindness in allowing me to print the extrac t from Mr. Hazlitfs diary, and to make other use of his "Memoirs" of his illustrious grandfather ; also to Mr. Coventry Pat more for a similar permission in the case of Mr. P. G. Patmore's "My Friends and Acquaintances"; also to Mr. Alexander Ireland and Mr. William Watson for one or two references. Among the few accounts of the "Liber Amoris," / desire to mention a pleasant paper in an old "Fraser," which, I understand, was written by Mr. Ashcroft Noble.


APPENDICES.


APPENDIX I.

EXTRACTS FROM MRS. HAZLITT'S DIARY, ENTITLED "JOURNAL OF MY TRIP TO SCOTLAND."

Sunday, 2ist [April]. At 5 a.m. calm. At I p.m. landed safe at Leith. A laddie brought my luggage with me to the Black Bull, Catherine Street, Edinburgh. Dined at three on mutton chops. Met Mr. Bell at the door, as I was going to take a walk after dinner. He had been on board the vessel to inquire for me. After he went, I walked up to Edin- burgh. . . . Returned to tea. . . . Went to bed at half-past twelve.

Monday, 22nd [April]. . . . Mr. Bell called about twelve, and I went with him to Mr. Cranstoun, the barrister, to consult him on the practicability and safety of procuring a divorce, and informed him that my friends in England had rather alarmed me by asserting that, if I took the oath of calumny, and swore that there was no collusion between Mr. Hazlitt and myself to procure the divorce, I should be liable to a prosecution and transportation for perjury. Mr. Hazlitt having certainly told me that he should never live with me again, and as my situation must have long been uncomfortable, he thought for both our sakes it would be better to obtain a divorce, and put an end to it. . .


Hi. APPENDIX I.

Tuesday 23rd. Consulted Mr. Gray [a solicitor].

The case must be submitted to the

procurators to decide whether I may be admitted to the oath of calumny. If they agree to it, the oath to be administered, then Mr. Hazlitt to be cited in answer to the charge, and if not defended [I told him I was sure Mr. Hazlitt had no such intention, as he was quite as desirous of obtaining the divorce as me], he said then, if no demur or difficulty arose about proofs, the cause would probably occupy two months, and cost 50, but that I should have to send to England for the testimony of two witnesses who were present at the marriage, and also to testify that we acknowledged each other as husband and wife, and were so esteemed by our friends, neighbours, acquaintances, &c. He said it was fortunate that Mr. and Mrs. Bell were here to bear testimony to the latter part. And that I must also procure a certifi- cate of my marriage from St. Andrew's Church, Holborn. I took the questions which Mr. Gray

wrote to Mr. Bell, who added a note,

and I put it in the penny post. ' Sent also the paper signed by Mr. Hazlitt securing the reversion of my money to the child, which Mr. Bell had given me, by the mail to Coulson, requesting him to get it properly stamped and return it to me, together with the cer- tificate of my marriage

Thursday, 2$th April [1822]. Mr. Bell called to ask if he could be of any assistance to me. I had just sent a note to Mr. Hazlitt to say that I demurred


APPENDIX I. hii.

to the oath, so there was no occasion to trouble Mr. Bell. In the afternoon Mr. Ritchie, of the Scotsman newspaper, called to beg me, as a friend to both (I had never seen or heard of him before), to proceed in the divorce, and relieve all parties from an unpleasant situation, Said that with my appearance it was highly probable that I might marry again, and meet with a person more congenial to me than Mr. Hazlitt had unfortunately proved. That Mr. Hazlitt was in such a state of nervous irritability that he could not work or apply to anything, and that he thought that he would not live very long if he was not easier in his mind. I told him I did not myself think that he

would survive me In the evening Mr.

Bell called I then told him of Mr.

Ritchie's visit, at which he seemed much surprised, and said if Mr. Hazlitt had sent him, as I supposed, he acted with great want of judgment and prudence.

Saturday, 27 th April. Gave Mr. Bell the stamp for the 5<3/. bill, and the following paper of memo- randum for Mr. Hazlitt to sign :

"I. William Hazlitt to pay the whole expense of board, clothing, and education, for his son, William Hazlitt, by his wife, Sarah Hazlitt (late Stoddart), and she to be allowed free access to him at all times, and occasional visits from him.

" 2. William Hazlitt to pay board, lodging, law, and all other expenses incurred by his said wife during her stay in Scotland on this divorce business,


v. APPENDIX I.

together with travelling expenses.

"3. William Hazlitt to give a note-of-hand for fifty pounds at six months, payable to William Netherfold or order. Value Received."

Mr. Bell said he would go that day to Mr. Gray

then go oil to Mr. Hazlitt's, and call

on me afterwards ; but I saw no more of him.

Sunday, 2%th April, 1822. Wrote to Mr. Hazlitt to inform him I had only between five and six pounds of my quarter's money left, and therefore, if he did not send me some immediately, and fulfil his agree- ment for the rest, I should be obliged to return on Tuesday, while I had enough to take me back. Sent the letter by a laddie. Called on Mr. Bell, who said that Mr. Gray was not at home when he called, but that he had seen his son, and appointed to be with him at ten o'clock on Monday morning. Told him that Mr. Hazlitt said he would give the draft to fifty pounds at three months instead of six, when the pro- ceedings had commenced (meaning, I suppose, when the oath was taken, for they had already commenced) but would do nothing before. Told me he was gone to Lanark, but would be back on Monday morning.

Tuesday, y>th April. Went to Mr. Bell after dinner, who did not know whether Mr. Hazlitt was

returned or not In the evening, after

some hesitation, went to Mr. Hazlitt myself for an answer. He told me he expected thirty pounds from Colburn on Thursday, and then he would let me


APPENDIX I. Iv.

have five pounds for present expenses ; that he had but one pound in his pocket, but if I wanted it, I should have that. That he was going to give two lectures at Glasgow next week, for which he was to have ioo/., and he had eighty pounds beside to receive for the 'Table Talk' in a fortnight, out of which sums he pledged himself to fulfil his engage- ments relative to my expenses : and also to make me a handsome present, when it was over (2o/.), as I seemed to love money. Or it would enable me to travel back by land, as I said I should prefer seeing something of the country to going back in the steam- boat, which he proposed. Said he would give the note-of-hand for fifty pounds to Mr. Ritchie for me, payable to whoever I pleased : if he could con- veniently at the time, it should be for three months instead of six, but he was not certain of that. . . . Inquired if I had taken the oath. I told him I only waited a summons from Mr. Gray, if I could depend upon the money, but I could not live in a strange place without : and I had no friends or means of earning money here as he had ; though as I had still four pounds, I could wait a few days. I asked him how the expenses, or my draught, were to be paid, if he went abroad, and he answered that, if he suc- ceeded in the divorce, he should be easy in his mind, and able to work, and then he should probably be back in three months ; but otherwise, he might leave England for ever. He said that as soon as I had got him to sign a paper giving away a ISO/, a year from


Ivi. APPENDIX I.

himself, I talked of going back, and leaving every- thing I told him to recollect that it was

no advantage for myself that I sought .... it was only to secure something to his child as well as mine. He said he could do very well for the child himself; and that he was allowed to be a very indul- gent, kind father some people thought too much so. I said I did not dispute his fondness for him, but I must observe that though he got a great deal of money, he never saved or had any by him, or was likely to make much provision for the child ; neither could I think it was proper, or for his welfare that he should take him to the Fives Court, and such places . . . . it was likely to corrnpt and vitiate him. . . . . He said perhaps it was wrong, but that he did not know that it was any good to bring up

children in ignorance of the world He

said I had always despised him and his abilities. . . . . He said that a paper had been brought to him from Mr. Gray that day, but that he was only just come in from Lanark, after walking thirty miles, and was getting his tea

Thursday, 2nd May [1822].- -Mr. Bell called to say Mr. Hazlitt would sign the papers to-morrow and leave [them] in his hand. And that he should bring me the first five pounds. When he was gone, I wrote to Mr. Hazlitt, requesting him to leave the papers in Mr. Ritchie's hands, as he had before pro- posed.

Friday, $rd May. Received the certificate of my


APPENDIX T. Ivii.

marriage, and the stamped paper transferring my money to the child after my death, from Coulsou, the carnage of which cost seven shillings. Called on Mr. Gray, who said, on my asking him when my presence would be necessary in the business, that he should not call on me till this day three weeks.

Saturday, ^th May, 1822. Mr. Ritchie called, and gave me 4/., said Mr. Hazlitt could not spare more then, as he was just setting off for Glasgow.

Tuesday, *]th May. Wrote to my little son. . .

Tuesday, 2ist May. Wrote to Mr. Hazlitt for money. The note was returned with a message that he was gone to London, and would not be back for a fortnight.

Wednesday, 22nd. Called on Mr. Ritchie to inquire what I was to do for money, as Mr. Hazlitt had gone off without sending me any : he seemed surprised to hear he was in London, but conjectured he was gone about the publication of his book, took his address, and said he would write to him in the evening.

Sunday, qth June, 1822. Sent a letter to Mr. Hazlitt to remit the money he had promised.

Monday, loth June. .... Received a note from Mr. Ritchie, to say he would come the next day and explain about money matters to me. Had also a letter from the child

Tuesday, nth June. .... Mr. Ritchie


Iviii. APPENDIX i.

came Told me that Mr. Hazlitt only

got 56^. from Glasgow, and nothing from Colburn, so that he could not give me the money I asked, but that he had told him whatever small sums of money I wanted to go on with, he would let me have by some means or other.

Thursday, i$th June [1822]. Mr. Bell called, and said that Mr. Hazlitt had gone to Renton Inn, but that he would remit me some money, which he showed him he had for the purpose, as soon as the oath was taken, which he said he was to give him due notice of. .... Asked if I did not take the oath to-morrow ? I said I had not heard from Mr. Gray, but was in hourly expectation of it. ... The note came soon after, appointing the next day.

Friday, i^th June. Mr. Bell called, and said he was going to Mr. Gray's, and would come back for me. Returned, and said Mr. Gray informed him he could not be admitted, as he would be called on with Mrs. Bell the next Friday as witnesses. So I under- took to let him know when the ceremony was over. [Here follows the description of the taking of the oath.] .... On the whole, with the utmost expedition they can use, and supposing no impedi- ments, it will be five weeks from this day before all is finished. Went down and reported this to Mr. and Mrs. Bell : dined there. They told me that Mr. Hazlitt took gol. to the Renton Inn with him. . . . Mr. Bell undertook to send him a parcel that night


APPENDIX I. Hx.

with the joyful intelligence of the oath being taken, as he would get it sooner that way than by the post.

Saturday, i$th June. Mr. Bell called, and wrote a letter to Mr. Hazlitt here, and made it into a parcel, not having sent to him last night, as he promised. Wrote to Peggy. Feel very faint to-day.

Sunday, i6t/i June [1822]. .... Adam Bell called, while I was at breakfast, to say that Mr. Hazlitt was come back, and had been at their house the night before

Monday, I'jth June. Went to Mr. Bell as soon as I had breakfasted. He told me that Mr. Ritchie was to bring me 2ol. that day in part of payment, and that the rest would he paid me as Mr. Hazlitt could get it. That he had proposed only ten now, but that Mr. Bell had told him that that would not do, as I proposed taking some journey, and had no money. Said he did not know anything about the child. Went home very uneasy about him, as his holidays were to begin this day ; and I fretted that he should be left there, and thought he would be very uneasy if they had not sent him to Winterslow, and feel quite unhappy and forsaken ; and thought on his father's refusing to tell me where he was to be, till I was so nervous and hysterical I could not stay in the house.

Went down to Mr. Bell's again at one, as they told me he [Mr. H.] would be there about that time, that I might see him myself, and know where the


x. APPENDIX T.

child was. He was not come, and Mr. Bell did not like my meeting him there. I told him if I could not gain information of the child, I would set off to London directly, and find him out, and leave the business here just as it was. He then gave me a note to send him [Mr. H.] about it, but I carried it myself, and asked to see him.

They said he was out, but would return at three

o'clock. I left the note, and went at three. They

then said he would be back to dinner at four. I

wandered about between that and Mr. Bell's till

four ; then, going again, I met him by the way : he

gave me io/., and said I should have more soon by

V" Mr. Bell. I said I did not like Mr. Bell ; I had

' rather he sent by Mr. Ritchie, which he said he

\ _would.

I asked about the child, and he said he was going to write that night to Mr. John Hunt about him ; so that the poor little fellow is really fretting, and think- ing himself neglected

Mr. Bell said that he seemed quite enamoured of a letter he had been writing to Patmore ; that in their walk the day before he pulled it out of his pocket twenty times, and wanted to read it to them ; that he talked so loud, and acted so extravagantly, that the people stood and stared at them as they passed, and seemed to take him for a madman. . .

[The next twelve days were spent by Mrs. H. in the tour to the Highlands and to Dublin. She. returned on the 28th June.]


APPENDIX I. Ixi.

Saturday, 2<)th June, 1822. Sent the child's letter to his father with a note, telling him that I was just returned from Dublin with four shillings and sixpence in my pocket, and I wanted more money. He came about two o'clock, and brought me ten pounds, and said he did not think he was indebted to me my quarter's money, as he had supplied me with

more than was necessary to keep me He

had been uneasy at not hearing from the child, though he had sent him a pound and ordered him to write. I remarked that the letter I sent him was addressed to him, and I supposed the child did not know how to direct to him. He said he would if he had attended to what he told him. That he wrote to Patmore, and desired him to see for the child, and convey him to Mr. John Hunt's, and that in his answer he said, " I have been to the school, and rejoiced the poor little fellow's heart by bringing him away with me, and in the afternoon he is going by the stage to Mr. Hunt's* He has only been detained two days after the holidays begun." . . . That Mr. Prentice had told him last night it [the business] was again put off another fortnight ; requested me to write to Mr. Gray, to know whether I should be called on next Friday, and if it would be necessary for me to remain in Scotland after that time ; if not, he thought I had better go on the Saturday by the steamboat, as the accommodation was excellent, and

  • At Taunton.


Ixii. APPENDIX I.

it was very pleasant aud good company. That he intended going by it himself, as soon as he could, when the affair was over, and therefore I had better set out first, as our being seen there together would be awkward, and would look like making a mockery of the lawyers here. Wished I would also write to the child in the evening, as his nerves were in. such an irritable state he was unable to do so. Both which requests I complied with.

Monday, 1st July. Received a note from Mr. Gray, to say I should not be called on for two or three weeks, but without telling me how long I must remain in Scotland.

Saturday, 6th July [1822].. . . . Met Mr. Hazlitt and Mr. Henderson, who had just arrived [at Dalkeith Palace] in a gig. Mr. H. said he had heard again from Patmore, who saw the child last Tuesday, and that he was well and happy. I told him of my

last letter and its contents [He] adverted

again to the awkwardness of our going back in the same boat. I told him I had some thoughts of going by boat to Liverpool and the rest by land, as I should see more of the country that way ; which he seemed to like. Asked me if I meant to go to Winterslow ? Said, yes, but that I should be a week or two in London first. He said he meant to go to Winter- slow, aud try if he could write,* for he had been so distracted the last five months he could do nothing.

  • Mrs. H. had a house in the village, but Mr. H. put up at

the Hut. A strangely close juxtaposition I


APPENDIX 1. Ixiii.

That he might also go to his mother's f for a short time, and that he meant to take the child from school at the half-quarter, and take him with him ; and that after the holidays at Christmas he should return to Mr. Dawson's again. Said he had not been to town [London], and that we had better have no communi- cation at present, but that when it was over he would let me have the money as he could get it. Asked if I had seen Roslin Castle, and said he was there last Tuesday with Bell, and thought it a fine place. Mr. Henderson shook hands, and made many apologies for not recollecting me, and said I looked very well, but that from my speaking to Mr. H. about the

pictures, he had taken me for an artist

The two gentlemen passed me in their gig as I was returning.

Wednesday, loth July [1822]. Called on Mr. Ritchie, to ask if he thought I should finish the business on Monday ? I told him that I wanted to know what was to be done about my own payment, as Mr. Hazlitt now seemed to demur to the one quarter that he had all along agreed to, and there was also the 2ol. that I was to have as a present. He said that he was at present very much engaged in some business which would end in two days more, and that then, if I was at all apprehensive about it, he would write to, or see, Mr. Hazlitt on the subject.

Thursday, 1 1 th July. Met Mr. Hazlitt in

+ At Alphington, near Exeter.


Ixiv. APPENDIX I.

Catherine Street, and asked him what I was to do if Mr. Gray sent in my bill to me, and he said I had nothing to do with it, for that he had paid Mr. Prentice 4O/., which was nearly the whole expense for both of them. I said that was what Mr. Ritchie, to whom I had spoken about it, thought. He said Mr. Ritchie had nothing at all to do with it, and I remarked that he was the person he had sent to me about it, and that he did not think it would finish on Monday; and [I] asked if he had heard anything more ? He said no, but he thought it would be Monday or Tuesday ; and as soon as it was done, he wished I would come to him to finally settle matters, as he had some things to say, and I told him I would. I was rather flurried at meeting him, and totally forgot many things I wished to have said, which vexed me afterwards.

Friday -, \2th July. On my return [from a walk to Holyrood House] I found a note from Mr. Gray, appointing next Wednesday for my attendance, and desiring a " payment of 2Ol. towards the expense. I took it to Mr. Bell's ; he and Mr. Hazlitt went out at the back door as I went in at the front. I gave the message to Mrs. Bell, who told me Mr. Hazlitt had been to Mr. Gray's. . .

Saturday, i$th July. Met Mr. Hazlitt at the foot of my stairs, coming to me. He said that Mr. Gray was to have the money out of what he had paid Mr.

Prentice I told him he need not be"

uneasy about meeting me in the steamboat, for I did


APPENDIX I. 1XV.

not intend to go that way. Asked him if he thought it a good collection of pictures at Dalkeith House [this is so characteristic!]; he said no, very poor.

Wednesday, i^th July. Mr. Bell called between

ten and eleven He had come, by Mr.

Gray's desire, to accompany me to the court, and was himself cited as a witness. [Mrs. H. then describes going to the court, but the proceedings were pro formd, as the depositions had been arranged to be taken at Mr. Bell's private residence.] Returned, and wrote a note to Mr. Hazlitt, to have in case he was out, saying that I would call on him at two

o'clock. I left it Saw Mr. Hazlitt at

four o'clock ; he was at dinner ; but I stopped and drank tea with him. [ ! ] He told me that all was done now, unless Mrs. Bell should make any demur

in the part required of her Said he

would set off to London by the mail that night, though he thought he should be detained by illness or die on the road, for he had been penned up in that house for five months .... unable to do any work ; and he thought he had lost the job to Italy, but to get out of Scotland would seem like the road to Paradise. / fold him* he Jmd done a most in-

  • The italics are mine. This passage must find room here

in spite of my scruples. The affair was well known, and was soon in print in the ' Liber Amoris.' To conceal it would be useless ; and all that I can do is to place it in its true light before the world. Mrs. H. was a plaia - spoken woman, without any false delicacy about her. She was perfect ij acquainted with the whole history of the matter. --[J/r, W- C. Hazlitfs note,]


Ixvi. APPENDIX I.

judicious thing in publishing what he did in the [New Monthly] Magazine about Sarah Walker, par- ticularly at this time, and that he might be sure it would be made use of against him, and that every" body in London had thought it a most improper thing, and Mr. John Hunt was quite sorry that he had so committed himself*

He said that he was sorry for [it], but that it was done without his knowledge or consent. That Colburn had got hold of it by mistake, with other papers, and published it without sending him the proofs. He asked me where I should be in town, and I told him at Christie's. He inquired what kind of people they were. I told him a very respectable quiet young couple lately married. He desired me to take care of rrryself, and keep up a respectable appearance, as I had money enough to do so. He\ wished he could marry some woman with a good fortune, that he might not be under the necessity of writing another line ; and be enabled to provide for the child, and do something for John ; and that now his name was known in the literary world, he thought there was a chance for it, though he could not pretend to any- thing of the kind before I left Mr.

Henderson with him, pressing him to accompany him

to the Highlands ; but he seemed, after some hesita-

  • See note at end.

+ The italics are mine. The John referred to presently was, of course, his brother. This passage is very remarkable. {Mr. W. C. HazliWs note.]


APPENDIX I. Ixvii.

tion, to prefer going to London, though I left the matter uncertain. He [Mr. Henderson] had been dawdling backward and forward about it for three weeks, wishing to have the credit of taking him there, but grudging the money, though he was living upon us for a week together in London.

Mr. Hazlitt said that, if he went to Winterslow, he would take the child, as he wished to have him a little with him ; so I thought he had better go with the first that went, as I did not think of staying in town more than two or three weeks, and then making some stay at Winterslow, and proceeding afterwards to Crediton.* He said we could settle that best in town.

Mrs. Dow [Mr. H.'s landlady] brought in the bill, which he just looked at and said, " Is that the whole, ma'am ? " " Yes, sir ; you had better look over it, and see that it is correct, if you please." "That, ma'am," he said, "is one of the troubles I get rid of. I never do it." "You are a very indolent man, sir." " There is a balance of twenty-four shillings, ma'am ; can you have so much confidence in me as to let me have that ?" "No, sir, I can't do that, for I have not the money." "I shall be glad then, ma'am, if you will let me have the four shillings, and you may pay the pound to Mrs. Hazlitt

  • Where Mr. H.'s relations were settled I This is also a

curious part of the business. My grandmother was intimate and friendly with the Hazlitts to the last, and frequently visited them here. [Mr. W. C. Hazlitfs note.]


Ixviii. APPENDIX i.

on Saturday, as when it comes, she will be here." " Yes, sir, and Mrs. Hazlitt may look over the bill, if she pleases."

Thursday, iSfk July [1822]. She returned with the four shillings, saying she had been to two or

three places to get that Went to Mr.

Ritchie, who gave me the note-of-hand for fifty pounds at six months, dated 6th May, and the copy

of memorandums signed by Mr. Hazlitt

He said he had expected him and Mr. Henderson to supper last night, but they did not come. I told him he wished to go to London by the mail, and

probably had done so He said he must

repeat that he thought we had taken the step most

advisable for both parties Called at his

[Mr. H.'s] lodgings to inquire if he went by the mail. Mrs. Dow said yes ; he left there about eight o'clock. . . . . Called at the coach-office, and they said Mr. Hazlitt did not go by the mail. Saw the waiter at the inn door, who said he went by the steamboat at eight o'clock this morning. . , . . .

Carried back Mrs. Bell's book. Mr. Bell said I was a great fool to have acceded to his wish for a divorce, but that it was now done, and he thought I had better get some old rich Scotch lord, and marry here. "I was now Miss Stoddart, and was I not glad of that ? " " No ; I had no intention of marry- ing, and should not do what he talked of." He said I must needs marry ; and I told him I saw no such necessity "


APPBNDIX I. Ixix.

This is the conclusion. Mrs. Hazlitt sailed on the following day, at 2 p.m., in the smack Favourite from Leith.


PASSAGE IN ESSAY "ON GREAT AND LITTLE THINGS" (WRITTEN JANUARY, 1821, PRINTED IN NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE, N.S. VOL. iv. 1822 ;

AND REPRINTED IN "TABLE TALK") REFERRED

TO IN MRS. HAZLITT'S DIARY, PP. LXV. AND LXVI.

"This is the misery of unequal matches. The woman cannot easily forget, or think that others forget, her origin ; and with perhaps superior sense and beauty, keeps painfully in the back-ground. It is worse when she braves this conscious feeling, and displays all the insolence of the upstart and affected fine lady. But shouldst thou ever, my Infelice, grace my home with thy loved presence, as thou hast cheered my hopes with thy smile, thou wilt conquer all hearts with thy prevailing gentleness, arid I will show the world what Shakespear's women were ! Some gallants set their hearts on princesses; others descend in imagination to women of quality ; others are mad after opera-singers. For my part, I am shy even of actresses, and should not think of leaving my card with Madame Vestris. I am for none of these bonnes fortunes ; but for a list of humble beauties, servant- maids and shepherd-girls, with their red elbows, hard


APPENDIX i. 'Ixxi.

hands, black stockings and mob-caps, I could furnish out a gallery equal to Cowley's, and paint them half as well. Oh ! might I but attempt a description of some of them in poetic prose, Don Juan would forget his Julia, and Mr. Davison might both print and publish this volume. I agree so far with Horace, and differ with Montaigne. I admire the Clementinas and Clarissas at a distance : the Pamelas and Fannys of Richardson and Fielding make my blood tingle. I have written love-letters to such in my time, d^un pathetique a faire fendre les rochers, and with about as much effect as if they had been addressed to stone. The simpletons only laughed, and said, that " those were not the sort of things to gain the affections." I wish I had kept copies in my own justification. What is worse, I have an utter aversion to blue stockings. I do not care a fig for any woman .-4hat knows even what an author means. If I know C that she has read anything I have written, I cut her V acquaintance immediately. This sort of literary inter- course with me passes for nothing. Her critical and scientific acquirements are carrying coals to New- castle. I do not want to be told that I have published such or such a work. I knew all this before. It makes no addition to my sense of power. I do not wish the affair to be brought about in that way. I would have her read my soul : she should understand the language of the heart : she should know what I am, as if she were another self ! She should love me for myself alone. I like myself without any reason :


APPENDIX I.

I*would have her do so too. This is not very reason- able. I abstract from my temptations to admire all the circumstances of dress, birth, breeding, fortune ; and I would not willingly put forward my own pre- tensions, whatever they may be. The image of some fair creature is engraven on my inmost soul ; it is on that I build my claim to her regard, and expect her to see into my heart, as I see her form always before me. Wherever she treads, pale primroses, like her face, vernal hyacinths, like her brow, spring up beneath her feet, and music hangs on every bough : but all is cold, barren, and desolate without her. Thus I feel, and thus I think. But have I ever told her so ? No. Or if I did, would she understand it ? No. I " hunt the wind, I worship a statue, cry aloud to the desert." To see beauty is not to be beautiful, to pine in love is not to be loved again. I always was inclined to raise and magnify the power of Love. I thought that his sweet power should only be exerted to join together the loveliest forms and fondest hearts ; that none but those in whom his godhead shone putwardly, and was inly felt, should ever partake of his triumphs ; and I stood and gazed at a distance, as unworthy to mingle in so bright a throng, and did not (even for a moment) wish to tarnish the glory of so fair a vision by being myself admitted into it. I say this was my notion once, but God knows it was one of the errors of my youth. For coming nearer to look, I saw the maimed, the blind, and the halt enter in, the crooked and the dwarf, the ugly, the old and impotent, the man of


APPENDIX i. Ixxiii.

pleasure and the man of the world, the dapper and the pert, the vain and shallow boaster, the fool and the pedant, the ignorant and brutal, and all that is farthest removed from earth's fairest-born, and the pride of human life. Seeing all these enter the courts of Love, and thinking that I also might venture in under favour of the crowd, but finding myself rejected, I fancied (I might be wrong) that it was not so much because I was below, as above the common standard. I did feel, but I was ashamed to feel, mortified at my repulse, when I saw the meanest of mankind, the very scum and refuse, all creeping things and every obscene creature, enter in before me. I seemed a species by myself. I took a pride even in my disgrace : and concluded I had elsewhere my inheritance ! The only thing I ever piqued myself upon was the writing the 1 ' Essay on the Principles of Human Action ' ' * a work that no woman ever read, or would ever comprehend the meaning of. But if I do not build my claim to regard on the pretensions I have, how can I build it on those I am totally without ? Or why do I complain and expect to gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles ? Thought has in me cancelled pleasure ; and this dark forehead, bent upon truth, is the rock on which all affection has split. And thus I waste my life in one long sigh ; nor ever (till too late) beheld a gentle face turned gently upon mine ; . . . . But no ! not

  • Published in 1805, but the composition of the work, though

a thin octavo, cost the author seven or eight years' labour.

[ED.]


Ixxiv. APPENDIX I.

too late, if that face, pure, modest, downcast, tender, with angel sweetness, not only gladdens the prospect of the future, but sheds its radiance on the past, smiling in tears. A purple light hovers round my head. The air of love is in the room. As I look at my long-neglected copy of the Death of Clorinda,* golden gleams play upon the canvas, as they used when I painted it. The flowers of Hope and Joy springing up in my mind, recal the time when they first bloomed there. The years that are fled knock at the door and enter. I am in the Louvre once more. The sun of Austerlitz has not set. It still shines here in my heart ; and he, the son of glory, is not dead, nor ever shall, to me. I am as when my life began. The rainbow is in the sky again. I see the skirts of the departed years. All that I have thought and felt has not been in vain. I am not utterly worthless, unregarded ; nor shall I die and wither of pure scorn. Now could I sit on the tomb of Liberty, and write a Hymn to Love. Oh ! if I am deceived, let me be deceived still. Let me live in the Elysium of those soft looks ; poison me with kisses, kill me with smiles ; but still mock me with thy love ! f

, By Lana, Titian's contemporary. It was copied by the writer in 1802, and is still in good preservation. [En.]

+ I beg the reader to consider this passage merely as a specimen of the mock-heroic style, and as having nothing to do with any real facts or feelings.


APPENDIX II.

EXTRACTS OF LETTERS FROM W. HAZLITT TO P. G. PATMORE (DATED BETWEEN MARCH AND JULY, 1822).

"What have I suffered since I parted with you! A raging fire in my heart and in my brain, that I thought would drive me mad. The steam-boat seemed a prison a hell and the everlasting waters an unendurable repetition of the same idea my woes. The abyss was before me, and her face, where all my peace was centred all lost ! I felt the eternity of punishment in this world. Mocked, mocked by her in whom I placed my hope writhing, withering in misery and despair, caused by one who hardens herself against me. I wished for courage to throw myself into the waters ; but I could not even do that and my little boy, too, prevented me, when I thought of his face at hearing of his father's death, and his desolation in life.


" You see she all along hated me (< I always told you I had no affection for you '), and only played with


Ixxvi. APPENDIX II.

" I am a little, a very little, better to-day. Would it were quietly over, and that this form, made to be loathed, were hid out of sight of cold, sullen eyes. I thought of the breakfasts I had promised myself with her, of those I had had with her, standing and listening to my true vows ; and compared them to the one I had this morning. The thought choked me. The people even take notice of my dumb despair, and pity me. What can be done ? I cannot forget her, and I can find no other like what she seemed. I should like you to see her, and learn whether I may come back again as before, and whether she will see and talk to me as an old friend. Do as you think best."


"I got your letter this morning, and I kiss the rod, not only with submission, but with gratitude. Your rebukes of me and your defence of her are the only things that save my soul from hell. She is rny soul's idol, and, believe me, those words of yours applied to the dear creature (' to lip a chaste one and suppose her wanton ') were balm and rapture to me.

"Be it known to you, that while I write this, I am drinking ale* at the Black Bull, celebrated in Black- wood's. It is owing to your letter. Could I think her ' honest,' I am proof even against Edinburgh ale !

He had not for years previously touched anything but water, except his beloved tea, nor did he afterwards, up to th period of his last illness.


APPENDIX II.

She, by her silence, makes my ' dark hour,' and you dissipate it for four-and-twenty hours.

" I have seen the great little man,f and he is very gracious to me. I tell him I am dull and out of spirits, but he says he cannot perceive it. He is a person of infinite vivacity. My Sardanapalus is to be in.}:

" In my judgment, Myrrha is just like ,

only I am not like Sardanapalus.

" Do you think if she knew how I love her, my depressions and my altitudes, my wanderings and my pertinacity, it would not melt her ? She knows it all ! I don't believe that any human being was ever courted more passionately than she has been by me. As Rousseau said of Madame d'Houdetot (forgive the allusion), my soul has found a tongue in speaking to her, and I have talked to her in the divine language of love. Yet she says she is insensible to it. Am I to believe her or you ? You ; for I wish it to mad- ness."


" The deed is done, and I am virtually a free man.

  • * * What had I better do in these

circumstances ? I dare not write to her I dare not

write to her father. She has shot me through with

t Jeffrey.

t An article in the Edinburgh Review on Byron's tragedy so called.


Ixxviii. APPENDIX II.

poisoned arrows, and I think another 'winged wound ' would finish me. It is a pleasant sort of balm she has left in my heart. One thing I agree with you in it will remain there for ever but yet not long. It festers and consumes me. If it were not for my little boy, whose face I see struck blank at the news, and looking through the world for pity, and meeting with contempt, I should soon settle the question by my death. That is the only thought that brings my wandering reason to an anchor that excites the least interest, or gives me fortitude to bear up against what I am doomed to feel for the ungrateful. Otherwise, I am dead to all but the agony of what I have lost. She was my life it is gone from me, and I am grown spectral. If it is a place I know, it reminds me of her of the way in which my fond heart brooded over her. If it is a strange place, it is desolate, hateful, barren of all interest for nothing touches me but what has a reference to her. There is only she in the world 1 the false, the fair, the inexpressive she.' If the clock strikes, the sound jars me, for a million of hours will never bring peace to my breast. The light startles me, the darkness terrifies me I seem falling into a pit, without a hand to help me. She came (I knew not how) and sat by my side, and was folded in my arms, a vision of love and joy as if she had dropped from the heavens, to bless me by some special dispensation of a favouring Providence to make me amends for all. And now, without any fault of mine but too much love, she has vanished


APPENDIX II. Ixxix.

from me, and I am left to wither. My heart is torn out of me, and every feeling for which I wished to live. It is like a dream, an enchantment it torments me, and makes me mad. I lie down with it I rise up with it and I see no chance of repose. I grasp at a shadow I try to undo the past, or to make that mockery real and weep with rage and pity over my own weakness and misery. * *

"I had hopes, I had prospects to come the flattering of something like fame a pleasure in writing health even would have come back to me with her smile. She has blighted all turned all to poison and drivelling tears. Yet the barbed arrow is in my heart I can neither endure it nor draw it out, for with it flows my life's blood. I had dwelt too long upon Truth to trust myself with the immortal

thoughts of love. That might have

been mine and now never can : these are the two sole propositions that for ever stare me in the face, and look ghastly in at my poor brain. I am in some i /"sense proud that I can feel this dreadful passion. It \ makes me a kind of peer in the kingdom of love. !But I could have wished it had been for an object that, at least, could have understood its value and pitied its excess. * * * The gates of Paradise were once open to me, and I blushed to enter but with the golden keys of love ! I would die but her lover my love of her ought not to die. When I am dead, who will love her as I have done ? If she should be in misfortune, who will comfort her ?


1XXX. APPENDIX II.

When she is old, who will look in her face and bless her ? * * * Oh, answer me, to save me if possible for her and from myself !

" Will you call at Mr. 's school, and tell my

little boy I'll write to him or see him on Saturday morning. Poor little fellow ! "


" Your letter raised me a moment from the depths of despair ; but, not hearing from you yesterday or to-day (as I hoped), I am gone back again. You say I want to get rid of her. I hope you are more right in your conjectures about her than in this about me. Oh, no ! believe it, I love her as I do my own soul : my heart is wedded to her, be she what she may ; and I would not hesitate a moment between her and an angel from heaven. I grant all you say about my self-tormenting madness; but has it been without cause ? Has she not refused me again and again with scorn and abhorence ? * * * ' She can make no more confidences ! ' These words ring for ever in my ears, and will be my deathwatch. My poor fond heart, that brood.ed over her, and the remains of her affections, as my only hope of comfort upon earth, cannot brook or survive this vulgar degradation. Who is there so low as 1 ? Who is there besides, after the homage I have paid her, and the caresses she has lavished on me, so vile, so filthy, so abhorrent to love, to whom such an indignity could have happened ? When I think of this (and I think


APPENDIX II. Ixxxi.

of it for ever, except when I read your letters), the air I breathe stifles me. I am pent up in burning impotent desires, which can find no vent or object. I am hated, repulsed, bemocked, by all I love. I cannot stay in any place, and find no rest or interruption from the thought of her contempt, and her ingratitude. I can do nothing. What is the use of all I have done ? Is it not that my thinking beyond my strength, my feeling more than I ought about so many things, has withered me up, and made me a thing for love to shrink from and wonder at ? Who could ever feel that peace from the touch of her hand that I have done ; and is it not torn for ever from me ? My state is, that I feel I shall never lie down again at night, nor rise up of a morning in peace, nor ever behold my little boy's face with pleasure while I live, unless I am restored to her favour. Instead of that delicious feeling I had when she was heavenly kind to me, and my heart softened and melted in its own tenderness and her sweetuess, I am now enclosed in a dungeon of despair. The sky is marble, like my thoughts; nature is dead without me, as hope is within me ; no object can give me one gleam of satisfaction now, or the prospect of it in time to come. I wander, or rather crawl, by the seaside; and the eternal ocean, and lasting despair, and her face, are before me. Hated, mocked by her on whom my heart by its last fibre hung. I wake with her by my side, not as my sweet companion, but as the corpse of my love, without a heart in her cold, insensible,


Ixxxii. APPENDIX II.

or struggling from me ; and the worm gnaws me, and the sting of unrequited love, and the canker of a hopeless, endless sorrow. I have lost the taste of my food by feverish anxiety ; and my tea, which used to refresh me when I got up, has no moisture in it. Oh ? cold, solitary, sepulchral breakfasts, compared to those which I made when she was standing by my side ; my Eve, my guardian angel, my wife, my sister, my sweet friend, my all. * * * Ah ! what I suffer now, shows only what I have felt before.

" But you say, ' The girl is a good girl, if there is goodness in human nature.' I thank you for those words, and I will fall down and worship you, if you can prove them true ; and I would not do much less to him that proves her a demon.

" Do let me know if anything has passed ; suspense is my greatest torment. I am going to Renton Inn, to see if I can work a little."


" I ought to have written you before ; but since I received your letter I have been in a sort of hell. I would put an end to my torments at once, but that I am as great a coward as I am a fool. Do you know that I have not had a word of answer from her since ? What can be the reason? Is she offended at my letting you know she wrote to me ? or is it some new amour? I wrote to her in the tenderest, most respectful manner poured my soul at her feet and this is the way she serves me ! Can you account for


APPENDIX ii. Ixxxiii.

it, except on the admission of my worst suspicion ? God ! can I bear to think of her so or that I am scorned and made sport of by the creature to whom I have given my very heart ? I feel like one of the damned. To be hated, loathed as I have been all my life, and to feel the utter impossibility of its ever being otherwise while I live, take what pains I may ! I sit and cry my eyes out. My weakness grows upon me, and I have no hope left, unless I could lose my senses quite. I think I should like this. To forget ah ! to forget there would be something in that to be an-- idiot for some few years, and then wake up a poor, wretched, old man, to recollect my misery as past, and die ! Yet, oh ! with her, only a little while ago, I had different hopes forfeited for nothing that I know of."


" I was in hopes to have got away by the steam- boat to-morrow, but owing to * * * I cannot, and may not be in town till another week, unless I come by the mail, which I am strongly tempted to do. In the latter case, I shall be there on Saturday evening. Will you look in and see, about eight o'clock ? I wish much to see you, and her, and John Hunt, and my little boy, once more ; and then, if she is not what she once was to me, I care not if I die that instant.' '


APPENDIX II.

Many of the letters in the " Nouvelle Heloise " are among the most beautiful and affecting effusions which exist in those works of fiction that concern themselves with sentiment and passion, rather than with incident and action. But, I venture to say, that there is nothing in the "Nouvelle Heloise " equal in passion and pathos to the foregoing extracts. And the reason is, that the latter are actual and immediate transcripts from the human heart. In this respect the letters from which these extracts are taken are, perhaps, more beautiful and touching than anything of their kind that was ever given to the world. But I am far from doubting that innumerable others exist, equalling them in all the qualities in which they excel ; for real and intense passion levels all ranks of intellect, laughs learning and worldly wisdom to scorn, and invests the common-places of life with the highest attributes of poetry and eloquence.

Perhaps the published writings most resembling these letters in the depth and intensity of the passion they embody and convey, are the celebrated letters addressed by Mary Woolstoncraft fo Imlay.

[P. G. PATMORE].


APPENDIX III.

LETTERS IN "MEMOIRS" ONLY PARTIALLY IN- CLUDED IN THE " LIBER AMORIS," AND MR. PAT- MORE'S "MY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES."


"London, January lyth [1822]. " SIR,

"Dr. Read sent the "London Magazine," with compliments and thanks; no letters or parcels, except the one which I have sent with the * Magazine," according to your directions. Mr. Lamb sent for the things which you left in our care, likewise a cravat which was sent with them. I send my thanks for your kind offer, but must decline accepting it. Baby is quite well. The first floor is occupied at present ; it is quite uncertain when it will be disengaged.

"My family send their best respects to you. I hope, sir, your little son is quite well.

" From yours respectfully,

"S. WALKER. "W. Hazlitt, Esq."

"It is well I had finished Colburn's work* before all this came upon me. It is one comfort I have

  • The second volume of "Table Talk."


IXXXVI. APPENDIX III.

done that. ... I write this on the supposition that Mrs. H. may still come here, and that I may be left in suspense a week or two longer. But, for God's sake, don't go near the place on my account. Direct to me at the post-office, and if I return to town directly, as I fear, I will leave word for them to forward the letter to me in London not in S. B. . . . . I have finished the book of my conversa- tions with her, which I call * Liber Amoris.'

" Yours truly,

"W. H.* " Edinburgh, March 30.

"P.S. I have seen the great little man,f and he is very gracious to me. Et sa femme aussi ! I tell him I am dull and out of spirits. He says he cannot perceive it. He is a person of an infinite vivacity. My Sardanapalus J is to be in. In my judgment Myrrha is most like S.W., only I am not like Sar- danapalus.

" P. G. Patmore, Esq.,

u 12, Greek Street, Soho, London."

  • I am quoting from the original autograph letter : in the

printed copy the text differs.

+ Jeffrey.

t The review of Byron's "Sardanapalus " in the "Edinburgh."


APPENDIX III. IxXXVli.

[April 7, 1822.] "MY DEAR FRIEND,

" I received your letter this morning with grati- tude. I have felt somewhat easier since. It showed your interest in my vexations, and also that you knew nothing worse than I did. I cannot describe the weakness of mind to which she has reduced me. I am come back to Edinburgh about this cursed busi- ness, and Mrs. H. is coming down next week. . . . A thought has struck me. Her father has a bill of mine for lol. unhonoured, about which I tipped her a cavalier epistle ten days ago, saying I should be in town this week, and 'would call and take it up,' but nothing reproachful. Now if you can get Colburn, who has a deposit of 220 pp. of the new volume, to come down with io/., you might call and take up the aforesaid bill, saying that I am prevented from coming to town, as I expected, by the business I

came about

"W. H.

"P.S. Could you fill up two blanks for me in an essay on Burleigh House in Colburn's hands, one, Lamb's Description of the Sports in the Forest : see John Woodvil,

To see the sun to bed, and to arise, &c.;

the other, Northcote's account of Claude Lorraine in his Vision of a Painter at the end of his life of Sir Joshua ? . . . .


Ixxxviii. APPENDIX in.

"FINAL. Don't go at all To think

that I should feel as I have done for such a monster ! "P. G. Patmore, Esq.,

"12, Greek Street, Soho, London."


[Edinburgh, April 21, 1822.] " MY DEAR PATMORE,

"I got your letter this morning, and I kiss the rod not only with submission but gratitude. Your re- bukes of me and your defences of her are the only things that save me .... Be it known to you that while I write this I am drinking ale at the Black Bull, celebrated in Blackwood. It is owing to your letter. Could I think the love honest, I am proof against Edinburgh ale .... Mrs. H. is actually on her way here. I was going to set off home .... when coming up Leith Walk I met an old friend come down here to settle, who said, * I saw your wife at the wharf.

She had just paid passage by the <Supcrl? This

Bell whom I met is the very man to negotiate the business between us. Should the business succeed, and I should be free, do you think S. W. will be

Mrs. ? If she "will she shall ; and to call her so

to you, or to hear her called so by others, will be

music to my ears such as they never heard [!]

How I sometimes think of the time I first saw the

sweet apparition, August 16, 1820! I am glad

you go on swimmingly with the N[ew] M[onthly]


APPENDIX III. Ixxxix.

M[agazine]. I shall be back in a week or a month. I won't write to her.

[No signature].

" I wish Colburn would send me word what he is about. Tell him what I am about, if you think it wise to do so.

"P. G. Patmore, Esq.,

"12, Greek Street, Soho, London."


[Between June 3 and June 9, 1822, but undated].

" MY ONLY FRIEND,

" I should like you to fetch the MS S., and then to ascertain for me whether I had better return there or not, as soon as this affair is over. I cannot give her up without an absolute certainty. Only, however, sound the matter by saying, for instance, that you are desired to get me a lodging, and that you believe I should prefer being there to being anywhere else. You may say that the affair of the divorce is over,

and that I am gone a tour in the Highlands

Ours was the sweetest friendship. Oh ! might the delusion be renewed, that I might die in it ! Test her through some one who will satisfy my soul I have lost only a lonely frail one that I was not likely

to gain by true love. I am going to see K , to

get him to go with me to the Highlands, and talk about her. I shall be back Thursday week, to


XC. APPENDIX III.

appear in court pro forma the next day

" Send me a line about my little boy.

" W.H. " 10, George Street,

"Edinburgh."


"Renton Inn, Berwickshire,

[June 9, 1822]. "MY DEAR PATMORE,

"Your letter raised me for a moment from the depths of despair, but not hearing from you yesterday or to-day, as I hoped, I am gone back again. . . . I grant all you say about my self- tormenting mad- ness, but has it been without cause ? When I think of this, and I think of it for ever (except when I read your letters), the air I breathe stifles me. . . I can do nothing. What is the use of all I have done ? Is it not this thinking beyond my strength, my feeling more than I ought about so many things, that has withered me up, and made me a thing for love to shrink from and wonder at ? .... My state is that I feel I shall never lie down again at night nor rise up of a morning in peace, nor ever behold my little boy's face with pleasure, while I live, unless I am restored to her favour. ... I wander, or rather crawl, by the sea-side, and the eternal ocean, and lasting despair, and her face are

before me Do let me know if anything

has passed : suspense is my greatest torment. Jeffrey


APPENDIX III. XC1.

(to whom I did a little unfold) came down with ioo/., to give me time to recover, and I am going to Renton Inn to see if I can work a little in the three weeks before it will be over, if all goes well. Tell Colburn to send the 'Table Talk' to him, 92, George Street, Edinburgh, unless he is mad, and wants to ruin me. . . . Write on the receipt of this, and believe me yours unspeakably obliged,

W.H."


[Renton Inn, Berwickshire,

June 18, 1822.] " MY DEAR FRIEND,

"Here I am at Renton, amid the hills and groves which I greeted in their barrenness in winter, but which have now put on their full green attire, that shows lovely in this northern twilight, but speaks a tale of sadness to this heart, widowed of its last and / its dearest, its only hope. For a man who writes v .. such nonsense I write a good hand. Musing over my only subject (Othello's occupation, alas! is gone). I have at last hit upon a truth that, if true, explains all, and satisfies me. You will by this time probably know something, from having called and seen how the land lies, that will make you a judge how far I have stepped into madness in my conjectures. If I am right, all engines set at work at once that punish ungrateful woman ! Oh, lovely Renton Inn ! here I wrote a volume of Essays; here I wrote my enamoured


XC11. APPENDIX III.

follies to her, thinking her human, and that below was not all the fiends. ... By this time you probably know enough, and know whether this following solution is in rerum naturd at No. 9, S. B. . . . Say that I shall want it [the lodging] very little the next year, as I shall be abroad for some months, but that I wish to keep it on, to have a place to come to when I am in London ... If you get a civil answer to this, take it for me, and send me word. . . . Learn first if the great man of Pen- maen-Mawr is still there. You may do this by asking after my hamper of books which was in the back parlour. . . . Tell her that I am free and that I have had a severe illness.

"W.H.

"I would give a thousand worlds to believe her anything but what I suppose. . . .

"P. G. Patmore, Esq.,

" 12, Greek Street, Soho, London."


[Edinburgh, June 25, 1822].

" MY DEAR AND GOOD FRIEND,

" I am afraid that I trouble you with my querulous epistles ; but this is probably the last. To-morrow decides my fate with respect to her\ and the next day I expect to be a free man. There has been a delay pro forma of ten days. In vain ! Was it not for her, and to lay my freedom at her feet, that I


APPENDIX III. XClii.

took this step that has cost me infinite wretchedness ? . . . . You, who have been a favourite with women, do not know what it is to be deprived of one's only hope, and to have it turned to a mockery and a scorn. There is nothing in the world left that can give me one drop of comfort that I feel more and more. . . . The breeze does not cool me, and tjie blue sky does not allure my eye. I gaze only on her face like a marble image averted from me. Ah ! the only face that ever was turned fondly to me f ~

"""T^shall, I hope, be in town next Friday at

furthest Not till Friday week. Write,

for God's sake, and let me know the worst.

" I have no answer from her. I wish you to call on Roscoe* in confidence, to say that I intend to make her an offer of marriage, and that I will write to her father the moment I am free (next Friday week), and to ask him whether he thinks it will be to any purpose, and what he would advise me to do. . . . . You don't know what I suffer, or you would not be so severe upon me. My death will, I hope, satisfy everyone before long.

W. H."

  • The gentleman who had married the sister, and was said

to be very happy in his choice.



LIBER AMORIS.

PART I.



N^A*

f


ADVERTISEMENT.


The circumstances, an outline of which is given in these pages, happened a very short time ago to a native of North Britain, who left his own country early in life, in consequence of political animosities and an ill-advised connection in marriage. It was some years after that he formed the fatal attachment which is the subject of the following narrative. The whole was transcribed very carefully with his own hand, a little before he set out for the Continent in hopes of benefiting by a change of scene, but he died soon after in the Netherlands it is supposed, of disappointment preying on a sickly frame and morbid state of mind. It was his wish that what


ADVERTISEMENT.

had been his strongest feeling while living, should be preserved in this shape when he was no more. It has been suggested to the friend, into whose hands the manuscript was entrusted, that many things (particularly in the Conversations in the first Part) either childish or redundant, might have been omitted ; but a promise was given that not a word should be altered, and the pledge was held sacred. The names and circumstances are so far disguised, it is presumed, as to prevent any consequences result- ing from the publication, farther than the amuse- ment or sympathy of the reader.


THE PICTURE.

H. OH ! is it you ? I had something to shew you I have got a picture here. Do you know any one it's like ?

S. No, Sir.

H. Don't you think it like yourself ?

S. No : it's much handsomer than I can pretend to be.

H. That's because you don't see your- self with the same eyes that others do. / don't think it handsomer, and the ex- pression is hardly so fine as your's some- times is.

S. Now you flatter me. Besides, the complexion is fair, and mine is dark.

H. Thine is pale and beautiful, my love, not dark ! But if your colour were a little heightened, and you wore the same dress,


2 THE PICTURE.

and ,your hah were let down over your

, shoulders, as it 13 here, it might be taken

. for a picture of* you. Look here, only

see how like it is. The forehead is like,

with that little obstinate protrusion in the

middle ; the eyebrows are like, and the

eyes are just like yours, when you look

up and say " No never ! "

S. What then, do I always say " No- never ! " when I look up ?

H. I don't know about that I never heard you say so but once : but that was once too often for my peace. It was when you told me, "you could never be mine. Ah ! if you are never to be mine, I shall not long be myself. I cannot go on as I am. My faculties leave me : I think of nothing, I have no feeling about any thing but thee : thy sweet image has taken pos- session of me, haunts me, and will drive me to distraction. Yet I could almost wish to go mad for thy sake : for then I might fancy that I had thy love in return, which I cannot live without !

S. Do not, I beg, talk in that manner,


THE PICTURE. 3

but tell me what this is a picture of.

H. I hardly know ; but it is a very small and delicate copy (painted in oil on a gold ground) of some fine old Italian picture, Guide's or Raphael's, but I think Raphael's. Some say it is a Madona ; others call it a Magdalen, and say you may distinguish the tear upon the cheek, though no tear is there. But it seems to me more like Raphael's St. Cecilia, " with looks commercing with the skies," than anything else. See, Sarah, how beautiful it is ! Ah ! dear girl, these are the ideas I have cherished in my heart, and in my brain ; and I never found any thing to realize them on earth till I met with thee, my love ! While thou didst seem sensible of my kindness, I was but too happy : but now thou hast cruelly cast me off.

S. You have no reason to say so : you are the same to me as ever.

H. That is, nothing. You are to me every thing, and I am nothing to you. Is it not too true ?

S. No.


4 THE PICTURE.

H. Then kiss me, my sweetest. Oh ! could you see your face now your mouth full of suppressed sensibility, your down- cast eyes, the soft blush upon that cheek, you would not say the picture is not like because it is too handsome, or because you want complexion. Thou art heavenly-fair, my love like her from whom the picture was taken the idol of the painter's heart, as thou art of mine ! Shall I make a drawing of it, altering the dress a little, to shew you how like it is ?

S. As you please.


THE INVITATION.

H. But I am afraid I tire you with this prosing description of the French character and abuse of the English ? You know there is but one subject on which I should ever wish to talk, if you would let me.

S. I must say, you don't seem to have a very high opinion of this country.

H. Yes, it is the place that gave you birth.

S. Do you like the French women better than the English ?

H. No : though they have finer eyes, talk better, and are better made. But they none of them look like you. I like the Italian women I have seen, much better than the French : they have darker eyes, darker hair, and the accents of their native


6 THE INVITATION.

tongue are much richer and more melodious. But I will give you a better account of them when I come back from Italy, if you would like to hear it.

S. I should much. It is for that I have sometimes had a wish for travelling abroad, to understand something of the manners and characters of different people.

H. My sweet girl ! I will give you the best account I can unless you would rather go and judge for yourself.

S. I cannot.

H. Yes, you shall go with me, and you shall go with honour you know what I mean.

S. You know it is not in your power to take me so.

H. But it soon may : and if you would consent to bear me company, I would swear never to think of an Italian woman while I am abroad, nor of an English one after I return home. Thou art to me more than thy whole sex.

S. I require no such sacrifices.

H. Is that what you thought I meant by


THE INVITATION. 7

sacrifices last night ? But sacrifices are no sacrifices when they are repaid a thousand fold.

S. I have no way of doing it.

H. You have not the will.

S. I must go now.

H. Stay, and hear me a little. I shall soon be where I can no more hear thy voice, far distant from her I love, to see what change of climate and bright skies will do for a sad heart. I shall perhaps see thee no more, but I shall still think of thee the same as ever I shall say to myself, "Where is she now ? what is she doing ?" But I shall hardly wish you to think of me, unless you could do so more favourably than I am afraid you will. Ah ! dearest creature, I shall be " far distant from you," as you once said of another, but you will not think of me as of him, " with the sincerest affection." The smallest share of thy tenderness would make me blest ; but couldst thou ever love me as thou didst him, I should feel like a God ! My face would change to a different expression : my


8 THE INVITATION.

whole form would undergo alteration. I was getting well, I was growing young in the sweet proofs of your friendship : you see how I droop and wither under your displeasure ! Thou art divine, my love, and canst make me either more or less than mortal. Indeed I am thy creature, thy * slave I only wish to live for your sake I would gladly die for you

S. That would give me no pleasure. But indeed you greatly over-rate my power.

H. Your power over me is that of sovereign grace and beauty. When I am near thee, nothing can harm me. Thou art an angel of light, shadowing me with thy softness. But when I let go thy hand, I stagger on a precipice : out of thy sight the world is dark to me and comfortless. There is no breathing out of this house : the air of Italy will stifle me. Go with me and lighten it. I can know no pleasure away from thee

"But I will come again, my love, "An it were ten thousand mile !"


THE MESSAGE.


S. MRS. E has called for the book,

Sir.

H. Oh ! it is there. Let her wait a minute or two. I see this is a busy-day with you. How beautiful your arms look in those short sleeves !

S. I do not like to wear them.

H. Then that is because you are merci- ful, and would spare frail mortals who might die with gazing.

S. I have no power to kill.

H. You have, you have Your charms are irresistible as your will is inexorable. I wish I could see you always thus. But I would have no one else see you so. I am jealous of all eyes but my own. I should almost like you to wear a veil, and to be


10 THE MESSAGE.

muffled up from head to foot ; but even if you were, and not a glimpse of you could be seen, it would be to no purpose you would only have to move, and you would be admired as the most graceful creature in the world. You smile Well, if you were to be won by fine speeches

S. You could supply them !

H. It is however no laughing matter with me ; thy beauty kills me daily, and I shall think of nothing but thy charms, till the last word trembles on my tongue, and that will be thy name, my love the name of my Infelice ! You will live by that name, you rogue, fifty years after you are dead. Don't you thank me for that ?

S. I have no such ambition, Sir. But Mrs. E is waiting.

H. She is not in love, like me. You look so handsome to-day, I cannot let you go. You have got a colour.

S. But you say I look best when I am pale.

H. When you are pale, I think so ; but when you have a colour, I then think you


THE MESSAGE. II

still more beautiful. It is you that I admire ; and whatever you are, I like best.

I like you as Miss L , I should like you

still more as Mrs. . I once thought you

were half-inclined to be a prude, and I admired you as a " pensive nun, devout and pure." I now think you are more than half a coquet, and I like you for your roguery. The truth is, I am in love with you, my angel ; and whatever you are, is to me the perfection of thy sex. I care not what thou art, while thou art still thyself. Smile but so, and turn my heart to what shape you please !

S. I am afraid, Sir, Mrs. E will

think you have forgotten her.

H. I had, my charmer. But go, and make her a sweet apology, all graceful as thou art. One kiss ! Ah ! ought I not to think myself the happiest of men ?


THE FLAGEOLET.


H. WHERE have you been, my love !

S. I have been down to see my aunt, Sir.

H. And I hope she has been giving you good advice.

S. I did not go to ask her opinion about any thing.

H. And yet you seem anxious and agi- tated. You appear pale and dejected, as if your refusal of me had touched your own breast with pity. Cruel girl ! you look at this moment heavenly- so ft, saint-like, or resemble some graceful marble statue, in the moon's pale ray ! Sadness only heightens the elegance of your features. How can I escape from you, when every new occasion, even your cruelty and scorn, brings out some new charm. Nay, your rejection of me, by


THE FLAGEOLET. 13

the way in which you do it, is only a new link added to my chain. Raise those down- cast eyes, bend as if an angel stooped, and kiss me. . . .Ah ! enchanting little trembler ! if such is thy sweetness where thou dost not love, what must thy love have been ? I cannot think how any man, having the heart of one, could go and leave it.

S. No one did, that I know of.

H. Yes, you told me yourself he left you (though he liked you, and though he knew Oh ! gracious God ! that you loved him) he left you because "the pride of birth would not permit a union." For myself, I would leave a throne to ascend to the heaven of thy charms. I live but for thee, here I only wish to live again to pass all eternity with thee. But even in another world, I suppose you would turn from me to seek him out, who scorned you here.

S. If the proud scorn us here, in that place we shall all be equal.

H. Do not look so do not talk so unless you would drive me mad. I could worship you at this moment. Can I witness


14 THE FLAGEOLET.

such perfection, and bear to think I have lost you for ever ? Oh ! let me hope ! You see you can mould me as you like. You can lead me by the hand, like a little child ; and with you my way would be like a little child's : you could strew flowers in my path, and pour new life and hope into me. I should then indeed hail the return of spring with joy, could I indulge the faintest hope would you but let me try to please you !

S. Nothing can alter my resolution, Sir.

H. Will you go and leave me so ?

S. It is late, and my father will be getting impatient at my stopping so long.

H. You know he has nothing to fear for you it is poor I that am alone in danger. But I wanted to ask about buying you a flageolet. Could I see that which you have ? If it is a pretty one, it would hardly be worth while ; but if it isn't, I thought of bespeaking an ivory one for you. Can't you bring up your own to shew me ?

S. Not to-night, Sir.

H. I wish you could.


THE FLAGEOLET. 15

S. I cannot but I will in the morning. -> H. Whatever you determine, I must submit to. Good night, and bless thee !


\_The next morning, S. brought up the tea- kettle as usual ; and looking towards the tea-tray, she said, " Oh ! I see my sister has forgot the tea-pot" It was not there, sure enough ; and tripping dozun stairs, she came up in a minute, with the tea-pot in one hand, and the flageolet in the other, balanced so sweetly and gracefully. It would have been awkward to have brought up the flageolet in the tea-tray, and she could not well have gone down again on purpose to fetch it. Something therefore was to be omitted as an excuse. Exqui- site witch ! But do I love her the less dearly for it ? I cannot.~]


THE CONFESSION.

H. You say you cannot love. Is there not a prior attachment in the case ? Was there any one else that you did like ?

S. Yes, there was another.

H. Ah ! I thought as much. Is it long ago then ?

S. It is two years, Sir.

H. And has time made no alteration ? Or do you still see him sometimes ?

S. No, Sir ! But he is one to whom I feel the sincerest affection, and ever shall, though he is far distant.

H. And did he return your regard ?

S. I had every reason to think so.

H. What then broke off your intimacy ?

S. It was the pride of birth, Sir, that would not permit him to think of an union.


THE CONFESSION. 17

H. Was he a young man of rank, then ?

S. His connections were high.

H. And did he never attempt to persuade you to any other step ?

S. No he had too great a regard for me.

H. Tell me, my angel, how was it ? Was he so very handsome ? Or was it the fineness of his manners ?

S. It was more his manner : but I can't tell how it was. It was chiefly my own fault. I was foolish to suppose he could ever think seriously of me. But he used to make me read with him and I used to be with him a good deal, though not much neither and I found my affections en- tangled before I was aware of it.

H. And did your mother and family know of it ?

S. No I have never told any one but you ; nor I should not have mentioned it now, but I thought it might give you some satisfaction.

H. Why did he go at last ?

S. We thought it better to part. c


J8 THE CONFESSION.

H. And do you correspond ?

S. No, Sir. But perhaps I may see him again some time or other, though it will be only in the way of friendship.

H. My God ! what a heart is thine, to live for years upon that bare hope !

S. 1 did not wish to live always, Sir I wished to die for a long time after, till I thought it not right ; and since then I have endeavoured to be as resigned as I can.

H. And do you think the impression will never wear out ?

S. Not if I can judge from my feelings hitherto. It is now some time since, and and I find no difference.

H. May God for ever bless you ! How can I thank you for your condescension in letting me know your sweet sentiments ? You have changed my esteem into adora- tion. Never can I harbour a thought of ill in thee again.

S. Indeed, Sir, I wish for your good opinion and your friendship.

H. And can you return them ?

S. Yes.


THE CONFESSION. 19

H. And nothing more ?

S. No, Sir.

H. You are an angel, and I will spend my life, if you will let me, in paying you the homage that my heart feels towards you.



THE QUARREL.

H. You are angry with me ?

S. Have I not reason ?

H. I hope you have ; for I would give the world to believe my suspicions unjust. But, oh ! my God ! after what I have thought of you and felt towards you, as little less than an angel, to have but a doubt cross my mind for an instant that you were what I dare not name a common lodging- house decoy, a kissing convenience, that your lips were as common as the stairs

S. Let me go, Sir !

H. Nay prove to me that you are not so, and I will fall down and worship you. You were the only creature that ever seemed to love me ; and to have my hopes, and all my fondness for you, thus turned to a


THE QUARREL. 21

mockery it is too much ! Tell me why you have deceived me, and singled me out as your victim ?

S. I never have, Sir. I always said I could not love.

H. There is a difference between love and making me a laughing-stock. Yet what else could be the meaning of your little sister's running out to you, and saying, "He thought I did not see him ! " when I had followed you into the other room ? Is it a joke upon me that I make free with you ? Or is not the joke rather against her sister, unless you make my courtship of you a jest to the whole house ? Indeed I do not well see how you can come and stay with me as you do, by the hour together, and day after day, as openly as you do, unless you give it some such turn with your family. Or do you deceive them as well as me ?

S. I deceive no one, Sir. But my sister Betsey was always watching and listening

when Mr. M wj.s courting my eldest

sister, till he was obliged to complain of it.

H. That I can understand, but not the


22 THE QUARREL.

other. You may remember, when your servant Maria looked in and found you sitting in my lap one day, and I was afraid she might tell your mother, you said " You did not care, for you had no secrets from your mother." This seemed to me odd at the time, but I thought no more of it, till other things brought it to my mind. Am I to suppose, then, that you are acting a part, a vile part, all this time, and that you come up here, and stay as long as I like, that you sit on my knee and put your arms round my neck, and feed me with kisses, and let me take other liberties with you, and that for a year together ; and that you do all this not out of love, or liking, or regard, but go through your regular task, like some young witch, without one natural feeling, to shew your cleverness, and get a few presents out of me, and go down into the kitchen to make a fine laugh of it ? There is some- thing monstrous in it, that I cannot believe of you.

S. Sir, you have no right to harass my feelings in the manner you do. I have


THE QUARREL. 23

never made a jest of you to any one, but always felt and expressed the greatest esteem for you. You have no ground for complaint in my conduct ; and I cannot help what Betsey or others do. I have always been consistent from the first. I told you my regard could amount to no more than friendship.

H. Nay, Sarah, it was more than half a year before I knew that there was an insur- mountable obstacle in the way. You say your regard is merely friendship, and that you are sorry I have ever felt any thing more for you. Yet the first time I ever asked you, you let me kiss you : the first time I ever saw you, as you went out of the room, you turned full round at the door, with that inimitable grace with which you do every thing, and fixed your eyes full upon me, as much as to say, " Is he caught ? " that very week you sat upon my knee, twined your arms round me, caressed me with every mark of tenderness consis- tent with modesty ; and I have not got much farther since. Now if you did all


24 THE QUARREL.

this with me, a perfect stranger to you, and without any particular liking to me, must I not conclude you do so as a matter of course with every one ? Or if you do not do so with others, it was because you took a liking to me for some reason or other.

S. It was gratitude, Sir, for different ob- ligations.

H. If you mean by obligations the pre- sents I made you, I had given you none the first day I came. You do not consider yourself obliged to every one who asks you for a kiss ?

S. No, Sir.

H. I should not have thought any thing of it in any one but you. But you seemed so reserved and modest, so soft, so timid, you spoke so low, you looked so innocent I thought it impossible you could deceive me. Whatever favors you granted must proceed from pure regard. No betrothed virgin ever gave the object of her choice kisses, caresses more modest or more be- witching than those you have given me a thousand and a thousand times. Could I


THE QUARREL. 25

have thought I should ever live to believe them an inhuman mockery of one who had the sincerest regard for you ? Do you think they will not now turn to rank poison in my veins, and kill me, soul and body ? You say it is friendship but if this is friendship, I'll forswear love. Ah ! Sarah ! it must be something more or less than friendship. If your caresses are sincere, they shew fond- ness if they are not, I must be more than indifferent to you. Indeed you once let some words drop, as if I were out of the question in such matters, and you could trifle with me with impunity. Yet you complain at other times that no one ever took such liberties with you as I have done. I remember once in particular your saying, as you went out at the door in anger " I had an attachment before, but that person never attempted any thing of the kind." Good God ! How did I dwell on that word before, thinking it implied an attachment to rne also ; but you have since disclaimed any such meaning. You say you have never professed more than esteem. Yet


26 THE QUARREL.

once, when you were sitting in your old place, on my knee, embracing and fondly embraced, and I asked you if you could not love, you made answer, " I could easily say so, whether I did or not YOU SHOULD JUDGE BY MY ACTIONS ! "And another time, when you were in the same posture, and I reproached you with indifference, you re- plied in these words, " Do I SEEM INDIFF- ERENT?" Was I to blame after this to indulge my passion for the loveliest of her sex ? Or what can I think ?

S. I am no prude, Sir.

H. Yet you might be taken for one. So your mother said, "It was hard if you might not indulge in a little levity." She has strange notions of levity. But levity, my dear, is quite out of character in you. Your ordinary walk is as if you were performing some religious ceremony : you come up to my table of a morning, when you merely bring in the tea-things, as if you were ad- vancing to the altar. You move in minuet- time : you measure every step, as if you were afraid of offending in the smallest things.


THE QUARREL. 2J

I never heard your approach on the stairs, but by a sort of hushed silence. When you enter the room, the Graces wait on you, and Love waves round your person in gentle undulations, breathing balm into the soul ! By Heaven, you are an angel ! You look like one at this instant ! Do I not adore you and have I merited this return ?

S. I have repeatedly answered that ques- tion. You sit and fancy things out of your own head, and then lay them to my charge. There is not a word of truth in your sus- picions.

H. Did I not overhear the conversation down-stairs last night, to which you were a party ? Shall I repeat it ?

S. I had rather not hear it !

H. Or what am I to think of this story of the footman ?

S. It is false, Sir, I never did any thing of the sort.

H. Nay, when I told your mother I wished she would'nt * * * * # # * * * *

                    • ( as i heard she did) she

said " Oh, there's nothing in that, for Sarah


28 THE QUARREL.

very often ***** * * * * * * and your doing so before company is only a trifling addition to the sport.

S. I'll call my mother, Sir, and she shall contradict you.

H. Then she'll contradict herself. But did not you boast you were " very persever- ing in your resistance to gay young men," and had been "several times obliged to ring the bell ? " Did you always ring it ? Or did you get into these dilemmas that made it necessary, merely by the demureness of your looks and ways ? Or had nothing else passed ? Or have you two characters, one that you palm off upon me, and another, your natural one, that you resume when you get out of the room, like an actress who throws aside her artificial 'part behind the scenes ? Did you not, when I was courting you on the staircase the first night Mr.

C came, beg me to desist, for if the

new lodger heard us, he'd take you for a light character ? Was that all ? Were you only afraid of being taken for a light char- acter? Oh! Sarah!


THE QUARREL. 29

S. I'll stay and hear this no longer.

H. Yes, one word more. Did you not love another ?

S. Yes, and ever shall most sincerely.

H. Then, that is my only hope. If you could feel this sentiment for him, you can- not be what you seem to me of late. But there is another thing I had to say be what you will, I love you to distraction ! You are the only woman that ever made me think she loved me, and that feeling was so new to me, and so delicious, that it "will never from my heart." Thou wert to me a little tender flower, blooming in the wilder- ness of my life ; and though thou should'st turn out a weed, I'll not fling thee from me, while I can help it. Wert thou all that I dread to think wert thou a wretched wan- derer in the street, covered with rags, dis- ease, and infamy, I'd clasp thee to my bosom, and live and die with thee, my love. Kiss me, thou little sorceress !

S. NEVER !

H. Then go : but remember I cannot live without you nor I will not.


THE RECONCILIATION.

H. I HAVE then lost your friendship ?

S. Nothing tends more to alienate friend- ship than insult.

H. The words I uttered hurt me more than they did you.

S. It was not words merely, but actions as well.

H. Nothing I can say or do can ever alter my fondness for you Ah, Sarah ! I am un- worthy of your love : I hardly dare ask for your pity ; but oh ! save me save me from your scorn : I cannot bear it it withers me like lightning.

S. I bear no malice, Sir ; but my brother, who would scorn to tell a lie for his sister, can bear witness for me that there was no truth in what you were told.


THE RECONCILIATION. 31

H. I believe it ; or there is no truth in woman. It is enough for me to know that you do not return my regard ; it would be too much for me to think that you did not deserve it. But cannot you forgive the agony of the moment ?

S. I can forgive ; but it is not easy to forget some things !

H. Nay, my sweet Sarah (frown if you will, I can bear your resentment for my ill behaviour, it is only your scorn and indif- ference that harrow up my soul) but I was going to ask, if you had been engaged to be married to any one, and the day was fixed, and he had heard ^what I did, whether he could have felt any true regard for the character of his bride, his wife, if he had not been hurt and alarmed as I was ?

S. I believe, actual contracts of marriage have sometimes been broken off by unjust suspicions.

H. Or had it been your old friend, what do you think he would have said in my case ?

S. He would never have listened to any thing of the sort.


32 THE RECONCILIATION.

H. He had greater reasons for confidence than I have. But it is your repeated cruel rejection of me that drives me almost to madness. Tell me, love, is there not, be- sides your attachment to him, a repugnance to me ?

S. No, none whatever.

H. I fear there is an original dislike, which no efforts of mine can overcome.

S. It is not you it is my feelings with respect to another, which are unalterable.

H. And yet you have no hope of ever being his ? And yet you accuse me of being romantic in my sentiments.

S. I have indeed long ceased to hope ; but yet 1 sometimes hope against hope.

H, My love ! were it in my power, thy hopes should be fulfilled to-morrow. Next to my own, there is nothing that could give me so much satisfaction as to see thine realized ! Do I not love thee, when I can feel such an interest in thy love for another ? It was that which first wedded my very soul to you. I would give worlds for a share in a heart so rich in pure affection !


THE RECONCILIATION. 33

S. And yet I did not tell you of the cir- cumstance to raise myself in your opinion.

H. You are a sublime little thing ! And yet, as you have no prospects there, I cannot help thinking, the best thing would be to do as I have said.

S. I would never marry a man I did not love beyond all the world.

H. I should be satisfied with less than that with the love, or regard, or whatever you call it, you have shown me before mar- riage, if that has only been sincere. You would hardly like me less afterwards.

S. Endearments would, I should think, increase regard, where there was love before- hand ; but that is not exactly my case.

H. But I think you would be happier than you are at present. You take pleasure in my conversation, and you say you have an esteem for me ; and it is upon this, after the honey-moon, that marriage chiefly turns.

S. Do you think there is no pleasure in a single life ?

H. Do you mean on account of its liberty ?


34 THE RECONCILIATION.

S. No, but I feel that forced duty is no duty. I have high ideas of the married state !

H. Higher than of the maiden state ?

S. I understand you, Sir.

H. I meant nothing ; but you have some- times spoken of any serious attachment as a tie upon you. It is not that you prefer flirting with "gay young men" to becoming a mere dull domestic wife ?

S. You have no right to throw out such insinuations : for though I am but a trades- man's daughter, I have as nice a sense of honour as any one can have.

H. Talk of a tradesman's daughter ! you would ennoble any family, thou glorious girl, by true nobility of mind.

S. Oh! Sir, you flatter -me. I know my own inferiority to most.

H. To none ; there is no one above thee, man nor woman either. You are above your situation, which is not fit for you.

S. I am contented with my lot, and do my duty as cheerfully as I can.

H. Have you not told me your spirits


THE RECONCILIATION. 35

grow worse every year ?

S. Not on that account : but some dis- appointments are hard to bear up against.

H. If you talk about that, you'll unman me. But tell me, my love, I have thought of it as something that might account for some circumstances ; that is, as a mere pos- sibility. But tell me, there was not a like- ness between me and your old lover that struck you at first sight ? Was there ?

S. No, Sir, none.

H. Well, I didn't think it likely there should.

S. But there was a likeness.

H. To whom ?

S. To that little image ! (looking intently on a small bronze figure of Buonaparte on the mantle-piece.)

H. What, do you mean to Buonaparte ?

S. Yes, all but the nose was just like.

II. And was his figure the same ?

S. He was taller !

[/ got up and gave her the image, and told her it was her^s by every right that was sacred. She refused at first to take so


36 THE RECONCILIATION.

valuable a curiosity, and said she would keep it for me. But I pressed it eagerly, and she took it. She immediately came and sat down, and put her arm round my neck, and kissed me, and I said "Is it not plain we are the best friends in the world, since we are always so glad to make it up?" And then I added "How odd it was that the God of my idolatry should turn out to be like her Idol, and said it was no wonder that the same face which awed the world should conquer the sweetest creature in it !" How I loved her at that moment ! Is it possible that the wretch who writes this could ever have been so blest ! Heavenly delicious creature ! Can I live without her ? Oh ! no never never.

"What is this world? What ask en men to have, " Now with his love, now in the cold grave, " Alone withouten any compagnie ! "

Let me but see her again ! She cannot hate the man who loves her as I do.~\


LETTERS TO THE SAME.


Feb. 1822.

You will scold me for this, and ask me if this is keeping my promise to mind my work. One half of it was to think of Sarah : and besides, I do not neglect my work either, I assure you. I regularly do ten pages a day, which mounts up to thirty guineas' worth a week, so that you see I should grow rich at this rate, if I could keep on so ; and I could keep on so, If I had you with me to encourage me with your sweet smiles, and share my lot. The Ber- wick smacks sail twice a week, and the wind sits fair. When I think of the thous- and endearing caresses that have passed between us, I do not wonder at the strong


38 LETTERS TO THE SAME.

attachment that draws me to you ; but I am sorry for my own want of power to please. I hear the wind sigh through the lattice, and keep repeating over and over to myself two lines of Lord Bryon's Tragedy

" So shalt thou find me ever at thy side Here and hereafter, if the last may be "

applying them to thee, my love, and think- ing whether I shall ever see thee again. Perhaps not for some years at least till both thou and I are old and then, when all else have forsaken thee, I will creep to thee, and die in thine arms. You once made me believe I was not hated by her I loved ; and for that sensation, so delicious was it, though but a mockery and a dream, I owe you more than I can ever pay. I thought to have dried up my tears for ever, the day I left you ; but as I write this, they stream again. If they did not, I think my heart would burst. I walk out here of an afternoon, and hear the notes of the thrush, that come up from a sheltered valley below, welcome in the spring ; but they do not melt


LETTERS TO THE SAME. 39

my heart as they used : it is grown cold and dead. As you say, it will one day be colder. Forgive what I have written above ; I did not intend it : but you were once my little all, and I cannot bear the thought of having lost you for ever, I fear through my own fault. Has any one called ? Do not send any letters that come. I should like you and your mother (if agreeable) to go and see Mr. Kean in Othello, and Miss Stephens in Love in a Village. If you will,

I will write to Mr. T , to send you

tickets. Has Mr. P called ? I think I

must send to him for the picture to kiss and talk to. Kiss me, my best-beloved. Ah ! if you can never be mine, still let me be your proud and happy slave.

H.


TO THE SAME.

March, 1822.

You will be glad to learn I have done my work a volume in less than a month. This is one reason why I am better than when I came, and another is, I have had two letters from Sarah. I am pleased I have got through this job, as I was afraid I might lose reputation by it (which I can little afford to lose) and besides, I am more anxious to do well now, as I wish you to hear me well spoken of. I walk out of an afternoon, and hear the birds sing as I told you, and think, if I had you hanging on my arm, and that for life, how happy I should be happier than I ever hoped to be, or had any con- ception of till I knew you. " But that can


TO THE SAME. 41

never be " I hear you answer in a soft, low murmur. Well, let me dream of it some- times I am not happy too often, except when that favorite note, the harbinger of spring, recalling the hopes of my youth, whispers thy name and peace together in my ear. I was reading something about Mr. Macready to-day, and this put me in mind of that delicious night, when I went with your mother and you to see Romeo and Juliet. Can I forget it for a moment your sweet modest looks, your infinite pro- priety of behaviour, all your sweet winning ways your hesitating about taking my arm as we came out till your mother did your laughing about nearly losing your cloak your stepping into the coach without my being able to make the slightest discovery and oh ! my sitting down beside you there, you whom I had loved so long, so well, and your assuring me I had not less- ened your pleasure at the play by being with you, and giving me your dear hand to press in mine ! I thought I was in heaven that slender exquisitely turned form con-


4^ TO THE SAME.

tained my all of heaven upon earth ; and as I folded you yes, you, my own best Sarah, to my bosom, there was, as you say, a tie between us you did seem to me, for those few short moments, to be mine in all truth and honour and sacredness Oh ! that we could be always so Do not mock me, for I am a very child in love. I ought to beg pardon for behaving so ill afterwards, but I hope the little image made it up between us, &c.

\_To this letter I have received no answer, not a line. The rolling years of eternity will never fill up that blank. Where shall I be ? What am I? Or where have I been ?~\



WRITTEN IN A BLANK LEAF OF ENDYMION.

I WANT a hand to guide me, an eye to cheer me, a bosom to repose on ; all which I shall never have, but shall stagger into my grave, old before my time, unloved and unlovely, unless S. L. keeps her faith with me.


But by her dove's eyes and serpent- shape, I think she does not hate me ; by her smooth forehead and her crested hair, I own I love her ; by her soft looks and queen-like grace (which men might fall down and worship) I swear to live and die for her !


A PROPOSAL OF LOVE.

(Given to her in our early acquaintance.)

" Oh ! if I thought it could be in a woman

(As, if it can, I will presume in you)

To feed for aye her lamp and flames of love,

To keep her constancy in plight and youth,

Outliving beauties outward with a mind

That doth renew swifter than blood decays :

Or that persuasion could but thus convince me,

That my integrity and truth to you

Might be confronted with the match and weight

Of such a winnowed purity in love

How were I then uplifted ! B,ut, alas,

I am as true as truth's simplicity,

And simpler than the infancy of truth."

TROILUS AND CRESSIDA.


LIBER AMORIS. PART II.


LETTERS TO C. P , ESQ.

Bees- Inn.

MY GOOD FRIEND,

Here I am in Scotland (and shall have been here three weeks, next Monday) as I may say, on my probation. This is a lone inn, but on a great scale, thirty miles from Edinburgh. It is situated on a rising ground (a mark for all the winds, which blow here incessantly) there is a woody hill opposite, with a winding valley below, and the London road stretches out on either side. You may guess which way I oftenest walk. I have written two letters to S. L. and got one cold, prudish answer, beginning Sir, and ending From your" s truly, with Best respects from herself and relations.


48 LETTER I.

I was going to give in, but have returned an answer, which I think is a touch-stone. I send it you on the other side to keep as a curiosity, in case she kills me by her exquisite rejoinder. I am convinced from the profound contemplations I have had on the subject here and coming along, that I am on a wrong scent. We, had a famous parting-scene, a complete quarrel and then a reconciliation, in which she did beguile me of my tears, but the deuce a one did she shed. What do you think? She cajoled me out of my little Buonaparte as cleverly as possible, in manner and form following. She was shy the Saturday and Sunday (the day of my departure) so I got in dudgeon, and began to rip up grievances. I asked her how she came to admit me to such extreme familiarities, the first week I entered the house. "If she had no par- ticular regard for me, she must do so (or more) with every one : if she had a liking to me from the first, why refuse me with scorn and wilfulness ? " If you had seen how she flounced, and looked, and went to


LETTER I. 49

the door, saying " She was obliged to me for letting her know the opinion I had always entertained of her" then I said, " Sarah ! " and she came back and took my hand, and fixed her eyes on the mantle- piece (she must have been invoking her idol then if I thought so, I could devour her, the darling but I doubt her) So I said " There is one thing that has occurred to me sometimes as possible, to account for your conduct to me at first there wasn't a likeness, was there, to your old friend ? " She answered " No, none but there was a likeness " I asked, to what ? She said "To that little image!" I said, "Do you mean Buonaparte ? " She said, " Yes, all but the nose." "And the figure?" "He was taller." I could not stand this. So I got up and took it, and gave it her, and after some reluctance, she consented to "keep it for me." What will you bet me that it wasn't all a trick ? I'll tell you why I suspect it, besides being fairly out of my wits about her. I had told her mother half an hour before, that I should take this E


5O LETTER I.

image and leave it at Mrs. B.'s, for that I didn't wish to leave any thing behind me that must bring me back again. Then up she comes and starts a likeness to her lover : she knew I should give it her on the spot " No, she would keep it for me ! " So I must come back for it. Whether art or nature, it is sublime. I told her I should write and telty5iTs5, and that I parted from her, confiding, adoring ! She is beyond me, that's certain. Do go and see her, and desire her not to give my present address to a single soul, and learn if the lodging is let, and to whom. My letter to her is as follows. If she shews the least remorse at- it, I'll be hanged, though it might move a stone, I modestly think. (See before, Part I. page. tf).

N.B. I have begun a book of our con- versations (I mean mine and the statue's) which I call LIBER AMORIS. I was de- tained at Stamford and found myself dull, and could hit upon no other way of employ- ing my time so agreeably.


LETTER II.


DEAR P-


Here without loss of time, in order that I may have vour opinion upon it, i{ little YES and No'sjanswer to my last, "si/,

" I should not have disregarded your in- junction not to send you any more letters that might come to you, had I not promised the Gentleman who left the enclosed to forward it the earliest opportunity, as he said it was of consequence. Mr. P called the day after you left town. My mother and myself are much obliged by your kind offer of tickets to the play, but must decline accepting it. My family send their best respects, in which they are joined by Your's truly,

S. L."

The deuce a bit more is there of it. If


52 LETTER II.

you can make any thing out of it (or any body else) I'll be hanged. You are to understand, this comes in a frank, the second I have received from her, with a name I can't make out, and she won't tell me, though I asked her, where she got franks, as also whether the lodgings were let, to neither of which a word of answer.

  1. * * # is the name on the frank : see if you

can decypher it by a Red-book. I suspect her grievously of being an arrant jilt, to say no more yet I love her dearly. Do you know I'm going to write to the sweet rogue presently, having a whole evening to myself in advance of my work ? Now mark, before you set about your exposition of the new Apocalypse of the New Calypso, the only thing to be endured in the above letter is the date. It was written the very day after she received mine. By this she seems willing to lose no time in receiving these letters "of such sweet breath composed." If I thought so but I wait for your reply. \ After all, what is there in her but a pretty figure, and that you can't get a word out of


LETTER II. 53

Her's is the Fabian method of making love and conquests. What do you suppose she said the night before I left her ?

" H. Could you not come and live with me as a friend ?

S. I don't know : and yet it would be of no use if I did, you would always be hanker- ing after what could never be ! "

I asked her if she would do so at once the very next day ? And what do you guess was her answer "Do you think it would be prudent?" As I didn't proceed to extre- mities on the spot, she began to look grave, and declare off. " Would she live with me in her own house to be with me alt day as dear friends, if nothing more, to sit and read and talk with me?" "She would make no promises, but I should find her the same." "Would she go to the play with me sometimes, and let it be understood that I was paying my addresses to her ?" " She could not, as a habit her father was rather strict, and would object." Now what am I to think of all this ? Am I mad or a fool ? Answer me to that, Master Brook ! You are a philosopher.


LETTER III.

DEAR FRIEND,

I ought to have written to you before ; but since I received your letter, I have been in a sort of purgatory, and what is worse, I see no prospect of getting out of it. I would put an end to my torments at once ; but I am as great a coward as I have been a dupe. Do you know I have not had a word of answer from her since ! What can be the reason ? Is she offended at my letting you know she wrote to me, or is it some new affair ? I wrote to her in the tenderest, most respectful manner, poured my soul at her feet, and this is the return she makes me ! Can you account for it, except on the admission of my worst doubts concerning her ? Oh God ! can I bear


LETTER III. 55

after all to think of her so, or that I am scorned and made a sport of by the creature to whom I had given my whole heart ? Thus has it been with me all my life ; and so will it be to the end of it ! If you should learn any thing, good or bad, tell me, I conjure you : I can bear any thing but this cruel suspense. If I knew she was a mere abandoned creature, I should try to forget her ; but till I do know this, nothing can tear me from her, I have drank in poison from her lips too long alas ! mine do not poison again. I sit and indulge my grief by the hour together ; my weak- ness grows upon me ; and I have no hope left, unless I could lose my senses quite. Do you know I think I should like this ? To forget, ah ! to forget there would be something in that to change to an ideot for some few years, and then to wake up a poor wretched old man, to recollect my misery as past, and die ! Yet, oh ! with her, only a little while ago, I had different hopes, forfeited for nothing that I know of !


56 LETTER III.

solation on the subject of my tormentor, pray do. The pain I suffer wears me out daily. I write this on the supposition that

Mrs. may still come here, and that I may

be detained some weeks longer. Direct to me at the Post-office ; and if I return to town directly as I fear, I will leave word for them to forward the letter to me in London not at my old lodgings. I will not go back there : yet how can I breathe away from her ? Her hatred of me must be great, since my love of her could not I overcome it ! I have finished the book of my conversations with her, which I told you S of: if I am not mistaken, you will think it very nice reading.

Your's ever.

Have you read Sardanapalus ? How like the little Greek slave, Myrrha, is to her !


LETTER IV. (Written in the Winter}.

MY GOOD FRIEND,

I received your letter this morning, and I kiss the rod not only with submission, but gratitude. Your reproofs of me and your defences of her are the only things that save my soul from perdition. She is my heart's idol ; and believe me those words of yours applied to the dear saint " To lip a chaste one and suppose her wanton" were balm and rapture to me. I have lipped her, God knows how often, and oh ! is it even possible that she is chaste, and that she has bestowed her loved "endearments" on me (her own sweet word) out of true regard ? That thought, out of the lowest depths of


58 LETTER IV.

despair, would at any time make me strike my forehead against the stars. Could I but think the love "honest," I am proof against all hazards. She by her silence makes my dark hour ; and you by your encouragements dissipate it for twenty-four hours. Another

thing has brought me to life. Mrs. is

actually on her way here about the divorce. Should this unpleasant business (which has been so long talked of) succeed, and I should become free, do you think S. L. will

agree to change her name to ? If she

will, she shall ; and to call her so to you or to hear her called so by others, would be music to my ears, such as they never drank in. Do you think if she knew how I love her, my depressions and my altitudes, my wanderings and my constancy, it would not move her ? She knows it all ; and if she is not an incorrigible, she loves me, or regards me with a feeling next to love. I don't believe that any woman was ever courted more passionately than she has been by me. y* As Rousseau said of Madame d'Houptot \ (forgive the allusion) my heart has found


LETTER IV. 59

a tongue in speaking to her, and I have talked to her the divine language of love. Yet she says, she is insensible to it. Am I to believe her or you ? You for I wish it and wish it to madness, now that I am like to be free, and to have it in my power to say to her without a possibility of sus- picion, " Sarah, will you be mine ?" When I sometimes think of the time I first saw the sweet apparition, August 16, 1820, and that possibly she may be my bride before that day two years, it makes me dizzy with incredible joy and love of her. Write soon.



LETTER V.


MY DEAR FRIEND,

I read your answer this morning with gratitude. I have felt somewhat easier since. It shewed your interest in my vexations, and also that you know nothing worse than I do. I cannot describe the weakness of mind to which she has reduced me. This state of suspense is like hanging in the air by a sin- gle thread that exhausts all your strength to keep hold of it ; and yet if that fails you, you have nothing in the world else left to trust to. I am come back to Edinburgh about

this cursed business, and Mrs. is coming

from Montrose next week. How it will end, I can't say ; and don't care, except as it re- gards the other affair. I should, I confess, like to have it in my power to make her the


LETTER V. 6 I

offer direct and unequivocal, to see how she'd receive it. It would be worth something at any rate to see her superfine airs upon the occasion ; and if she should take it into her head to turn round her sweet neck, drop her eye-lids, and say " Yes, I will be yours !" why then, " treason domestic, foreign levy, nothing could touch me further." By Hea^ ven ! I doat on her. The truth is, I never had x \ any pleasure, like love, with any one but her.^/ Then how can I bear to part with her ? Do you know I like to think of her best in her morning-gown and mob-cap it is so she has oftenest come into my room and enchanted me ! She was once ill, pale, and had lost all her freshness. I only adored her the more for it, and fell in love with the decay of her beauty. I could devour the little witch. If she had a plague-spot on her, I could touch the infection : if she was in a burning fever, I could kiss her, and drink death as I have drank life from her lips. When I press her hand, I enjoy perfect happiness and contentment of soul. It is not what she says or what she does it is herself that I


62 LETTER V.

love. To be with her is to be at peace. I have no other wish or desire. The air about her is serene, blissful ; and he who breathes it is like one of the Gods ! So that I can but have her with me always, I care for nothing more. I never could tire of her sweetness ; I feel that I could grow to her, body and soul ? My heart, my heart is her's.



LETTER VI.

( Written in May).


DEAR P-


What have I suffered since I parted with you ! A raging fire is in my heart and in my brain, that never quits me. The steam-boat (which I foolishly ventured on board) seems a prison-house, a sort of spectre-ship, moving on through an infernal lake, without wind or tide, by some necromantic power the splashing of the waves, the noise of the en- gine gives me no rest, night or day no tree, no natural object varies the scene but the abyss is before me, and all my peace lies weltering in it ! I feel the eternity of pun- ishment in this life ; for I see no end of my woes. The people about me are ill, uncom-


64 LETTER VI.

fortable, wretched enough, many of them but to-morrow or next day, they reach the place of their destination, and all will be new and delightful. To me it will be the same. I can neither escape from her, nor from my- self. All is endurable where there is a limit : but I have nothing but the blackness and the fiendishness of scorn around me mocked by her (the false one) in whom I placed my hope, and who hardens herself against me ! I believe you thought me quite gay, vain, insolent, half mad, the night I left the house no tongue can tell the heaviness of heart I felt at that moment. No footsteps ever fell more slow, more sad than mine ; for every step bore me farther from her, with whom my soul and every thought lingered. I had parted with her in anger, and each had spoken words of high disdain, not soon to be forgiven. Should I ever behold her again ? Where go to live and die far from her ? In her sight there was Elysium ; her smile was heaven ; her voice was enchant- ment ; the air of love waved round her, breathing balm into my heart: for a little


LETTER VI. 65

while I had sat with the Gods at their golden tables, I had tasted of all earth's bliss, " both living and loving ! " But now Paradise barred its doors against me ; I was driven from her presence, where rosy blushes and delicious sighs and all soft wishes dwelt, the outcast of nature and the scoff of love ! I thought of the time when I was a little happy careless child, of my father's house, of my early lessons, of my brother's picture of me when a boy, of all that had since happened to me, and of the waste of years to come I stopped, faultered, and was going to turn back once more to make a longer truce with wretchedness and patch up a hollow league with love, when the recollection of her words " I always told you I had no affection for you " steeled my resolution, and I deter- mined to proceed. You see by this she always hated me, and only played with my credulity till she could find some one to sup- ply the place of her unalterable attachment to the little image. ******! am a little, a very little better to-day. Would it were quietly over ; and that this misshapen

F


C


66 LETTER VI.


form (made to be mocked) were hid out of "the sight of cold, sullen eyes ! The people about me even take notice of my dumb de- spair, and pity me. What is to be done ? I cannot forget her; and I can find no other like what she seemed. I should wish you to call, if you can make an excuse, and see whether or no she is quite marble whether I may go back again at my return, and whe- ther she will see me and talk to me some- times as an old friend. Suppose you were

to call on M from me, and ask him

what his impression is that I ought to do. But do as you think best. Pardon, pardon.

P.S. I send this from Scarborough, where the vessel stops for a few minutes. I scarcely know what I should have - done, but for this relief to my feelings.


LETTER VII.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

The important step is taken, and I am virtually a free man. * * * What had I better do in these circumstances ? I dare not write to her, I dare not write to her father, or else I would. She has shot me through with poisoned arrows, and I think another " winged wound " would finish me. It is a pleasant sort of balm (as you express it) she has left in my heart ! One thing I agree with you in, it will remain there for ever ; but yet not very long. It festers, and consumes me. If it were not for my little boy, whose face I see struck blank at the news, looking through the world for pity and meeting with contempt instead, I should soon, I fear, settle the question by my death.


68 LETTER VII.

That recollection is the only thought that brings my wandering reason to an anchor ; that stirs the smallest interest in me ; or gives me fortitude to bear up against what I am doomed to feel for the ungrateful. Otherwise, I am dead to every thing but the sense of what I have lost. She was my life it is gone from me, and I am grown spectral ! If I find myself in a place I am acquainted with, it reminds me of her, of the way in which I thought of her,

" and carved on every tree

The soft, the fair, the inexpressive she ! "

If it is a place that is new to me, it is de- solate, barren of all interest ; for nothing touches me but what has a reference to her. If the clock strikes, the sound jars me ; a million of hours will not bring back peace to my breast. The light startles me ; the darkness terrifies me. I seem falling into a pit, without a hand to help me. She has deceived me, and the earth fails from under my feet : no object in nature is substantial, real, but false and hollow, like her faith on which I built my trust. She came (I knew


LETTER VII. 69

not how) and sat by my side and was folded in my arms, a vision of love and joy, as if she had dropped from the Heavens to bless me by some especial dispensation of a fa- vouring Providence, and make me amends for all ; and now without any fault of mine but too much fondness, she has vanished from me, and I am left to perish. My heart is torn out of me, with every feeling for . which I wished to live. The whole is like a dream, an effect of enchantment ; it tor- ments me, and it drives me mad. I lie down with it ; I rise up with it ; and see no chance of repose. I grasp at a shadow, I try to undo the past, and weep with rage and pity over my own weakness and misery. I spared her again and again (fool that I was) think- ing what she allowed from me was love, friendship, sweetness, not wantonness. How could I doubt it, looking in her face, and hearing her words, like sighs breathed from the gentlest of all bosoms ? I had hopes, I had prospects to come, the flattery of something like fame, a pleasure in writing, health even would have come back with her


70 LETTER VII.

smile she has blighted all, turned all to poison and childish tears. Yet the barbed arrow is in my heart I can neither endure it, nor draw it out ; for with it flows my life's-blood. I had conversed too long with abstracted truth to trust myself with the immortal thoughts of love. That S. L. might have been mine, and now never can ' these are the two sole propositions that forever stare me in the face, and look ghastly in at my poor brain. I am in

9 some sense proud that I can feel this dread- ful passion it gives me a kind of rank in the kingdom of love but I could have wished it had been for an object that at least could have understood its value and pitied its excess. You say her not coming to the door when you went is a proof yes, that her complement is at present full ! That is the reason she doesn't want me there, lest I should discover the new affair wretch that I am ! Another has possession of her, oh Hell ! I'm satisfied of it from her manner, which had a wanton insolence in it. Well might I run wild when I re-


LETTER VII. 71

ceived no letters from her. I foresaw, I felt my fate. The gates of Paradise were at once open to me too, and I blushed to enter but with the golden keys of love ! I would die ; but her lover my love of her ought not to die. When I am dead, who will love her as I have done ? If she should be in misfortune, who will comfort her? When she is old, who will look in her face, and bless her? Would there be any harm in

calling upon M , to know confidentially

if he thinks it worth my while to make her an offer the instant it is in my power? Let me have an answer, and save me, if possible, yV her and/rom myself.


LETTER VIII.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

Your letter raised me for a moment from the depths of despair ; but not hearing from you yesterday or to-day (as I hoped) I have had a relapse. You say I want to get rid of her. I hope you are more right in your conjectures about her than in this about me. Oh no ! believe it, I love her as I do my own soul ; my very heart is wedded to her (be she what she may) and I would not hesitate a moment between her and "an angel from Heaven." I grant all you say about my self-tormenting folly : but has it been without cause ? Has she not refused me again and again with a mixture of scorn and resentment, after going the utmost lengths with a man for whom she now dis-


LETTER VIII. 73

claims all affection ; and what security can I have for her reserve with others, who will not be restrained by feelings of delicacy towards her, and whom she has probably preferred to me for their want of it ? " She can make no more confidences" these words ring for ever in my ears, and will be my death-watch. They can have but one mean- ing, be sure of it she always expressed herself with the exactest propriety. That was one of the things for which I loved her shall I live to hate her for it ? My poor fond heart, that brooded over her and the remains of her affections as my only hope of comfort upon earth, cannot brook this new degradation. Who is there so low as me ? Who is there besides (I ask) after the homage I have paid her and the caresses she has lavished on me, so vile, so abhorrent to love, to whom such an indignity could have happened ? When I think of this (and I think of nothing else) it stifles me. I am pent up in burning, fruitless desires, which can find no vent or object. Am I not hated, repulsed, derided by her whom


74 LETTER VIII.

alone I love or ever did love ? I cannot stay in any place, and seek in vain for relief from the sense of her contempt and her in- gratitude. I can settle to nothing : what is the use of all I have done ? Is it not that very circumstance (my thinking beyond my strength, my feeling more than I need about so many things) that has withered me up, and made me a thing for Love to shrink from and wonder at ? Who could ever feel that peace from the touch of her dear hand that I have done ; and is it not torn from me for ever ? My state is this, that I shall never lie down again at night nor rise up in the morning in peace, nor ever behold my little boy's face with pleasure while I live unless I am restored to her favour. Instead of that delicious feeling I had when she was heavenly-kind to me, and my heart softened and melted in its own tenderness and her sweetness, I am now inclosed in a dungeon of despair. The sky is marble to my thoughts ; nature is dead around me, as hope is within me ; no object can give me one gleam of satisfaction now, nor the pros-


LETTER VIII. 75

pect of it in time to come. I wander by the sea-side ; and the eternal ocean and lasting despair and her face are before me. Slighted by her, on whom my heart by its last fibre hung, where shall I turn ? I wake with her by my side, not as my sweet bed- fellow, but as the corpse of my love, with- out a heart in her bosom, cold, insensible, or struggling from me ; and the worm gnaws me, and the sting of unrequited love, and the canker of a hopeless, endless sorrow. I have lost the taste of my food by feverish anxiety ; and my favourite beverage, which used to refresh me when I got up, has no moisture in it. Oh ! cold, solitary, sepul- chral breakfasts, compared with those which I promised myself with her ; or which I made when she had been standing an hour by my side, my guardian-angel, my wife, my sister, my sweet friend, my Eve, my all ; and had blest me with her seraph-kisses ! Ah ! what I suffer at present only shews what I have enjoyed. But "the girl is a good girl, if there is goodness in human nature." I thank you for those words ; and


j6 LETTER VIII.

I will fall down and worship you, if you can prove them true : and I would not do much less for him that proves her a demon. She is one or the other, that's certain ; but I fear the worst. Do let me know if any thing has passed : suspense is my greatest punish- ment. I am going into the country to see if I can work a little in the three weeks I have yet to stay here. Write on the receipt of this, and believe me ever your unspeak- ably obliged friend.



TO EDINBURGH.

" Stony-hearted" Edinburgh ! What

art thou to me ? The dust of thy streets mingles with my tears and blinds me. City of palaces, or of tombs a quarry, rather than the habitation of men ! Art thou like London, that populous hive, with its sun- burnt, well-baked, brick-built houses its public edifices, its theatres, its bridges, its squares, its ladies, and its pomp, its throng of wealth, its outstretched magnitude, and its mighty heart that never lies still ? Thy cold grey walls reflect back the leaden me- lancholy of the soul. The square, hard- edged, unyielding faces of thy inhabitants have no sympathy to impart. What is it to me that I look along the level line of thy tenantless streets, and meet perhaps a law- yer like a grasshopper chirping and skip-


78 TO EDINBURGH.

ping, or the daughter of a Highland laird, haughty, fair, and freckled ? Or why should I look down your boasted Prince's-street, with the beetle-browed Castle on one side, and the Calton-hill with its proud monu- ment at the further end, and the ridgy steep of Salisbury-Crag, cut off abruptly by Na- ture* s boldest hand, and Arthur's- Seat over- looking all, like a lioness watching her cubs ? Or shall I turn to the far-off Pent- land-hills, with Craig-Crook nestling beneath them, where lives the prince of critics and the king of men ? Or cast my eye unsated over the Frith of Forth, that from my win- dow of an evening (as I read of AMY and her love) glitters like a broad golden mirror in the sun, and kisses the win'ding shores of kingly Fife ? Oh no ! But to thee, to thee I turn, North Berwick-Law, with thy blue cone rising out of summer seas ; for thou art the beacon of my banished thoughts, and dost point my way to her, who is my heart's true home. The air is too thin for me, that has not the breath of Love in it ; that is not embalmed by her sighs !


A THOUGHT.

I am not mad, but my heart is so ; and raves within me, fierce and untameable, like a panther in its den, and tries to get loose to its lost mate, and fawn on her hand, and bend lowly at her feet.

ANOTHER.

Oh ! thou dumb heart, lonely, sad, shut up in the prison-house of this rude form, that hast never found a fellow but for an in- stant, and in very mockery of thy misery, speak, find bleeding words to express thy thoughts, break thy dungeon-gloom, or die pronouncing thy Infelice's name !

ANOTHER.

Within my heart is lurking suspicion, and base fear, and shame and hate ; but above all, tyrannous love sits throned, crowned with her graces, silent and in tears.


LETTER IX.

MY DEAR P

You have been very kind to me in this business ; but I fear even your indulgence for my infirmities is beginning to fail. To what a state am I reduced, and for what ? For fancying a little artful vixen to be an angel and a saint, because she affected to look like one, to hide her rank thoughts and deadly purposes. Has she not murdered me under the mask of the tenderest friendship ? And why ? Because I have loved her with unutterable love, and sought to make her my wife. You say it is my own "outrageous conduct" that has estranged her ; nay, I have been too gentle with her. I ask you first in candour whether the ambiguity of her beha- viour with respect to me, sitting and fondling a man (circumstanced as I was) sometimes




LETTER IX. 8 1

for half a day together, and then declaring she had no love for him beyond common re- gard, and professing never to marry, was not enough to excite my suspicions, which the different exposures from the conversations below-stairs were not calculated to allay ? I ask you what you yourself would have felt or done, if loving her as I did, you had heard what I did, time after time ? Did not her mother own to one of the grossest charges (which I shall not repeat) and is such inde- licacy to be reconciled with her pretended character (that character with which I fell in love, and to which I made love) without sup- posing her to be the greatest hypocrite in the world ? My unpardonable offence has been that I took her at her word, and was willing to believe her the precise little puri- tanical person she set up for. After exciting her wayward desires by the fondest embraces and the purest kisses, as if she had been " made my wedded wife yestreen," or was to become so to-morrow (for that was always my feeling with respect to her) I did not proceed to gratify them, or to follow up my

G


82 LETTER IX.

advantage by any action which should de- clare, " I think you a common adventurer, and will see whether you are so or not !" Yet any one but a credulous fool like me would have made the experiment, with what- ever violence to himself, as a matter of life and death ; for I had every reason to distrust appearances. Her conduct has been of a piece from the beginning. In the midst of her closest and falsest endearments, she has always (with one or two exceptions) dis- claimed the natural inference to be drawn from them, and made a verbal reservation, by which she might lead me on in a Fool's Paradise, and make me the tool of her levity, her avarice, and her love of intrigue as long as she liked, and dismiss me whenever it suited her. This, you see, she has done, because my intentions grew serious, and if complied with, would deprive her of the plea- sures of a single life ! Offer marriage to this " tradesman's daughter, who has as nice a sense of honour as any one can have ;" and like Lady Bellaston in Tom Jones she cuts you immediately in a fit of abhorrence and


LETTER IX. 83

alarm. Yet she seemed to be of a different mind formerly, when struggling from me in the height of our first intimacy, she ex- claimed " However I might agree to my own ruin, I never will consent to bring dis- grace upon my family !" That I should have spared the traitress after expressions like this, astonishes me when I look back upon it. Yet if it were all to do over again, I know I should act just the same part. Such is her power over me ! I cannot run", the least risk of offending her I love her so. When I look in her face, I cannot doubt her truth ! Wretched being that I am ! I have thrown away my heart and soul upon an unfeeling girl ! and my life (that might have been so happy, had she been what I thought her) will soon follow either volun- tarily, or by the force of grief, remorse, and disappointment. I cannot get rid of the reflection for an instant, nor even seek relief from its galling pressure. Ah ! what a heart she has lost ! All the love and affect- ion of my whole life were centred in her, who alone, I thought, of all women had


84 LETTER IX.

found out my true character, and knew how to value my tenderness. Alas ! alas ! that this, the only hope, joy, or comfort I ever had, should turn to a mockery, and hang like an ugly film over the remainder of my days ! I was at Roslin Castle yesterday. It lies low in a rude, but sheltered valley, hid from the vulgar gaze, and powerfully reminds one of the old song. The strag- gling fragments of the russet ruins, suspend- ed smiling and graceful in the air as if they would linger out another century to please the curious beholder, the green larch-trees trembling between with the blue sky and white silver clouds, the wild mountain plants starting out here and there, the date of the year on an old low door-way, but still more, the beds of flowers in orderly decay, that seem to have no hand to tend them, but keep up a sort of traditional remembrance of civilization in former ages, present altogether a delightful and amiable subject for contemplation. The exquisite beauty of the scene, with the thought of what I should feel, should I ever be restored to her, and


LETTER IX. 85

have to lead her through such places as my adored, my angel-wife, almost drove me beside myself. For this picture, this ecstatic vision, what have I of late instead as the image of the reality ? Demoniacal posses- sions. I see the young witch seated in another's lap, twining her serpent arms round him, her eye glancing and her cheeks on fire why does not the hideous thought choke me ? Or why do I not go and find out the truth at once ? The moonlight streams over the silver waters : the bark is in the bay that might waft me to her, almost with a wish. The mountain-breeze sighs out her name : old ocean with a world of tears murmurs back my woes ! Does not my heart yearn to be with her ; and shall I not follow its bidding ? No, I must wait till I am free ; and then I will take my Freedom (a glad prize) and lay it at her feet and tell her my proud love of her that would not brook a rival in her dishonour, and that would have her all or none, and gain her or lose myself for ever !

You see by this letter the way I am in,


86 LETTER IX.

and I hope you will excuse it as the picture of a half-disordered mind. The least respite from my uneasiness (such as I had yesterday) only brings the contrary reflection back upon me, like a flood ; and by letting me see the happiness I have lost, makes me feel, by contrast, more acutely what I am doomed to bear.



LETTER X.

DEAR FRIEND,

Here I am at St. Bees once more, amid the scenes which I greeted in their barrenness in winter ; but which have now put on their full green attire that shows luxuriant to the eye, but speaks a tale of sadness to this heart widowed of its last, its dearest, its only hope ! Oh ! lovely Bees-Inn ! here I com- posed a volume of law- cases, here I wrote my enamoured follies to her, thinking her human, and that "all below was not the fiend's " here I got two cold, sullen answers

from the little witch, and here I was

and I was damned. I thought the revisiting the old haunts would have soothed me for a time, but it only brings back the sense of what I have suffered for her and of her un- kindness the more strongly, till I cannot en-


88 LETTER X.

ydure the recollection. I eye the Heavens in dumb despair, or vent my sorrows in the desart air. " To the winds, to the waves, to the rocks I complain" you may suppose with what effect ! I fear I shall be obliged to return. I am tossed about (backwards and forwards) by my passion, so as to be- come ridiculous. I can now understand how it is that mad people never remain in the same place they are moving on for ever, from themselves !

Do you know, you would have been de- lighted with the effect of the Northern twi- light on this romantic country as I rode along last night ? The hills and groves and herds of cattle were seen reposing in the grey dawn of midnight, as in a moonlight without shadow. The whole wide canopy of Heaven shed its reflex light upon them, like a pure crystal mirror. No sharp points, no pretty details, no hard contrasts every object was seen softened yet distinct, in its simple outline and natural tones, trans- parent with an inward light, breathing its own mild lustre. The landscape altogether


LETTER X. 89

was like an airy piece of mosaic-work, or like one of Poussin's broad massy land- scapes or Titian's lovely pastoral scenes. Is it not so, that poets see nature, veiled to the sight, but revealed to the soul in visionary grace and grandeur ! I confess the sight touched me ; and might have removed all sadness except mine. So (I thought) the light of her celestial face once shone into my soul, and wrapt me in a heavenly trance. The sense I have of beauty raises me for a moment above myself, but depresses me the more afterwards, when I recollect how it is thrown away in vain admiration, and that it only makes me more susceptible of pain from the mortifications I meet with. Would I had never seen her ! I might then not in- deed have been happy, but at least I might have passed my life in peace, and have sunk into forgetfulness without a pang. The noble scenery in this country mixes with my passion, and refines, but does not relieve it. I was at Stirling Castle not long ago. It gave me no pleasure. The declivity seemed to me abrupt, not sublime ; for in truth I did


90 LETTER X.

not shrink back from it with terror. The weather-beaten towers were stiff and formal : the air was damp and chill : the river winded its dull, slimy way like a snake along the marshy grounds : and the dim misty tops of Ben Leddi, and the lovely Highlands (woven fantastically of thin air) mocked my embraces and tempted my longing eyes like her, the sole queen and mistress of my thoughts ! I never found my contemplations on this sub- ject so subtilised and at the same time so desponding as on that occasion. I wept myself almost blind, and I gazed at the broad golden sun-set through my tears that fell in showers. As I trod the green mountain turf, oh ! how I wished to be laid beneath it in one grave with her that I might sleep with her in that cold bed, my hand in hers, and my heart for ever still while worms should taste her sweet body, that I had never tasted ! There was a time when I could bear solitude ; but it is too much for me at present. Now I am no sooner left to myself than I am lost in infinite space, and look round me in vain for support or comfort. She was my


LETTER X. 91

stay, my hope : without her hand to cling to, I stagger like an infant on the edge of a pre- cipice. The universe without her is one wide, hollow abyss, in which my harassed thoughts can find no resting-place. I must \L break off here ; for the hysterica passio comes upon me, and threatens to unhinge my reason.



LETTER XL

MY DEAR AND GOOD FRIEND,

I am afraid I trouble you with my queru- lous epistles, but this is probably the last. To-morrow or the next day decides my fate with respect to the divorce, when I expect to be a free man. In vain ! Was is not for her and to lay my freedom at her feet, that I consented to this step which has cost me infinite perplexity, and now to be discarded for the first pretender that came in her way! If so, I hardly think I can survive it. You who have been a favourite with women, do not know what it is to be deprived of one's only hope, and to have it turned to shame and disappointment. There is nothing in the world left that can afford me one drop of comfort this I feel more and more. Every thing is to me a mockery of pleasure, like


LETTER XI. 93

her love. The breeze does not cool me : the blue sky does not cheer me. I gaze only on her face averted from me alas ! the only face that ever was turned fondly to me ! And why am I thus treated ? Because I wanted her to be mine for ever in love or friendship, and did not push my gross fami- liarities as far as I might. " Why can you not go on as we have done, and say noth- ing about the word, forever ? " Was it not plain from this that she even then medi- tated an escape from me to some less sen- timental lover ? " Do you allow any one else to do so ? " I said to her once, as I was toying with her. " No, not now ! " was her answer; that is, because there was nobody else in the house to take freedoms with her. I was very well as a stopgap, but I was to be nothing more. While the coast was clear, I had it all my own way : but the instance

C came, she flung herself at his head

in the most bare-faced way, ran breathless up stairs before him, blushed when his foot was heard, watched for him in the passage, and was sure to be in close conference with


94 LETTER XI.

him when he went down again. It was then my mad proceedings commenced. No won- der. Had I not reason to be jealous of every appearance of familiarity with others, knowing how easy she had been with me at first, and that she only grew shy when I did not take farther liberties ? What has her character to rest upon but her attachment to me, which she now denies, not modestly, but impudently ? Will you yourself say that if she had all along no particular regard for me, she will not do as much or more with other more likely men? "She has had," she says, " enough of my conversation, " so it could not be that ! Ah I my friend, it was not to be supposed I should ever meet even with the outward demonstrations of regard from any woman but a common trader in the endearments of love ! I have tasted the sweets of the well practised illusion, and now feel the bitterness of knowing what a bliss I am deprived of, and must ever be de- prived of. Intolerable conviction ! Yet I might, I believe, have won her by other methods ; but some demon held my hand.


LETTER XI. 95

How indeed could I offer her the least insult when I worshipped her very footsteps ; and even now pay her divine honours from my inmost heart, whenever I think of her, abased and brutalised as I have been by that Circean cup of kisses, of enchantments, of which I have drunk ! I am choked, withered, dried up with chagrin, remorse, despair, from which I have not a moment's respite, day or night. I have always some horrid dream about her, and wake wondering what is the matter that " she is no longer the same to me as ever ?" I thought at least we should always remain dear friends, if nothing more did she not talk of coming to live with me only the day before I left her in the winter ? But " she's gone, I am abused, and my re- venge must be to love her !" Yet she knows that one line, one word would save me, the cruel, heartless destroyer ! I see nothing for it but madness, unless Friday brings a change, or unless she is willing to let me go back. You must know I wrote to her to that purpose, but it was a very quiet, sober letter, begging pardon, and professing reform for


96 LETTER XI.

the future, and all that. What effect it will have, I know not. I was forced to get out of the way of her answer, till Friday came. Ever your's.



TO S. L.


MY DEAR MISS L-


Evil to them that evil think, is an old say- ing ; and I have found it a true one. I have ruined myself by my unjust suspicions of you. Your sweet friendship was the balm of my life ; and I have lost it, I fear for ever, by one fault and folly after another. What would I give to be restored to the place in your esteem, which, you assured me, I held only a few months ago ! Yet I was not contented, but did all I could to torment myself and harass you by endless doubts and jealousy. Can you not forget and for- give the past, and judge of me by my con- duct in future ? Can you not take all my follies in the lump, and say like a good, generous girl, " Well, I'll think no more of H


98 TO s. L.

them ? " In a word, may I come back, and try to behave better? A line to say so would be an additional favour to so many already received by

Your obliged friend,

And sincere well-wisher.



LETTER XII. TO C. P .

I have no answer from her. I'm mad. I

wish you to call on M in confidence, to

say I intend to make her an offer of my hand, and that I will write to her father to that effect the instant I am free, and ask him whether he thinks it will be to any purpose, and what he would advise me to do.



UNALTERED LOVE.

"Love is not love that alteration finds : Oh no ! it is an ever-fixed mark, That looks on tempests and is never shaken."

SHALL I not love her for herself alone, in spite of fickleness and folly ? To love her for her regard to me, is not to love her, but myself. She has robbed me of herself: shall she also rob me of my love of her ? "Did I not live on her smile ? Is it less sweet because it is withdrawn from me ? Did I not adore her every grace ? Does she bend less enchantingly, because she has turned from me to another ? Is my love then in the power of fortune, or of her ca- price ? No, I will have it lasting as it is pure ; and I will make a Goddess of her, and build a temple to her in my heart, and worship her on indestructible altars, and*


UNALTERED LOVE. IOI

raise statues to her: and my homage shall be unblemished as her unrivalled symmetry of form ; and when that fails, the memory of it shall survive ; and my bosom shall be proof to scorn, as her's has been to pity ; and I will pursue her with an unrelenting love, and sue to be her slave, and tend her steps without notice and without reward ; and serve her living, and mourn for her when dead. And thus my love will have shewn itself superior to her hate ; and I shall triumph and then die. This is my idea of the only true and heroic love ! Such is mine for her.



PERFECT LOVE.

PERFECT love has this advantage in it, that it leaves the possessor of it nothing- farther to desire. There is one object (at least) in which the soul finds absolute con- tent, for which it seeks to live, or dares to die. The heart has as it were filled up the moulds of the imagination. The truth of passion keeps pace with and outvies the extravagance of mere language. There are no words so fine, no flattery so soft, that there is not a sentiment beyond them, that it is impossible to express, at the bottom of the heart where true love is. What idle sounds the common phrases, adorable crea- ture, angel, divinity, are ! What a proud reflection it is to have a feeling answering to all these, rooted in the breast, unalterable,


PERFECT LOVE. 103

unutterable, to which all other feelings are light and vain ! Perfect love reposes on the object of its choice, like the halcyon on the wave ; and the air of heaven is around it.



FROM C. P. ESQ.

London, July ^th, 1822.

I have seen M ! Now, my dear H ,

let me entreat and adjure you to take what I have to tell you, for what it is worth neither for less, nor more. In the first place, I have learned nothing decisive from him. This, as you will at once see, is, as far as it goes, good. I am either to hear from him, or see him again in a day or two ; but I thought you would like to know what passed inconclusive as it was so I write without delay, and in great haste to save a post. I found him frank, and even friendly in his manner to me, and in his views re- specting you. I think that he is sincerely sorry for your situation ; and he feels that the person who has placed you in that situ-


FROM C. P. ESQ. 105

ation is not much less awkwardly situated herself; and he professes that he would willingly do what he can for the good of both. But he sees great difficulties attend- ing the affair which he frankly professes to consider as an altogether unfortunate one. With respect to the marriage, he seems to see the most formidable objections to it, on both sides ; but yet he by no means decid- edly says that it cannot, or that it ought not to take place. These, mind you, are his own feelings on the subject : but the most important point I learn from him is this, that he is not prepared to use his influence either way that the rest of the family are of the same way of feeling ; and that, in fact, the thing must and does entirely rest with herself. To learn this was, as you see, gaining a great point. When I then endea- voured to ascertain whether he knew any thing decisive as to what are her views on the subject, I found that he did not. He has an opinion on the subject, and he didn't scruple to tell me what it was ; but he has no positive knowledge. In short,


106 FROM C. P. ESQ.

he believes, from what he learns from her- self (and he had purposely seen her on the subject, in consequence of my appli- cation to him) that she is at present indis- posed to the marriage ; but he is not prepared to say positively that she will not consent to it. Now all this, coming from him in the most frank and unaffected manner, and without any appearance of cant, caution, or reserve, I take to be most important as it respects your views, whatever they may be ; and certainly much more favorable to them (I confess it) than I was prepared to expect, supposing them to remain as they were. In fact, as I said before, the affair rests entirely with herself. They are none of them disposed either to further the marriage, or throw any insur- mountable obstacles in the way of it ; and what is more important than all, they are evidently by no means certain that SHE may not, at some future period, consent to it ; or they would, for her sake as well as their own, let you know as much flatly, and put an end to the affair at once.


FROM C. P. ESQ. 107

Seeing in how frank and straitforward a manner he received what I had to say to him, and replied to it, I proceeded to ask him what were his views, and what were likely to be her's (in case she did not con- sent) as to whether you should return to live in the house ; but I added, without waiting for his answer, that if she intended to persist in treating you as she had done for some time past, it would be worse than madness for you to think of returning. I added that, in case you did return, all you would expect from her would be that she would treat you with civility and kindness that she would continue to evince that friendly feeling towards you, that she had done for a great length of time, &c. To this, he said, he could really give no de- cisive reply, but that he should be most happy if, by any intervention of his, he could conduce to your comfort ; but he seemed to think that for you to return on any express understanding that she should behave to you in any particular manner, would be to place her in a most awkward situation. He


108 FROM C. P. ESQ.

went somewhat at length into this point, and talked very reasonably about it; the result however was that he would not throw any obstacles in the way of your return, or of her treating you as a friend, &c. nor did it appear that he believed she would refuse to do so. And, finally, we parted on the understanding that he would see them on the subject, and ascertain what could be done for the comfort of all parties : though he was of opinion that if you could make up your mind to break off the acquaintance altogether, it would be the best plan of all. I am to hear from him again in a day or two. Well, what do you say to all this ? Can you turn it to any thing but good compar- ative good ? If you would know what / say to it, it is this : She is still to be won by wise and prudent conduct on your part ; she was always to have been won by such ; and if she is lost, it has been (not, as you sometimes suppose, because you have not carried that unwise, may I not say unworthy ? conduct still farther, but) because you gave way to it at all. Of course I use the terms


FROM C. P. ESQ. 109

and "prudent'* with reference to your object. Whether the pursuit of that object is wise, only yourself can judge. I say she has all along been to be won, and she still is to be won ; and all that stands in the way of your views at this moment is your past conduct. They are all of them,**"*^ f every soul, frightened at you ; they have seen enough of you to make them so ; and they have doubtless heard ten times more than they have seen, or than any one else has

seen. They are all of them, including M

(and particularly she herself) frightened out of their wits, as to what might be your treatment of her if she were your's ; and they dare not trust you they will not trust- you, at present. I do not say that they will trust you or rather that she will, for it all depends on her, when you have gone through a probation, but I am sure that she will not trust you till you have. You will, I hope, not be angry with me when I say that she would be a fool if she did. If she were to accept you at present, and without knowing more of you, even / should begin to suspect


110 FROM C. P. ESQ.

that she had an unworthy motive for doing it. Let me not forget to mention what is perhaps as important a point as any, as it regards the

marriage. I of course stated to M that

when you are free, you are prepared to make her a formal offer of your hand ; but I begged him, if he was certain that such an offer would be refused, to tell me so plainly at once, that I might endeavour, in that case, to dissuade you from subjecting yourself to the pain of such a refusal. He would not tell me that he was certain. He said his opinion was that she would not accept your offer, but still he seemed to think that there would be no harm in making it ! One word more, and a very important one. He once, and without my referring in the slightest manner to that part of th$ subject, spoke of her as a good girl, and likely to make any man an excellent wife I Do you think if she were a bad girl (and if she were, he must know her to be so) he would have dared to do this, under these circumstances ? And once, in speaking of his not being a fit person to set his face against " marrying for love," he


FROM C. P. ESQ. Ill

added "I did so myself, and out of that house ; and I have had reason to rejoice at it ever since." And mind (for I anticipate your cursed suspicions) I'm certain, at least, if manner can entitle one to be certain of any thing, that he said all this spontaneously, and without any understood motive ; and I'm certain, too, that he knows you to be a person it would not do to play any tricks of this kind with. I believe (and all this would never have entered my thoughts, but that I know it will enter your's) I believe that even if they thought (as you have some- times supposed they do) that she needs whitewashing, or making an honest woman of, you would be the last person they would think of using for such a purpose, for they know (as well as I do) that you couldn't fail to find out the trick in a month, and would turn her into the street the next moment, though she were twenty times your wife and that, as to the consequences of doing so, you would laugh at them, even if you cou'dn't escape from them. I shall lose the post if I say more.

Believe me, Ever truly your friend,

C.P.


LETTER XIII.


MY DEAR P-


You have saved my life, If I do not keep friends with her now, I deserve to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. She is an angel from Heaven, and you cannot pretend I ever said a word to the contrary! The little rogue must have liked me from the first, or she never could have stood all these hurricanes without slipping her cable. What could she find in me ? " I have mistook my person all this while," &c. Do you know I saw a picture, the very pattern of her, the other day, at Dalkeith Palace (Hope finding For- tune in the Sea) just before this blessed news came, and the resemblance drove me almost out of my senses. Such delicacy, such ful- ness, such perfect softness, such buoyancy,


LETTER XIII. 113

such grace ! If it is not the very image of her, I am no judge. You have the face to doubt my making the best husband in the world : you might as well doubt it if I was married to one of the Houris of Paradise. She is a saint, an angel, a love. If she deceives me again, she kills me. But I will have such a kiss when I get back, as shall last me twenty years. May God bless her for not utterly disowning and destroying me ! What an exquisite little creature it is, and how she holds out to the last in her system of consistent contradictions ! Since I wrote to you about making a formal proposal, I have had her face constantly before me, looking so like some faultless marble statue, as cold, as fixed and graceful as ever statue did ; the expression (nothing was ever like that /) seemed to say " I wish I could love you better than I do, but still I will be your's." No, I'll never believe again that she will not be mine ; for I think she was made on pur- pose for me. If there's any one else that understands that turn of her head as I do, I'll give her up without scruple. I have I


114 LETTER XIII.

made up my mind to this, never to dream of another woman, while she even thinks it worth her while to refuse to have me. You see I am not hard to please, after all. Did M know of the intimacy that had sub- sisted between us ? Or did you hint at it ? I think it would be a clencher, if he did. How ought I to behave when I go back ? Advise a fool, who had nearly lost a Goddess by his folly. The thing was, I could not think it possible she should ever like me. Her taste is singular, but not the worse for that. I'd rather have her love, or liking (call it what you will) than empires. I deserve to call her mine ; for nothing else can atone for what I've gone through for her. I hope your next letter will not reverse all, and then I shall be happy till I see her-: one of the blest when I do see her, if she looks like my own beautiful love. I may perhaps write a line when I come to my right wits. Farewel at present, and thank you a thousand times for what you have done for your poor friend.


LETTER XIII. I 15

P.S. I like what M said about her

sister, much. There are good people in the world : I begin to see it, and believe it.



LETTER THE LAST.


DEAR P-


To-morrow is the decisive day that makes me or mars me. I will let you know the result by a line added to this. Yet what signifies it, since either way I have little hope there, "whence alone my hope cometh !" You must know I am strangely in the dumps at this present writing. My reception with her is doubtful, and my fate is then certain. The hearing of your happiness has, I own, made me thoughtful. It is just what I pro- posed to her to do to have crossed the Alps with me, to sail on sunny seas, to bask in Italian skies, to have visited Vevai and the rocks of Meillerie, and to have repeated to her on the spot the story of Julia and St. Preux, and to have shewn her all that my


LETTER THE LAST. I I 7

heart had stored up for her but on my fore- head alone is written REJECTED ! Yet I too could have adored as fervently, and loved as tenderly as others, had I been per- mitted. You are going abroad, you say, happy in making happy. Where shall I be ? In the grave, I hope, or else in her arms. To me, alas ! there is no sweetness out of her sight, and that sweetness has turned to bitterness, I fear ; that gentleness to sullen scorn ! Still I hope for the Jbest. If she will but have me, I'll make her love me : and I think her not giving a positive answer looks like it, and also shews that there is no one else. Her holding out to the last also, I think, proves that she was never to have been gained but with honour. She's a strange, almost an inscrutable girl : but if I once win her consent, I shall kill her with kindness. Will you let me have a sight of somebody be- fore you go ? I should be most proud. I was in hopes to have got away by the Steam-boat to-morrow, but owing to the business not coming on till then, I cannot ; and may not be in town for another week, unless I come


Il8 LETTER THE LAST.

by the Mail, which I am strongly tempted to do. In the latter case I shall be there, and visible on Saturday evening. Will you look in and see, about eight o'clock ? I wish much to see you and her and J. H. and my little boy once more ; and then, if she is not what she once was to me, I care not if I die that instant. I will conclude here till to- morrow, as I am getting into my old me- lancholy.

It is all over, and I am my own man, and your's ever


LIBER AMORIS. PART III.


ADDRESSED TO J. S. K-


MY DEAR K-


It is all over, and I know my fate. I told you I would send you word, if any thing decisive happened ; but an impenetrable mystery hung over the affair till lately. It is at last (by the merest accident in the world) dissipated ; and I keep my promise, both for your satisfaction, and for the ease of my own mind.

You remember the morning when I said " I will go and repose my sorrows at the foot of Ben Lomond " and when from Dumbar- ton-bridge its giant-shadow, clad in air and sunshine, appeared in view. We had a pleasant day's walk. We passed Smollet's monument on the road (somehow these poets touch one in reflection more than most


122 TO J. S. K. .

military heroes) talked of old times ; you repeated Logan's beautiful verses to the cuckoo,* which I wanted to compare with Wordsworth's, but my courage failed me ; you then told me some passages of an early attachment which was suddenly broken off; we considered together which was the most to be pitied, a disappointment in love where the attachment was mutual or one where there has been no return, and we both agreed, I think, that the former was best to be en- dured, and that to have the consciousness of

  • " Sweet bird, thy bower is ever green,

Thy sky is ever clear ; Thou hast no sorrow in thy song, No winter in thy year."

So they begin. It was the month of May ; the cuckoo sang shrouded in some woody copse ; the showers fell between whiles ; my friend repeated the lines with native enthusiasm in a clear manly voice, still resonant of youth and hope. Mr. Wordsworth will excuse me, if in these circumstances I declined entering the field with his profounder metaphysical strain, and kept my preference to myself.


TO J. S. K . 123

it a companion for life was the least evil of the two, as there was a secret sweetness that took off the bitterness and the sting of regret, and " the memory of what once had been " atoned, in some measure, and at intervals, for what " never more could be." In the other case, there was nothing to look back to with tender satisfaction, no redeeming trait, not even a possibility of turning it to good. It left behind it not cherished sighs, but stifled pangs. The galling sense of it did not bring moisture into the eyes, but dried up the heart ever after. One had been my fate, the other had been yours !

You startled me every now and then from my reverie by the robust voice, in which you asked the country people (by no means pro- digal of their answers) "If there jwas 'any trout-fishing in those streams ?" and our dinner at Luss set us up for the rest of our day's march. The sky now became over- cast ; but this, I think, added to the effect of the scene. The road to Tarbet is superb. It is on the very verge of the^lake hard level, rocky, with low stone-bridges con-


124 TO J- s - K

stantly flung across it, and fringed with birch trees, just then budding into spring, behind which, as through a slight veil, you saw the huge shadowy form of Ben Lomond. It lifts its enormous but graceful bulk direct from the edge of the water without any projecting lowlands, and has in this respect much the advantage of Skiddaw. Loch Lomond comes upon you by degrees as you advance, un- folding and then withdrawing its conscious beauties like an accomplished coquet. You are struck with the point of a rock, the arch of a bridge, the Highland huts (like the first rude habitations of men) dug out of the soil, built of turf, and covered with brown heather, a sheep-cote, some straggling cattle feeding half-way down a precipice ; but as you ad- vance farther on, the view expands into the perfection of lake scenery. It is nothing (or your eye is caught by nothing) but water, earth, and sky. Ben Lomond waves to the right, in its simple majesty, cloud-capt or bare, and descending to a point at the head of the lake, shews the Trossacs beyond, tumbling about their blue ridges like woods


TO J. S. K . 125

waving ; to the left is the Cobler, whose top is like a castle shattered in pieces and nod- ding to its ruin ; and at your side rise the shapes of round pastoral hills, green, fleeced with herds, and retiring into mountainous bays and upland valleys, where solitude and peace might make their lasting home, if peace were to be found in solitude ! That it was not always so, I was a sufficient proof ; for there was one image that alone haunted me in the midst of all this sublimity and beauty, and turned it to a mockery and a dream !

The snow on the mountain would not let us ascend ; and being weary of waiting and of being visited by the guide every two hours to let us know that the weather would not do, we returned, you homewards, and I to London

" Italiam, Italiam !"

You know the anxious expectations with which I set out : now hear the result.

As the vessel sailed up the Thames, the air thickened with the consciousness of


I 26 TO J. S. K .

being near her, and I " heaved her name pantingly forth." As I approached the house, I could not help thinking of the lines

" How near am I to happiness, That earth exceeds not ! Not another like it. The treasures of the deep are not so precious As are the concealed comforts of a man Lock'd up in woman's love. I scent the air Of blessings when I come but near the house. What a delicious breath true love sends forth ! The violet-beds not sweeter. Now for a welcome Able to draw men's envies upon man : A kiss now that will hang upon my lip, As sweet as morning dew upon a rose, And full as long ! "

I saw her, but I saw at the first glance that there was something amiss. It was with much difficulty and after several pressing intreaties that she was prevailed on to come up into the room ; and when she did, she stood at the door, cold, distant, averse ; and when at length she was persuaded by my repeated remonstrances to come and take my hand, and I offered to touch her lips, she turned her head and shrunk from my


TO J. S. K . 127

embraces, as if quite alienated or mortally offended. I asked what it could mean ? What had I done in her absence to have incurred her displeasure ? Why had she not written to me ? I could get only short, sullen, disconnected answers, as if there was something labouring in her mind which she either could not or would not impart. I hardly knew how to bear this first reception after so long an absence, and so different from the one my sentiments towards her merited ; but I thought it possible it migjit be prudery (as I had returned without having actually accomplished what I went about) or that she had taken offence at something in my letters. She saw how much I was hurt. I asked her, "If she was altered since I went away ? " " No." " If there was any one else who had been so fortunate as to gain her favourable opinion ? " " No, there was no one else." " What was it then ? Was it any thing in my letters ? Or had I displeased

her by letting Mr. P know she wrote to

me?" "No, not at all; but she did not apprehend my last letter required any an-


128 TO J. S. K .

swer, or she would have replied to it." All this appeared to me very unsatisfactory and evasive ; but I could get no more from her, and was obliged to let her go with a heavy, foreboding heart. I however found that

C was gone, and no one else had been

there, of whom I had cause to be jealous. " Should I see her on the morrow ? " " She believed so, but she could not pro- mise." The next morning she did not appear with the breakfast as usual. At this I grew somewhat uneasy. The little Buona- parte, however, was placed in its old position on the mantle-piece, which I considered as a sort of recognition of old times. I saw her once or twice casually ; nothing particular happened till the next day, which was Sun- day. I took occasion to go into the parlour for the newspaper, which she gave me with a gracious smile, and seemed tolerably frank and cordial. This of course acted as a spell upon me. I walked out with my little boy, intending to go and dine out at one or two places, but I found that I still contrived to bend my steps towards her, and I went back


TO J. S. K . 129

to take tea at home. While we were out, I talked to William about Sarah, saying that she too was unhappy, and asking him to make it up with her. He said, if she was unhappy, he would not bear her malice any more. When she came up with the tea- things, I said to her, "William has something to say to you I believe he wants to be friends." On which he said in his abrupt, hearty manner, " Sarah, I'm sorry if I've ever said any thing to vex you" so they shook hands, and she said, smiling affably "Then I'll think no more of it ! " I added " I see you've brought me back my little Buonaparte" She answered with tremulous softness " I told you I'd keep it safe for you ! " as if her pride and pleasure in doing so had been equal, and she had, as it were, thought of nothing during my absence but how to greet .me with this proof of her fidelity on my return. I cannot describe her manner. Her words are few and simple ; but you can have no idea of the exquisite, unstudied, irresistible graces with which she accompanies them, unless you can suppose K


130 TO J. S. K .

a Greek statue to smile, move, and speak. Those lines in Tibullus seem to have been written on purpose for her

Quicquid agit, quoquo vestigia vertit, Componuit furtim, subsequiturque decor.

Or what do you think of those in a modern play, which might actually have been com- posed with an eye to this little trifler

" See with what a waving air she goes

Along the corridor. How like a fawn ! Yet statelier. No sound (however soft) Nor gentlest echo telleth when she treads, But every motion of her shape doth seem Hallowed by silence. So did Hebe grow Among the Gods a paragon ! Away, I'm grown The very fool of Love ! "

The truth is, I never saw any thing like her, nor I never shall again. How then do I console myself for the loss of her ? Shall I tell you, but you will not mention it again ? I am foolish enough to believe that she and I, in spite of every thing, shall be sitting together over a sea-coal fire, a comfortable


TO J. S. K . Ijr

good old couple, twenty years hence ! But to my narrative.

I was delighted with the alteration in her manner, and said, referring to the bust " You know it is not mine, but your's ; I gave it you ; nay, I have given you all my heart, and whatever I possess, is your's ! " She seemed good-humouredly to decline this carte blanche offer, and waved, like a thing of enchantment, out of the room. False calm ! Deceitful smiles ! Short interval of peace, followed by lasting woe ! I sought an interview with her that same evening. I could not get her to come any farther than the door. " She was busy she could hear what I had to say there." "Why do you seem to avoid me as you do ? Not one five minutes' conversation, for the sake of old acquaintance ? Well, then, for the sake of the little image /" The appeal seemed to have lost its efficacy ; the charm was broken; she remained immoveable. "Well, then, I must come to you, if you will not run away." I went and sat down in a chair near the door, and took her hand, and talked


132 TO J. S. K .

to her for three quarters of an hour; and she listened patiently, thoughtfully, and seemed a good deal affected by what I said. I told her how much I had felt, how much I had suffered for her in my absence, and how much I had been hurt by her sudden silence, for which I knew not how to account. I could have done nothing to offend her while I was away ; and my letters were, I hoped, tender and respectful. I had had but one thought ever present with me ; her image never quitted my side, alone or in company, to delight or distract me. Without her I could have no peace, nor ever should again, unless she would behave to me as she had done formerly. There was no abatement of my regard to her ; why was she so changed ? I said to her, "Ah! Sarah, when I think that it is only a year ago that you were every thing to me I could wish, and that now you seem lost to me for ever, the month of May (the name of which ought to be a signal for joy and hope) strikes chill to my heart. How different is this meeting from that delicious parting, when you seemed never


TO J. S. K . 133

weary of repeating the proofs of your regard and tenderness, and it was with difficulty we tore ourselves asunder at last ! I am ten thousand times fonder of you than I was then, and ten thousand times more unhappy.'* "You have no reason to be so ; my feelings towards you are the same as they ever were." I told her " She was my all of hope or comfort : my passion for her grew stronger every time I saw her." She answered, " She was sorry for it ; for that she never could return." I said something about looking ill : she said in her pretty, mincing, emphatic way, "I despise looks!" So, thought I, it is not that ; and she says there's no one else : it must be some strange air she gives herself, in consequence of the approaching change in my circumstances. She has been probably advised not to give up till all is fairly over, and then she will be rny own sweet girl again. All this time she was standing just outside the door, my hand in hers (would that they could have grown together !) she was dressed in a loose morning-gown, her hair curled beautifully ;


134 T J- s. K .

she stood with her profile to me, and looked down the whole time. No expression was ever more soft or perfect. Her whole attitude, her whole form, was dignity and bewitching grace. I said to her, " You look like a queen, my love, adorned with your own graces !" I grew idolatrous, and would have kneeled to her. She made a movement, as if she was displeased. I tried to draw her towards me. She wouldn't. I then got up, and offered to kiss her at parting. I found she obstinately refused. This stung me to the quick. It was the first time in her life she had ever done so. There must be some new bar between us to produce these continued denials ; and she had not even esteem enough left to tell me so. I followed her half-way down-stairs, but to no purpose, and returned into my room, confirmed in my most dreadful surmises. I could bear it no longer. I gave way to all the fury of disap- pointed hope and jealous passion. I was made the dupe of trick and cunning, killed with cold, sullen scorn ; and, after all the agony I had suffered, could obtain no


TO J. S. K . 135

explanation why I was subjected to it. I was still to be tantalized, tortured, made the cruel sport of one, for whom I would have sacrificed all. I tore the locket which contained her hair (and which I used to wear continually in my bosom, as the precious token of her dear regard) from my neck, and trampled it in pieces. I then dashed the little Buonaparte on the ground, and stamped upon it, as one of her instruments of mockery. I could not stay in the room ; I could not leave it ; my rage, my despair were uncontroulable. I shrieked curses on her name, and on her false love ; and the scream I uttered (so pitiful and so piercing was it, that the sound of it terrified me) instantly brought the whole house, father, mother, lodgers and all, into the room. They thought I was destroying her and myself. I had gone into the bed-room, merely to hide away from myself, and as I came out of it, raging-mad with the new sense of present shame and lasting misery,

Mrs. F said, " She's in there ! He has

got her in there !" thinking the cries had


136 TO J. S. K .

proceeded from her, and that I had been offering her violence. " Oh ! no," I said, " She's in no danger from me ; I am not the person ; " and tried to burst from this scene of degradation. The mother endeavoured to stop me, and said, "For God's sake,

don't go out, Mr. ! for God's sake,

don't!" Her father, who was not, I believe, in the secret, and was therefore justly scandalised at such outrageous conduct, said angrily, " Let him go ! Why should he stay?" I however sprang down stairs, and as they called out to me, " What is it ? What has she done to you?" I answered, "She has murdered me ! She has destroyed me for ever ! She has doomed my soul to per- dition !" I rushed out of the house, thinking to quit it forever; but I was no sooner in the street, than the desolation and the darkness became greater, more intolerable ; and the eddying violence of my passion drove me back to the source, from whence it sprung. This unexpected explosion, with the conjectures to which it would give rise, could not be very agreeable to the precieuse


TO J. S. K . 137

or her family: and when I went back, the father was waiting at the door, as if antici- pating this sudden turn of my feelings, with no friendly aspect. I said, " I have to beg pardon, Sir; but my mad fit is over, and I wish to say a few words to you in private/ * He seemed to hesitate, but some uneasy forebodings on his own account, probably, prevailed over his resentment ; or, perhaps (as philosophers have a desire to know the cause of thunder) it was a natural curiosity to know what circumstances of provocation had given rise to such an extraordinary scene of confusion. When we reached my room, I requested him to be seated. I said, " It is true, Sir, I have lost my peace of mind forever, but at present I am quite calm and collected, and I wish to explain to you why I have behaved in so extravagant a way, and to ask for your advice and intercession." He appeared satisfied, and I went on. I had no chance either of exculpating myself, or of probing the question to the bottom, but by stating the naked truth, and therefore I said at once, " Sarah told me, Sir (and I


138 TO J. S. K .

never shall forget the way in which she told me, fixing her dove's eyes upon me, and looking a thousand tender reproaches for the loss of that good opinion, which she held dearer than all the world) she told me, Sir, that as you one day passed the door, which stood a-jar, you saw her in an attitude which a good deal startled you ; I mean sitting in my lap, with her arms round my neck, and mine twined round her in the fondest manner. What I wished to ask was, whether this was actually the case, or whether it was a mere invention of her own, to enhance the sense of my obligations to her ; for I begin to doubt everything ? " " Indeed, it was so ; and very much sur- prised and hurt I was to see it." " Well, then, Sir, I can only say, that as you saw her sitting then, so she had been sitting for the last year and a half, almost every day of her life, by the hour together ; and you may judge yourself, knowing what a nice modest- looking girl she is, whether, after having been admitted to such intimacy with so sweet a creature, and for so long a time, it


TO J. S. K . 139

is not enough to make anyone frantic to be received by her as I have been since my return, without any provocation given or cause assigned for it.'* The old man answered very seriously, and, as I think, sincerely, "What you now tell me, Sir, mortifies and shocks me, as much as it can do yourself. I had no idea such a thing was possible. I was much pained at what I saw ; but I thought it an accident, and that it would never happen again." "It was a constant habit; it has happened a hundred times since, and a thousand before. I lived on her caresses as my daily food, nor can I live without them." So I told him the whole story, u what conjura- tions, and what mighty magic I won his daughter with," to be anything but mine for life. Nothing could well exceed his as- tonishment and apparent mortification. " What I had said," he owned, " had left a weight upon his mind that he should not easily get rid of.*' I told him, " For myself, I never could recover the blow I had re- ceived. I thought, however, for her own


140 TO J. S. K .

sake, she ought to alter her present be- haviour. Her marked neglect and dislike, so far from justifying, left her former inti- macies without excuse ; for nothing could reconcile them to propriety, or even a pre- tence to common decency, but either love, or friendship so strong and pure that it could put on the guise of love. She was certainly a singular girl. Did she think it right and becoming to be free with strangers, and strange to old friends ? " I frankly declared, " I did not see how it was in human nature for any one who was not rendered callous to such familiarities by bestowing them indis- criminately on every one, to grant the extreme and continued indulgences she had done to me, without either liking the man at first, or coming to like him in the end, in spite of herself. When my addresses had nothing, and could have nothing honourable in them, she gave them every encourage- ment ; when I wished to make them honour- able, she treated them with the utmost con- tempt. The terms we had been all along on were such as if she had been to be my bride


TO J. S. K . 141

next day. It was only when I wished her actually to become so, to ensure her own character and my happiness, that she shrunk back with precipitation and panic-fear. There seemed to me something wrong in all this ; a want both of common propriety, and I might say, of natural feeling ; yet, with all her faults, I loved her, and ever should, be- yond any other human being. I had drank in the poison of her sweetness too long ever to be cured of it ; and though I might find it to be poison in the end, it was still in my veins. My only ambition was to be per- mitted to live with her, and to die in her arms. Be she what she would, treat me how she would, I felt that my soul was wedded to hers ; and were she a mere lost creature, I would try to snatch her from perdition, and marry her to-morrow if she would have me. That was the question " Would she have me, or would she not ? " He said he could not tell ; but should not attempt to put any constraint upon her in- clinations, one way or other. I acquiesced, and added, that " I had brought all this


I


142 TO J. S. K .

upon myself, by acting contrary to the

suggestions of my friend, Mr. , who had

desired me to take no notice whether she came near me or kept away, whether she smiled or frowned, was kind or contemp- tuous all you have to do, is to wait patiently for a month till you are your own man, as you will be in all probability ; then make her an offer of your hand, and if she re- fuses, there's an end of the matter." Mr. L. said, "Well, Sir, and I don't think you can follow a better advice ! " I took this as a sort of negative encouragement, and so we parted.


TO THE SAME (in continuation).

MY DEAR FRIEND,

The next day I felt almost as sailors must do after a violent storm overnight, that has subsided towards daybreak. The morning was a dull and stupid calm, and I found she was unwell, in consequence of what had happened. In the evening I grew more uneasy, and determined on going into the country for a week or two. I gathered up the fragments of the locket of her hair, and the little bronze statue, which were strewed about the floor, kissed them, folded them up in a sheet of paper, and sent them to her, with these lines written in pencil on the out- side "Pieces of a broken heart, to be kept in remembrance of the unhappy. Farewell" No notice was taken ; nor did I expect any.




1 44 TO J. S. K .

The following morning I requested Betsey to pack up my box for me, as I should go out of town the next day, and at the same time wrote a note to her sister to say, I should take it as a favour if she would please to accept of the enclosed copies of the Vicar of Wake field, The Man of Feeling, and Nature and Art, in lieu of three volumes of my own writings, which I had given her on different occasions, in the course of our acquaintance. I was piqued, in fact, that she should have these to shew as proofs of my weakness, and as if I thought the way to win her was by plaguing her with my own performances. She sent me word back that the books I had sent were of no use to her, and that I should have those I wished for in the afternoon ; but that she could not before, as she had lent them to her sister,

Mrs. M , I said, " Very well ; " but

observed (laughing) to Betsey, "It's a bad rule to give and take ; so, if Sarah won't have these books, you must ; they are very pretty ones, I assure you." She curtsied and tbok them, according to the family


TO J. S, K . 145

custom. In the afternoon, when I came back to tea, I found the little girl on her knees, busy in packing up my things, and a large paper-parcel on the table, which I could not at first tell what to make of. On opening it, however, I soon found what it was. It contained a number of volumes which I had given her at different times (among others, a little Prayer-Book, bound in crimson velvet, with green silk linings ; she kissed it twenty times when she received it, and said it was the prettiest present in the world, and that she would shew it to her aunt, who would be proud of it) and all these she had returned together. Her name in the title-page was cut out of them all. I doubted at the instant whether she had done this before or after I had sent for them back, and I have doubted of it since ; but there is no occasion to suppose her ugly all over with hypocrisy. Poor little thing ! She has enough to answer for, as it is. I asked Betsey if she could carry a message for me, and she said " Yes." " Will you tell your sister, then, that I did not want all these books ; and L


146 TO J. S. K .

give my love to her, and say that I shall be obliged if she will still keep these that I have sent back, and tell her that it is only those of my own writing that I think un- worthy of her." What do you think the little imp made answer ? She raised herself on the other side of the table where she stood, as if inspired by the genius of the place, and said "AND THOSE ARE THK ONES

THAT SHE PRIZES THE MOST ! " If there

were ever words spoken that could revive the dead, those were the words. Let me kiss them, and forget that my ears have heard aught else ! I said, "Are you sure of that?" and she said, "Yes, quite sure." I told her, " If I could be, I should be very different from what I was." And I became so that instant, for these cas.ual words carried assurance to my heart of her esteem that once implied, I had proofs enough of her fondness. Oh ! how I felt at that moment ! Restored to love, hope, and joy, by a breath which I had caught by the merest accident, and which I might have pined in absence and mute despair for want of hearing! I


TO J. S. K . 147

did not know how to contain myself; I was childish, wanton, drunk with pleasure. I gave Betsey a twenty-shilling note which I happened to have in my hand, and on her asking " What's this for, Sir ? " I said, " It's for you. Don't you think it worth that to be made happy ? You once made me very wretched by some words I heard you drop, and now you have made me as happy ; and all I wish you is, when you grow up, that you may find some one to love you as well as I do your sister, and that you may love better than she does me !" I continued in this state of delirium or dotage all that day and the next, talked incessantly, laughed at every thing, and was so extravagant, nobody could tell what was the matter with me. I murmured her name ; I blest her ; I folded her to my heart in delicious fondness ; I called her by my own name ; I worshipped

her ; I was mad for her. I told P I

should laugh in her face, if ever she pre- tended not to like me again. Her mother came in and said, she hoped I should excuse Sarah's coming up. " Oh ! Ma'am," I said,


148 TO J. S. K .

" I have no wish to see her ; I feel her at my heart ; she does not hate me after all, and I wish for nothing. Let her come when she will, she is to me welcomer than light, than life ; but let it be in her own sweet time, and at her own dear pleasure." Betsey also told me she was "so glad to get the books back." I, however, sobered and wavered (by degrees) from seeing nothing of her, day after day; and in less than a week I was devoted to the Infernal Gods. I could hold out no longer than the Monday evening following. I sent a message to her; she sent an ambiguous answer ; but she came up. Pity me, my friend, for the shame of this recital. Pity me for the pain of having ever had to make it ! If the spirits of mortal creatures, purified by faith and hope, can (according to the highest assurances) ever, during thousands of years of smooth- rolling eternity and balmy, sainted repose, forget the pain, the toil, the anguish, the helplessness, and the despair they have suffered here, in this frail being, then may I forget that withering hour, and her, that fair,


TO J. S. K . 149

pale form that entered, my inhuman betrayer, and my only earthly love ! She said, " Did you wish to speak to me, Sir?" I said "Yes, may I not speak to you ? I wanted to see you and be friends." I rose up, offered her an arm-chair which stood facing, bowed on it, and knelt to her adoring. She said (going) "If that's all, I have nothing to say." I replied, " Why do you treat me thus ? What have I done to become thus hateful to you ?" Answer, " I always told you I had no affection for you." You may suppose this was a blow, after the imaginary honey- moon in which I had passed the preceding week. I was stunned by it ; my heart sunk within me. I contrived to say, " Nay, my dear girl, not always neither; for did you not once (if I might presume to look back to those happy, happy times) when you were sitting on my knee as usual, embracing and embraced, and I asked if you could not love me at last, did you not make answer, in the softest tones that ever man heard, ' / could easily say so, whether I did or not : you should judge by my actions ! ' Was I to blame in


150 TO J. S. K .

taking you at your word, when every hope I had depended on your sincerity ? And did you not say since I came back, l Your feel- ings to me were the same as ever ? ' Why then is your behaviour so different?" S. "Is it nothing, your exposing me to the whole house in the way you did the other evening ?" H. " Nay, that was the consequence of your cruel reception of me, not the cause of it. I had better have gone away last year, as I proposed to do, unless you would give some pledge of your fidelity ; but it was your own offer that I should remain. ' Why should I go ?' you said, * Why could we not go on the same as we had done, and say nothing about the word forever?' S. "And how did you behave when you returned ?" H. " That was all forgiven when we -last parted, and your last words were, * I should find you the same as ever ' when I came back ? Did you not that very day enchant and madden me over again by the purest kisses and embraces, and did I not go from you (as I said) ador- ing, confiding, with every assurance of mutual esteem and friendship ? " S. " Yes,


TO J. S. K . 151

and in your absence I found that you had told my aunt what had passed between us." H. " It was to induce her to extort your real sentiments from you, that you might no longer make a secret of your true regard for me, which your actions (but not your words) confessed." S. " I own I have been guilty of improprieties, which you have gone and repeated, not only in the house, but out of it ; so that it has come to my ears from various quarters, as if I was a light charac- ter. And I am determined in future to be guided by the advice of my relations, and particularly of my aunt, whom I consider as my best friend, and keep every lodger at a proper distance." You will find hereafter that her favourite lodger, whom she visits daily, had left the house ; so that she might easily make and keep this vow of extraordin- ary self-denial. Precious little dissembler ! Yet her aunt, her best friend, says, " No, Sir, no ; Sarah's no hypocrite !" which I was fool enough to believe ; and yet my great and unpardonable offence is to have enter- tained passing doubts on this delicate point.



152 TO J. S. K .

I said, Whatever errors I had committed, arose from my anxiety to have every thing explained to her honour ; my conduct shewed that I had that at heart, and that I built on the purity of her character as on a rock. My esteem for her amounted to adoration. " She did not want adoration." It was only when any thing happened to imply that I had been mistaken, that I committed any extravagance, because I could not bear to think her short of perfection. " She was far from perfection," she replied, with an air and manner (oh, my God !) as near it as possible. " How could she accuse me of a want of regard to her? It was but the other day, Sarah," I said to her, " when that little circumstance of the books happened, and I fancied the expressions your sister dropped proved the sincerity of all your kindness to me you don't know how my heart melted within me at the thought, that after all, I might be dear to you. New hopes sprung up in my heart, and I felt as Adam must have done when his Eve was created for him !" " She had heard enough of that


TO J. S. K . 153

sort of conversation," (moving towards the door). This, I own, was the unkindest cut of all. I had, in that case, no hopes what- ever. I felt that I had expended words in vain, and that the conversation below stairs which I told you of when I saw you) had spoiled her taste for mine. If the allusion had been classical I should have been to blame ; but it was scriptural, it was a sort of religious courtship, and Miss L. is religious !

At once he took his Muse and dipt her Right in the middle of the Scripture.

It would not do the lady could make neither head nor tail of it. This is a poor attempt at levity. Alas ! I am sad enough. " Would she go and leave me so ? If it was only my own behaviour, I still did not doubt of success. I knew the sincerity of my love, and she would be convinced of it in time. If that was all, I did not care : but tell me true, is there not a new attachment that is the real cause of your estrangement ? Tell me, my sweet friend, and before you tell me, give me your hand (nay, both hands) that I


iS4 T0 J- s. K .

may have something to support me under the dreadful conviction/' She let me take her hands in mine, saying, " She supposed there could be no objection to that," as if she acted on the suggestions of others, instead of following her own will but still avoided giving me any answer. I conjured her to tell me the worst, and kill me on the spot. Any thing was better than my present

state. I said, "Is it Mr. C ?" She

smiled, and said with gay indifference, " Mr.

C was here a very short time." "Well,

then, was it Mr. ?" She hesitated, and

then replied faintly, " No." This was a mere trick to mislead ; one of the profound- nesses of Satan, in which she is an adept. " But," she added hastily, " she could make no more confidences." "Then," said I, " you have something to communicate." " No ; but she had once mentioned a thing of the sort, which I had hinted to her mother, though it signified little." All this while I was in tortures. Every word, every half- denial, stabbed me. " Had she any tie ?" " No, I have no tie ?" " You are not


TO J. S. K . 155

going to be married soon ?" " I don't intend ever to marry at all !" " Can't you be friends with me as of old ?" "She could give no promises." " Would she make her own terms ?" " She would make none." " I was sadly afraid the little image was dethroned from her heart, as I had dashed it to the ground the other night." " She was neither desperate nor violent." I did not answer "But deliberate and deadly," though I might ; and so she vanished in this running fight of question and answer, in spite of my vain efforts to detain her. The cockatrice, I said, mocks me : so she has always done. The thought was a dagger to me. My head reeled, my heart recoiled within me. I was stung with scorpions ; my flesh crawled ; I was choked with rage ; her scorn scorched me like flames ; her air (her heavenly air) withdrawn from me, stifled me, and left me gasping for breath and being. It was a fable. She started up in her own likeness, a serpent in place of a woman. She had fascinated, she had stung me, and had returned to her proper shape,


156 TO J. S. K .

gliding from me after inflicting the mortal wound, and instilling deadly poison into every pore ; but her form lost none of its original brightness by the change of character, but was all glittering, beauteous, voluptuous grace. Seed of the serpent or of the woman, she was divine ! I felt that she was a witch, and had bewitched me. Fate had enclosed me round about. / was transformed too, no longer human (any more than she, to whom I had knit myself) my feelings were marble ; my blood was of molten lead ; my thoughts on fire. I was taken out of myself, wrapt into another sphere, far from the light of day, of hope, of love. I had no natural affection left ; she had slain me, but no other thing had power over me- Her arms embraced another ; but her mock- embrace, the phantom of her love, still bound me, and I had not a wish to escape. So I felt then, and so perhaps shall feel till I grow old and die, nor have any desire that my years should last longer than they are linked in the chain of those amorous folds, or than her enchantments steep my soul in


TO J. S. K . 157

oblivion of all other things ! I started to find myself alone for ever alone, without a creature to love me. I looked round the room for help ; I saw the tables, the chairs, the places where she stood or sat, empty, deserted, dead. I could not stay where I was ; I had no one to go to but to the parent-mischief, the preternatural hag, that had " drugged this posset " of her daughter's charms and falsehood for me, and I went down and (such was my weakness and helplessness) sat with her for an hour, and talked with her of her daughter, and the sweet days we had passed together, and said I thought her a good girl, and believed that if there was no rival, she still had a regard for me at the bottom of her heart ; and how I liked her all the better for her coy, maiden airs : and I received the assurance over and over that there was no one else ; and that Sarah (they all knew) never staid five minutes with any other lodger, while with me she would stay by the hour together, in spite of all her father could say to her (what were her motives, was best known to herself !) and


158 TO J. S. K .

while we were talking of her, she came bounding into the room, smiling with smoth- ered delight at the consummation of my folly and her own art; and I asked her mother whether she thought she looked as if she hated me, and I took her wrinkled, withered, cadaverous, clammy hand at parting, and kissed it. Faugh !

I will make an end of this story ; there is something in it discordant to honest ears. I left the house the next day, and returned to Scotland in a state so near to phrenzy, that I take it the shades sometimes ran into one

another. R met me the day after I

arrived, and will tell you the way I was in. I was like a person in a high fever ; only mine was in the mind instead of the body. It had the same irritating uncomfortable effect on the bye-standers. I was incapable of any application, and don't know what I should have done, had it not been for the

kindness of . I came to see you, to

" bestow some of my tediousness upon you," but you were gone from home. Every thing went on well as to the law-business ;


TO J. S. K . 159

and as it approached to a conclusion, I wrote

to my good friend P to go to M ,

who had married her sister, and ask him if it would be worth my while to make her a formal offer, as soon as I was free, as, with the least encouragement, I was ready to throw myself at her feet ; and to know, in case of refusal, whether I might go back there and be treated as an old friend. Not a word of answer could be got from her on either point, notwithstanding every impor- tunity and intreaty ; but it was the opinion

of M that I might go and try my fortune.

I did so with joy, with something like confidence. I thought her giving no positive answer implied a chance, at least, of the reversion of her favour, in case I behaved well. All was false, hollow, insidious. The first night after I got home, I slept on down. In Scotland, the flint had been my pillow. But now I slept under the same roof with her. What softness, what balmy repose in the very thought ! I saw her that same day and shook hands with her, and told her how glad I was to see her ; and she was kind


l6o TO J. S. K .

and comfortable, though still cold and distant. Her manner was altered from what it was the last time. She still absented herself from the room, but was mild and affable when she did come. She was pale, dejected, evidently uneasy about something, and had been ill. I thought it was perhaps her reluctance to yield to my wishes, her pity for what I suffered ; and that in the struggle between both, she did not know what to do. How I worshipped her at these moments ! We had a long interview the third day, and I thought all was doing well. I found her sitting at work in the window-seat of the front parlour ; and on my asking if I might come in, she made no objection. I sat down by her ; she let me take her hand ; I talked to her of indifferent things, and of old times. I asked her if she would put some new frills on my shirts ? " With the greatest pleasure." If she could get the littk image mended ? "It was broken in three pieces, and the sword was gone, but she would try." I then asked her to make up a plaid silk which I had given her in the


TO J. S. K . l6l

winter, and which she said would make a pretty summer gown. I so longed to see her in it ! " She had little time to spare, but perhaps might ! " Think what I felt, talking peaceably, kindly, tenderly with my love, not passionately, not violently. I tried to take pattern by her patient meekness, as I thought it, and to subdue my desires to her will. I then sued to her, but respectfully, to be admitted to her friendship she must know I was as true a friend as ever woman had or if there was a bar to our intimacy from a dearer attachment, to let me know it frankly, as I shewed her all my heart. She drew out her handkerchief and wiped her eyes " of tears which sacred pity had engendered there." Was it so or not ? I cannot tell. But so she stood (while I pleaded my cause to her with all the earnest- ness and fondness in the world) with the tears trickling from her eye-lashes, her head stooping, her attitude fixed, with the finest expression that ever was seen of mixed regret, pity, and stubborn resolution ; but without speaking a word, without altering M


1 62 TO J. S. K .

a feature. It was like a petrifaction of a human face in the softest moment of passion. "Ah!" I said, "how you look! I have prayed again and again while I was away from you, in the agony of my spirit, that I might but live to see you look so again, and then breathe my last !" I entreated her to give me some explanation. In vain ! At length she said she must go, and disappeared like a spirit. That week she did all the little trifling favours I had asked of her. The frills were put on, and she sent up to know if I wanted any more done. She got the Buonaparte mended. This was like healing old wounds indeed ! How ? As follows, for thereby hangs the conclusion of my tale. Listen.

I had sent a message one 'evening to speak to her about some special affairs of the house, and received no answer. I waited an hour expecting her, and then went out in great vexation at my disappointment. I complained to her mother a day or two after, saying I thought it so unlike Sarah's usual propriety of behaviour, that she must mean it as a mark


TO J. S. K . 163

of disrespect. Mrs. L said, " La ! Sir,

you're always fancying things. Why, she was dressing to go out, and she was only going to get the little image you're both so fond of mended ; and its to be done this evening. She has been to two or three places to see about it, before she could get any one to undertake it." My heart, my poor fond heart, almost melted within me at this news. I answered, " Ah ! Madam, that's always the way with the dear creature. I am finding fault with her and thinking the hardest things of her ; and at that very time she's doing something to shew the most delicate attention, and that she has no greater satisfaction than in gratifying my wishes !" On this we had some farther talk, and I took nearly the whole of the lodgings at a hundred guineas a year, that (as I said) she might have a little leisure to sit at her needle of an evening, or to read if she chose, or to walk out when it was fine. She was not in good health, and it would do her good to be less confined. I would be the drudge and she should no longer be the slave. I asked


164 TO J. S. K .

nothing in return. To see her happy, to make her so, was to be so myself. This was agreed to. I went over to Blackheath that evening, delighted as I could be after all I had suffered, and lay the whole of the next morning on the heath under the open sky, dreaming of my earthly Goddess. This was Sunday. That evening I returned, for I could hardly bear to be for a moment out of the house where she was, and the next morning she tapped at the door it was opened it was she she hesitated and then came forward : she had got the little image in her hand, I took it, and blest her from my heart. She said " They had been obliged to put some new pieces to it." I said "I didn't care how it was done, so that I had it restored to me safe, and by her." I thanked her and begged to shake hands with her. She did so, and as I held the only hand in the world that I never wished to let go, I looked up in her face, and said " Have pity on me, have pity on me, and save me if you can !" Not a word of answer, but she looked full in my eyes, as much as to say, " Well, I'll think


TO J. S. K . 165

of it ; and if I can, I will save you !" We talked about the expense of repairing the figure. "Was the man waiting?" " No, she had fetched it on Saturday evening." I said I'd give her the money in the course of the day, and then shook hands with her again in token of reconciliation ; and she went waving out of the room, but at the door turned round and looked full at me, as she did the first time she beguiled me of my heart. This was the last.

All that day I longed to go down stairs to ask her and her mother to set out with me for Scotland on Wednesday, and on Saturday I would make her my wife. Something withheld me. In the evening, however, I could not rest without seeing her, and I said to her younger sister, " Betsey, if Sarah will come up now, I'll pay her what she laid out for me the other day." " My sister's gone out, Sir," was the answer. What again ! thought I, That's somewhat sudden. I told

P her sitting in the window-seat of the

front parlour boded me no good. It was not in her old character. She did not use to


166 "TO j. s. K .

know there were doors or windows in the house and now she goes out three times in a week. It is to meet some one, I'll lay my life on't. "Where is she gone ? " "To my grandmother's, Sir." "Where does your grandmother live now ? " " At Somers' Town." I immediately set out to Somers' Town. I passed one or two streets, and at last turned up King-street, thinking it most likely she would return that way home. I passed a house in King-street where I had once . lived, and had not proceeded many paces, ruminating on chance and change and old times, when I saw her coming towards me. I felt a strange pang at the sight, but I thought her alone. Some people before me moved on, and I saw another person with her. The murder was out.' It was a tall, rather well-looking young man, but I did not at first recollect him. We passed at the crossing of the street without speaking. Will you believe it, after all that had passed between us for two years, after what had passed in the last half-year, after what had passed that very morning, she went


TO J S. K . 167

by me without even changing countenance, without expressing the slightest emotion, without betraying either shame or pity or remorse or any other feeling that any other human being but herself must have shewn in the same situation. She had no time to prepare for acting a part, to suppress her feelings the truth is, she has not one natural feeling in her bosom to suppress. I turned and looked they also turned and looked and as if by mutual consent, we both retrod our steps and passed again, in the same way. I went home. I was stifled. I could not stay in the house, walked into the street, and met them coming towards home. As soon as he had left her at the door (I fancy she had prevailed with him to accompany her, dreading some violence) I returned, went upstairs, and requested an interview. Tell her, I said, I'm in excellent temper and good spirits, but I must see her! She came smiling, and I said, " Come in, my dear girl, and sit down, and tell me all about it, how it is and who it is." " What," she said, " do you mean Mr.


1 68 TO J. S. K-


C ? Oh," said I, " then it is he ! Ah !

you rogue, I always suspected there was something between you, but you know you denied it lustily : why did you not tell me all about it at the time, instead of letting me suffer as I have done ? But however, no reproaches. I only wish it may all end happily and honourably for you, and I am satisfied. But," I said, " you know you used to tell me, you despised looks." "She didn't think Mr. C was so particularly hand- some." " No, but he's very well to pass, and a well-grown youth into the bargain." Pshaw ! let me put an end to the fulsome detail. I found he had lived over the way, that he had been lured thence, no doubt, almost a year before, that they had first spoken in the street, and that he had never once hinted at marriage, and had gone away, because (as he said) they were too much together, and that it was better for her to meet him occasionally out of doors. " There could be no harm in their walking together." " No, but you may go some where afterwards." " One must trust to




TO J. S. K . 169

one's principle for that." Consummate hypocrite ! * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

                • I told her Mr. M ,

who had married her sister, did not wish to leave the house. I, who would have married her, did not wish to leave it. I told her I hoped I should not live to see her come to shame, after all my love of her ; but put her on her guard as well as I could, and said, after the lengths she had permitted herself with me, I could not help being alarmed at the influence of one over her, whom she could hardly herself suppose to have a tenth part of my esteem for her ! ! She made no answer to this, but thanked me coldly for my good advice, and rose to go. I begged her to sit a few minutes, that I might try to recollect if there was any thing else I wished to say to her, perhaps for the last time ; and then, not finding any thing, I bade her good night, and asked for a fare- wel kiss. Do you know she refused ; so little does she understand what is due to friendship, or love, or honour ! We parted friends, however, and I felt deep grief, but


170 TO J. S. K .

no enmity against her. I thought C

had pressed his suit after I went, and had prevailed. There was no harm in that a little fickleness or so, a little over-pretension to unalterable attachment but that was all. She liked him better than me it was my hard hap, but I must bear it. I went out to roam the desart streets, when, turning a corner, whom should I meet but her very lover ? I went up to him and asked for a few minutes' conversation on a subject that was highly interesting to me and I believed not indifferent to him : and in the course of four hours' talk, it came out that for three months previous to my quitting London for Scotland, she had been playing the same game with him as with me that he breakfasted first, and enjoyed an hour of her society, and then I took my turn, so that we never jostled ; and this explained why, when he came back sometimes and passed my door, as she was sitting in my lap, she coloured violently, thinking, if her lover looked in, what a denouement there would be. He could not help again and


TO J. S. K . iyi

again expressing his astonishment at finding that our intimacy had continued unimpaired up to so Late a period after he came, and when they were on the most intimate foot- ing. She used to deny positively to him that there was any thing between us, just as she used to assure me with impenetrable

effrontery that " Mr. C was nothing to

her, but merely a lodger." All this while she kept up the- farce of her romantic attachment to her old lover, vowed that she never could alter in that respect, let me go to Scotland on the solemn and repeated assurance that there was no new flame, that there was no bar between us but this shadowy love I leave her on this under- standing, she becomes more fond or more intimate with her new lover ; he quitting the house (whether tired out or not, I can't say) in revenge she ceases to write to me, keeps me in wretched suspense, treats me like something loathsome to her when I return to enquire the cause, denies it with scorn and impudence, destroys me and shews no pity, no desire to soothe or shorten


172 TO J. S. K .

the pangs she has occasioned by her wantonness and hypocrisy, and wishes to linger the affair on to the last moment, going out to keep an appointment with another while she pretends to be obliging

me in the tenderest point (which C

himself said was too much) What do

you think of all this ? Shall I tell you my opinion ? But 1 must try to do it in another letter.



TO THE SAME (in Conclusion).

I did not sleep a wink all that night ; nor did I know till the next day the full meaning of what had happened to me. With the morning's light, conviction glared in upon me that I had not only lost her for ever but every feeling I had ever had towards her respect, tenderness, pity all but my fatal passion, was gone. The whole was a mockery, a frightful illusion. I had em- braced the false Florimel instead of the true ; or was like the man in the Arabian Nights who had married agouL How different was the idea I once had of her ! Was this she,

" Who had been beguiled she who was made Witnin a gentle bosom to be laid- To bless and to be blessed to be heart-bare To one who found his bettered likeness there


174 TO j. s. K .

To think for ever*with him, like a bride

To haunt his eye, like taste personified

To double his delight, to share his sorrow,

And like a morning beam, wake to him every morrow?"

I saw her pale, cold form glide silent by me, dead to shame as to pity. Still I seemed to clasp this piece of witchcraft to my bosom ; this lifeless image, which was all that was left of my love, was the only thing to which my sad heart clung. Were she dead, should I not wish to gaze once more upon her pallid features ? She is dead to me ; but what she once was to me, can never die ! The agony, the conflict of hope and fear, of adoration and jealousy is over ; or it would, ere long, have ended with my life. I am no more lifted now to Heaven, and then plunged in the abyss ; but I seem to have been thrown from the top of a precipice, and to lie groveling, stunned, and stupefied. I am melancholy, lonesome, and weaker than a child. The worst is, I have no prospect of any alteration for the better : she has cut off all possibility of a reconcilement at any


TO J. S. K . 175

future period. Were she even to return to her former pretended fondness and endear- ments, I could have no pleasure, no confi- dence in them. I can scarce make out the contradiction to myself. I strive to think she always was what I now know she is ; but I have great difficulty in it, and can hardly believe but she still is what she so long seemed, Poor thing ! I am afraid she is little better off herself ; nor do I see what is to become of her, unless she throws off the mask at once, and runs a-muck at infamy. She is exposed and laid bare to all those whose opinion she set a value upon. Yet she held her head very high, and must feel (if she feels any thing) proportionably morti- fied. A more complete experiment on character was never made. If I had not met her lover immediately after I parted with her, it would have been nothing. I might have supposed she had changed her mind in my absence, and had given him the preference as soon as she felt it, and even shewn her delicacy in declining any farther intimacy with me. But it comes out that


176 TO J. S. K .

she had gone on in the most forward and familiar way with both at once (she could not change her mind in passing from one room to another) tola both the same bare- faced and unblushing falsehoods, like the commonest creature ; received presents from me to the very last, and wished to keep up the game still longer, either to gratify her humour, her avarice, or her vanity in playing with my passion, or to have me as a dernier resort, in case of accidents. Again, it would have been nothing, if she had not come up with her demure, well-composed, wheedling looks that morning, and then met me in the evening in a situation, which (she believed) might kill me on the spot, with no more feeling than a common courtesan shews, who bilks a customer, and passes him, leer- ing up at her bully, the moment after. If there had been the frailty of passion, it would have been excusable ; but it is evident she is a practised, callous jilt, a regular lodging-house decoy, played off by her mother upon the lodgers, one after another, applying them to her different purposes,


TO J. S. K : . 177

laughing at them in turns, and herself the probable dupe and victim of some favourite gallant in the end. I know all this ; but what do I gain by it, unless I could find some one with her shape and air, to supply the place of the lovely apparition ? That a professed wanton should come and sit on a man's knee, and put her arms round his neck, and caress him, and seem fond of him, means nothing, proves nothing, no one concludes any thing from it ; but that a pretty, reserved, modest, delicate-looking girl should do this, from the first hour to the last of your being in the house, without intending any thing by it, is new, and, I think, worth explaining. It was, I confess, out of my calculation, and may be out of that of others. Her unmoved indifference and self-possession all the while, shew that it is her constant practice. Her look even, if closely examined, bears this interpretation. It is that of studied hypocrisy or startled guilt, rather than of refined sensibility or conscious innocence. " She defied any one to read her thoughts ? " she once told me.

N


178 TO J. S. K .

"Do they then require concealing?" I imprudently asked her. The command over herself is surprising. She never once betrays herself by any momentary forgetfulness, by any appearance of triumph or superiority to the person who is her dupe, by any levity of manner in the plenitude of her success ; it is one faultless, undeviating, consistent, consummate piece of acting. Were she a saint on earth, she could not seem more like one. Her hypocritical high-flown preten- sions, indeed, make her the worse : but still the ascendancy of her will, her determined perseverance in what she undertakes to do, has something admirable in it, approaching to the heroic. She is certainly an extra- ordinary girl ! Her retired manner, and invariable propriety of behaviour made me think it next to impossible she could grant the same favours indiscriminately to every one that she did to me. Yet this now appears to be the fact. She must have done the

very same with C , invited him into

the house to carry on a closer intrigue with her, and then commenced the double


TO J, S. K . 179

game with both together. She always " de- spised looks." This was a favourite phrase with her, and one of the hooks which she baited for me. Nothing could win her but a man's behaviour and sentiments. Besides, she could never like another she was a martyr to disappointed affection and friend- ship was all she could even extend to any other man. All the time, she was making signals, playing off her pretty person, and having occasional interviews in the street with this very man, whom she could only have taken so sudden and violent a liking to from his looks, his personal appearance, and what she probably conjectured of his circumstances. Her sister had married a

counsellor the Miss F 's, who kept the

house before, had done so too and so would she. "There was precedent for it." Yet if she was so desperately enamoured of this new acquaintance, if he had displaced the little image from her breast, if he was become her second " unalterable attachment " (which I would have given my life, to have been) why continue the same unwarrantable


l8o TO J. S. K .

familiarities with me to the last, and promise that they should be renewed on my return (if I had not unfortunately stumbled upon the truth to her aunt) and yet keep up the same refined cant about her old attachment all the time, as if it was that which stood in the way of my pretensions, and not her faithlessness to it ? " If one swerves from one, one shall swerve from another " was her excuse for not returning my regard. Yet that which I thought a prophecy, was I suspect a history. She had swerved twice from her vowed engagements, first to me, and then from me to another. If she made a fool of me, what did she make of her lover ? I fancy he has put that question to himself. I said nothing to him about the amount of the presents ; which is another damning circumstance, that might have opened my eyes long before ; but they were shut by my fond affection, which "turned all to favour and to prettiness." She cannot be supposed to have kept up an appearance of old regard to me, from a fear of hurting my feelings by her desertion ; for she not


TO J. S. K . l8l

only shewed herself indifferent to, but evidently triumphed in my sufferings, and heaped every kind of insult and indignity upon them. I must have incurred her contempt and resentment by my mistaken delicacy at different times ; and her manner, when I have hinted at becoming a reformed man in this respect, convinces me of it. " She hated it ! " She always hated whatever

she liked most. She "hated Mr. C 's

red slippers," when he first came ! One more count finishes the indictment. She not only discovered the most hardened indifference to the feelings of others ; she has not shewn the least regard to her own character, or shame when she was detected. When found out, she seemed to say, " Well, what if I am ? I have played the game as long as I could ; and if I could keep it up no longer, it was not for want of good will ! " Her colouring once or twice is the only sign of grace she has exhibited. Such is the creature on whom I had thrown away my heart and soul one who was incapable of feelinsr the commonest emotions of human


1 82 TO J. S. K .

nature, as they regarded herself or any one else. " She had no feelings with respect to herself," she often said. She in fact knows what she is, and recoils from the good opinion or sympathy of others, which she feels to be founded on a deception ; so that my overweening opinion of her must have appeared like irony, or direct insult. My seeing her in the street has gone a good way to satisfy me. Her manner there explains her manner in-doors to be conscious and overdone ; and besides, she looks but indifferently. She is diminutive in stature, and her measured step and timid air do not suit these public airings. I am afraid she will soon grow common to my imagination, as well as worthless in herself. Her image seems fast " going into the wastes of time," like a weed that the wave bears farther and farther from me. Alas ! thou poor hapless weed, when I entirely lose sight of thee, and forever, no flower will ever bloom on earth to glad my heart again !

THE END.


ERRATUM.

For Patmore's " My Friends and Acquaintances " read " My Friends and Acquaintance."


1 82 TO J. S. K .

nature, as they regarded herself or any one else. " She had no feelings with respect to herself," she often said. She in fact knows what she is, and recoils from the good opinion or sympathy of others, which she feels to be founded on a deception ; so that


seems last * gumg mtu LUC waoica ui tune, like a weed that the wave bears farther and farther from me. Alas ! thou poor hapless weed, when I entirely lose sight of thee, and forever, no flower will ever bloom on earth to glad my heart again !

THE END.


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