A TRANSITIONAL CHAPTER, WHEREIN THE AUTHOR COMPARES HIS BOOK TO AN
OMNIBUS AND A SHIP, QUOTES SHAKESPEARE, MARCO ANTONIO DE CAMOS,
QUARLES, SPENSER, AND SOMEBODY ELSE, AND INTRODUCES HIS READERS TO
SOME OF THE HEATHEN GODS, WITH WHOM PERHAPS THEY WERE NOT ACQUAINTED
BEFORE.
We are not to grudge such interstitial and transitional matter as may
promote an easy connection of parts and an elastic separation of them,
and keep the reader's mind upon springs as it were.
HENRY TAYLOR'S Statesman.
Dear impatient readers,—you whom I know and who do not know me,—and
you who are equally impatient, but whom I cannot call equally dear,
because you are totally strangers to me in my out-of-cog
character,—you who would have had me hurry on
In motion of no less celerity
Than that of thought,—[1]
you will not wonder, nor perhaps will you blame me now, that I do not
hasten to the wedding day. The day on which Deborah left her father's
house was the saddest that she had ever known till then; nor was there
one of the bridal party who did not feel that this was the first of
those events, inevitable and mournful all, by which their little
circle would be lessened, and his or her manner of life or of
existence changed.
[Footnote 1: SHAKESPEARE.]
There is no checking the course of time. When the shadow on Hezekiah's
dial went back, it was in the symbol only that the miracle was
wrought: the minutes in every other horologe held their due course.
But as Opifex of this opus, I when it seems good unto me, may take the
hour-glass from Time's hand and let it rest at a stand-still, till I
think fit to turn it and set the sands again in motion. You who have
got into this my omnibus, know that like other omnibusses, its speed
is to be regulated not according to your individual and perhaps
contrariant wishes, but by my discretion.
Moreover I am not bound to ply with this omnibus only upon a certain
line. In that case there would be just cause of complaint, if you were
taken out of your road.
_Mas estorva y desabre en el camino
Una pequeña legua de desvio
Que la jornada larga de contino._
Whoever has at any time lost his way upon a long journey can bear
testimony to the truth of what the Reverend Padre Maestro Fray Marco
Antonio de Camos says in those lines. (I will tell you hereafter
reader (for it is worth telling), why that namesake of the Triumvir,
when he wrote the poem from whence the lines are quoted, had no
thoughts of dedicating it as he afterwards did to D. Juan Pimentel y
de Requesens.) But you are in no danger of being bewildered, or driven
out of your way. It is not in a stage coach that you have taken your
place with me, to be conveyed to a certain point, and within a certain
time, under such an expectation on your part, and such an engagement
on mine. We will drop the metaphor of the omnibus,—observing however
by the bye, which is the same thing in common parlance as by the way,
though critically there may seem to be a difference, for by the bye
might seem to denote a collateral remark and by the way a direct one;
observing however as I said, that as Dexter called his work, or St.
Jerome called it for him, _Omnimoda Historia_, so might this opus be
not improperly denominated. You have embarked with me not for a
definite voyage, but for an excursion on the water; and not in a
steamer, nor in a galley, nor in one of the post-office packets, nor
in a man-of-war, nor in a merchant-vessel; but in
A ship that's mann'd
With labouring Thoughts, and steer'd by Reason's hand.
My Will's the seaman's card whereby she sails;
My just Affections are the greater sails,
The top sail is my fancy.[2]
Sir Guyon was not safer in Phædria's “gondelay bedecked trim” than
thou art on “this wide inland sea,” in my ship
That knows her port and thither sails by aim;
Ne care, ne fear I how the wind do blow;
Or whether swift I wend, or whether slow,
Both slow and swift alike do serve my turn.[3]
My turn is served for the present, and yours also. The question who
was Mrs. Dove? propounded for future solution in the second Chapter
P. I., and for immediate consideration at the conclusion of the 71st
Chapter and the beginning of the 72nd, has been sufficiently answered.
You have been made acquainted with her birth, parentage and education;
and you may rest assured that if the Doctor had set out upon a tour,
like Cœlebs, in search of a wife, he could never have found one who
would in all respects have suited him better. What Shakespeare says of
the Dauphin and the Lady Blanch might seem to have been said with a
second sight of this union:
Such as she is
Is this our Doctor, every way complete;
If not complete, O say, he is not she:
And she again wants nothing, to name want,
If want it be not, that she is not he.
He is the half part of a blessed man,
Left to be finished by such a she;
And she a fair divided excellence
Whose fulness of perfection lies in him.
[Footnote 2: QUARLES: _mutatis mutandis_.]
[Footnote 3: SPENSER.]
You would wish me perhaps to describe her person. Sixty years had
“written their defeatures in her face” before I became acquainted with
her; yet by what those years had left methinks I could conceive what
she had been in her youth. Go to your looking glasses, young
ladies,—and you will not be so well able to imagine by what you see
there, how you will look when you shall have shaken hands with
Threescore.
One of the Elizabethan minor-poets, speaking of an ideal beauty says,
Into a slumber then I fell,
When fond Imagination
Seemed to see, but could not tell,
Her feature, or her fashion.
But even as babes in dreams do smile,
And sometimes fall a weeping,
So I awaked, as wise this while,
As when I fell a-sleeping.
Just as unable should I feel myself were I to attempt a description
from what Mrs. Dove was when I knew her, of what Deborah Bacon might
be supposed to have been,—just as unable as this dreaming rhymer
should I be, and you would be no whit the wiser. What the disposition
was which gave her face its permanent beauty you may know by what has
already been said. But this I can truly say of her and of her husband,
that if they had lived in the time of the Romans when Doncaster was
called Danum, and had been of what was then the Roman religion, and
had been married, as consequently they would have been, with the
rights of classical Paganism, it would have been believed both by
their neighbours and themselves that their nuptial offerings had been
benignly received by the god Domicius and the goddesses Maturna and
Gamelia; and no sacrifice to Viriplaca would ever have been thought
necessary in that household.