"That enduring personal attachment so beautifully delineated by Erin's sweet Melodist, and still more touchingly perhaps in the well-known ballad 'John Anderson my Jo John,' in addition to a depth and constancy of character of no every-day occurrence, supposes a peculiar sensibility and tenderness of nature, a constitutional communicativeness and utterance of heart and soul; a delight in the detail of sympathy, in the outward and visible signs of the sacrament within-to count, as it were, the pulses of the life of love. But, above all, it supposes a soul which even in the pride and summer-tide of life, even in the lustihood of health and strength, had felt oftenest and prized highest that which age cannot take away, and which in all our lovings is the love; I mean that willing sense of the unsufficingness of the self for itself, which predisposes a generous nature to see in the total being of another the supplement and completion of its own; that quiet, perpetual seeking which the presence of that beloved object modulates, not suspends; where the heart momently finds, and finding again seeks on; lastly, when 'life's changeful orb has passed the full,' a confirmed faith in the nobleness of humanity thus brought home and pressed as it were to the very bosom of hourly experience; it supposes, I say, a heart-felt reverence for worth, not

the less deep because divested of its solemnity by habit, by familiarity, by mutual infirmities, and even by a feeling of modesty which will arise in delicate minds when they are unconscious of possessing the same or the correspondent excellence in their own characters. In short, there must be a mind which, while it feels the beautiful and the excellent in the beloved as its own, and by the right of love appropriates it, can call goodness its playfellow; and dares make sport of time and infirmity while in the person of a thousandfoldly endeared partner we feel for aged virtue the caressing fondness that belongs to the innocence of childhood, and repeat the same attentions and tender courtesies which had been dictated by the same affection to the same object, when attired in feminine loveliness or in manly beauty."*

The term which best expresses the idea under which the writers in the early part of the last century expressed love, and indeed all the great emotions of the human soul, is conventionality. "One would like," says De Quincey,t "to see a searching investigation into the state of society in Anne's days—its

*Poetical Works, vol. ii. p. 120.

Essay on Schlosser's Literary History of the Eighteenth Century;' one of the best and most amusing of this great writer's essays.

extreme artificiality, its sheepish reserve upon all the impassioned grandeurs, its shameless outrages upon all the decencies of human nature. Certain it is that Addison (because everybody) was in the meanest of conditions which blushes at the very expression of sympathy with the lovely, the noble, or the impassioned. The wretches were ashamed of their own nature, and perhaps with reason; for in their own denaturalized hearts they read only a degraded nature. Addison, in particular, shrank from every bold and every profound expression as from an offence against good taste. He dared not for his life have used the word 'passion,' except in the vulgar sense of an angry paroxysm. He durst as soon have danced a hornpipe on the top of the 'monument' as have talked of 'rapturous emotion.' What would he have said? Why, 'sentiments that were of a nature to prove agreeable after an unusual rate.' In their odious verses the creatures of that age talk of love as something that' burns' them.* You suppose at first

*When a fellow-scholar brought to young Henry Brooke, the author of the 'Fool of Quality,' born in 1708, an Ode to the Moon, which broke off with the line

"Ah, why doth Phoebe love to shine by night?"

-the precocious boy immediately wrote under it"Because the sex look best by candle-light."

that they are discoursing of tallow-candles, though you cannot imagine by what impertinence they address you, that are not a tallow-chandler, upon such painful subjects. And when they apostrophize the woman of their heart (for you are to understand that they pretend to such an organ) they beseech her to ease their pain. Can human meanness descend lower? As if the man, being ill from pleurisy, had a right to take a lady for one of the dressers in a hospital, whose duty it would be to fix a burgundy pitch-plaster between his shoulders."

In an Essay in the 'Tatler' Steele says: "If a man of any delicacy were to attend the discourses of the young fellows of this age, he would believe that there were none but prostitutes to make the objects of passion. . . . But Cupid is not only blind at present, but dead drunk; he has lost all his faculties: else how could Clelia be so long a maid with that agreeable behavior? Corinna with that sprightly

Richardson mentioned in one of his letters to Edwards, a forgotten sonneteer, that Miss Highmore had set herself on fire, and scorched herself with the curling-irons. Upon which the poet, in answer, supposes that the accident must have happened, not from the heat of the irons, but from the love-verses she used as curling-papers; and that the blaze happening on the left side was extinguished by the prevalent force of the cold about her heart. Correspondence of Richardson,' vol. iii. 35, 37. Such was sentiment in those days.

wit? Lesbia with that heavenly voice?

And Sacharissa with all those excellences in one person, frequent the park, the play, and murder those poor tits that drag her to public places, and not a man turn pale at her appearance?" In one of her letters in Richardson's novel of 'Sir Charles Grandison,' Harriet Byron says: " And pray may I not ask if the taste of the age among men is not dress, equipage, and foppery? Is the cultivation of the mind any part of their study? The men in short are sunk, my dear, and the women but barely swim."

Admiration of the sex was shown not by deep and respectful homage, but by extravagance of conduct. It was the fashion to inscribe the names of reigning beauties on drinking-glasses with the point of a diamond.* Goldsmith tells us, in his 'Life of Beau Nash,' that in the days when his hero was young, a fellow would drink no wine but what was strained through his mistress's chemise (nasty beast!), and he would eat a pair of her shoes tossed upon a fricassee. This last feat was repeated in the middle of the century. In a paper of the Connoisseur,' by the Earl of Cork (1754), we are told that he was present at an entertainment where a celebrated fille de joie was one of the party, and her shoe was pulled off by a young

*Tatler,' No. 24.