Conversion.--Billet-Doux of the Watch.--Crape Hat.
In the morning Clotilda went off to her poplar-Island, and at noon
Victor departed to his Pontine marsh,--both contented with a separation
which made them worthy to enjoy a reunion. The first thing to which the
court-physician gave himself in Flachsenfingen was--afterthought, or
rather after-feeling. Man is the Iceland-spar of time, which shows all
scenes twice, side by side. Memory caught once more in her mirror the
moonshine of last night, and the angels which floated in it, and turned
the mirror with this lustre, with this perspective, towards my Victor.
He thought over Clotilda's past conduct, in which he--as I hope my
reader has--discovered the traits of the purest love, which looks with
only one eye out of the veil, together with the traces of a decided
mastery of woman's feelings over woman's wishes. She comes on the 1st
of May from Maienthal with a weeping heart, which, torn away from a
dead companion, still bleeds on from its open wounds.--The pupil of
Emanuel meets her, and she hastens back again to the grave, there to
quench in tears of mourning her first love.--But Emanuel communicates
his holy fire to this love by his own, by his praise of the beloved, by
his open letter full of germinating love, which the latter had written
to him on the birthday festival of the 4th of May.--She returns
unrestored, towards the time of his approaching departure.--But her
good Emanuel, with the cruel kindness of friendship, impresses the
image which makes her heart too uneasy still more deeply into its
wounds, by reporting to her Victor's life in Maienthal and his
confession that he loves her. Victor is silent before her, but she
thinks he is so because he has no permission from his father to speak
with her about Flamin's relationship.--He goes to court, and seems to
forget her, nay, he puts upon her the chains of the court office, which
nevertheless, as he knows, oppress her soul even to blood. Her parents,
either by way of sounding her, or of flattering her secret suitor
Matthieu with her female veiling of herself, extort from her by a
tyrannical question the unhappy No, which deceives her brother and
repels her friend. Victor steals away, on her festal evening, from the
garden, without speaking to her, thereupon visits her parents again,
and grows entirely cool. Now she hears nothing more of him excepting,
at most, of his pleasures at court and his visits to Joachime.----Ay,
thou good soul, thus, in conflict with wishes and with troubles, in
sick pining after the loved soul, must all thy joys go to sleep and thy
hopes die out, and thy innocent cheeks grow pale!----As, now, Victor
thus thought over this sad past, and remembered how, in the playhouse,
where he revealed to her his knowledge of her sisterly relation, the
last bloom of her cheek, the last twig of hope, fell off, because she
could regard his previous silence as owing to a command of his
father,--and as all these traits conspired to form the image of a
heavenly queen before whom it is easier to kneel down than to embrace
her,--and as he further reflected that this noble heart, improved by an
Emanuel and worthy of an Emanuel, nevertheless gave itself with all its
heavens to the fickle heart of the pupil----and that the good soul
could not have even this modest wish fulfilled, because fate delayed
the blossoming of her love like that of a rose-bush by transplanting
it, by setting it in the shade, by clipping the buds in _spring_ and
_autumn_,--and as he saw that nevertheless this noble one had gone off
to Maienthal with her finger on her lips, with her hand on her heavy
heart, without a hint of her bitter disappointment, and that moral
coldness _lifted up_ this flower, as physical cold does other flowers,
but tore from it thereby the roots of life,--and as, finally, his dream
on the third Easter-holiday, when it appeared to him as if he saw her
rise singing from the earth on a light veil of mist, passed by before
him like a great rain-cloud, and the dream with her faded hues paused
before his pining soul, and a voice out of the dream asked him, "Wilt
thou long continue to love her, when angels yearn for her and lift her
out of her sorrow, and leave thee nothing but the grave of the too long
misinterpreted heart?"----As all these thoughts, in glowing procession,
like mountain chains of ruddy evening clouds, moved around his soul,
then was his heart, like an altar, covered by a sacrificial fire
falling from heaven, and all his earthly desires, all his stains, were
consumed in this fire,--in short, he resolved to amend himself, in
order, by virtue, to be worthy of a virtuous woman.
He was converted on the 3d of April, 1793, towards evening; when the
moon--and the EARTH--were under his feet in the Nadir.
The reader may have laughed at this chronometer; but every man in whom
virtue is anything higher than an accidental _water-sucker_ and
wood-shoot, must be able to tell the hour wherein she became the
Hamadryad of his inner being,--which the theologians call conversion
and the Moravians the _breaking-through_. Why should not time mark off
our spiritual sensations, when in fact it is only they that mark off
its periods?
There is--or comes--in every man who is more solar than planetary, a
lofty hour when his heart, amidst violent commotions and painful
rendings, at last, by a lifting-up, suddenly turns round towards
virtue, in an indescribable transition like that in which man lifts
himself over from one system of faith to another, or, suddenly,
from the highest point of wrath to a melting forgiveness of all
faults;--that lofty hour, the birth-hour of the virtuous life, is also
its sweetest hour, because it is to man as if his oppressive body were
taken off from him; because he enjoys the bliss of feeling in himself
_no contradictions_; because all his chains fall; _because he fears
nothing more_ in the awfully sublime universe.--The spectacle is great,
when the angel is born in man; when, thereafter, on the horizon of
earth, the whole solar warmth of virtue falls upon his heart
unobstructed by a cloud.
But poor mortal man, the prisoner man, immersed in blood, encased in
flesh, soon feels the difference between his raptures and his powers;
he who was going to subdue the promised land, when its clusters of
grapes came to meet him, hesitates, when he has to march against its
giants (the passions). I do not, however, reject even the extravagance
of that enthusiasm; Man, like buildings, must be _screwed up into the
air_, in order to be _rebuilt_; a syllogism does not lead off the blood
streams of our desires. It is singular that the devil in us must have
alone the right to spend blood, nerves, beverage, passions, upon his
military operations and for his imperial treasury, but the angel
not....
So it is, however; men are vicious, because they look upon virtue as
too hard, and they again become so, because they held it easier than it
is. Not reason (i. e. conscience) makes us good: that is the
outstretched wooden arm on the road to virtue; but this arm can neither
draw nor drive us thither,--reason has the legislative, not the
executive force. The power of loving these commandments, the still
greater power of giving one's self up to them, is a second conscience
by the side of the first; and as Kant cannot indicate with ink that
which makes man bad, so neither can that be set forth which keeps his
heart upright above moral filth or lifts it out of it.
Who can explain the fact, if there are men who, from youth up, either
possess or do without a certain sense of honor,--in the female sex this
line of division is still sharper and more important,--if there are men
who, from youth up either experience or forever live without a certain
yearning for the super-earthly, for religion, for the nobler principle
in man (and for systems which seal this nobler quality instead of
disputing it)?----(With children a warm feeling for religion is often a
sign of genius.) Man does not become good (though he does grow better)
because he is converted, but he gets converted because he is good.
Were virtue nothing but stoicism, then it were a mere child of reason,
whereas it is at the highest her foster-daughter. Stoicism represents
virtue as so useful, so reasonable, that it is nothing more than a
conclusion; it gives one nothing to conquer but errors. As (according
to the stoical principle) it is, not the highest, but the only
good,--as, according to that principle, all desires aim at an empty
nothing--it follows that virtue is no merit, but a necessity. E. g. if
there is nothing odious: then love and the victory over anger towards
an enemy are not harder or more meritorious than towards a friend, but
all one.
What then has the Stoic to sacrifice to Virtue according to his notion,
but mock-goods, air-castles, and fever-images? Nevertheless Stoicism
renders Virtue, as criticism does genius, negative services; the
stoical _chill_ calls forth no spring, but it destroys the insects
which gnaw it; the stoical winter, like the physical, removes the
_pestilence_, ere the warmer months come, which bring new life....
Although Victor said: "Thou dear one, no heart can be pure, still,
tender, and great enough for thine, but the weak one which thou
endurest will sanctify itself through thine and come to thee improved";
still mere love was not the source of his virtue, but the reverse was
the case, only virtue could manifest itself by such a love. But even
without taking that into account, a half-selfish change of purpose
becomes by action a disinterested one, as the love which starts from
beauty of face ennobles itself at last into love for beauty of soul.
His separation from Clotilda gave him joy in the thought that so long
as it lasted he should spare the delusions of her jealous brother.
_General love_ now led the way to friendship for the better sort of
women, and tolerance toward the worse. He annulled his satirical
intolerance--which, however, was not half so great as that of young
wags of authors--by toleration-mandates of his own. He read Gulliver's
last journey into Horse-land (Houynheim), as a recipe against lying
when one goes to court. His Kubach[52] and jewel-casket and his
_collegium pietatis_ consisted of three dissimilar volumes,--Kant,
Jacobi, and Epictetus.
I could wish, however, that he would not make himself ridiculous. Of a
man who had been nine months at court, one was surely justified in
expecting that he would behave differently, and not offend against that
equality of ranks and of vices; as men practise sins best in common, as
in Swiss churches the hearers must cough simultaneously, or as recruits
on their march must make water at the same time. At least, the
well-bred man seeks to conceal his love for his religion, as well as
that for his wife.--I return to the story.
Victor determined now to make only visits that annoyed himself and
pleased his neighbor. The first was an extraordinary tribute of a visit
to the Princess (for his daily portioning-tax[53] of calls on her now
ceased). To be sure, the thick hour-watch of old Bee-father Lind was
every minute an alarm-clock to hold up before him his former foolhardy
jokes, his watch-enclosure, and love-letter to Agnola. I cannot avoid
the apprehension that the reader may make a slip, and not dream with
what heart Sebastian went to the Princess;--O, with one full of dumb
apologies and--exculpations, with a distended breast full of proud
confidence, and yet full of sympathetic mildness. Whence came this?--It
came from the fair soul which now, reconciled and filled up with
another's _love_, could wish nothing more but _friendship_, and which
was now too happy to be inexorable. But he found in her apartment two
cold, refined faces, which it is quite as hard to apologize to as to
forgive,--namely, her own and that of Count von O. from Kussewitz, in
whose house her transfer had taken place. Victor blushed; the Count
appeared not to have the least knowledge of him,--they were not
introduced to each other,--but talked together as genially as if they
had been (especially as it made no difference),--and so, with cold
feelings, and with the greatest indifference about their own and each
other's anonymousness, they politely separated. Only Victor afterward
worried himself with doubts whether he had not sooner than Agnola
called the unknown Count by that title.
For the rest, he now, for the first time since he had loved Clotilda,
found the partition-wall between _love_ and _friendship_ with women to
be very _visible_ and very _thick_: before that he could see through
the partition-wall well enough. A woman cannot choose for herself a
firmer or purer friend than another woman's lover.
Victor must now also, and for still more urgent reasons, visit
Joachime. The evil spirit, which, like the youngest councillors, always
gives its voice first in man, made the motion that "he should indulge
Joachime in the slight illusion of believing that he loved her."--As
this did not pass, the _filou_[54] took another voice, and proposed
that "he should punish her for her former ambiguity by the most
unambiguous signs of his hatred."--But he followed willingly the good
spirit which led him by the hand, and said on the way, "Go now to
her,--disengage thyself from her without giving her any pain,--let thy
hand glide gradually out of hers, and clear one finger after another,
as maidens do with their natural hand, and assume the attitude neither
of her enemy nor of her lover." He went to her house without any
selfish consideration; for the latter would rather have prompted him to
stay at home, and enjoy and turn over the leaves of the past and
future, or else to quit the house and go to St. Luna, to sit down by
Agatha beside the crape hat of Clotilda which she was studying.
In order, however, not to let his visit have too much weight in the
eyes of Joachime, he proposed to himself to beg of her for some weeks
the views of Maienthal, which hung in her room. O Maienthal, how much
thou must have, if the very sketch of thee makes one so happy!--But his
visit turned out singularly. He wished on the way that he might find in
her toilette-chamber the fine fool and the fragrant fool and more
stuff;--there was nothing there. She received him with a careless
gayety, as if she were the Columbine[55] and the Medicus the clown. He,
however, was going merely to execute the gradual weakening or
_diminuendo_ of his moral dissonances; therefore he became, by his
constant looking off at his note-stand, and at the score of his inner
harmony, somewhat stiff and awkward in his playing. Women easily
distinguish the coldness of reason (if only by the very want of
extravagance) from coldness of mood. Now he asked for the views.
Joachime did not grow cooler, but warm, i. e. serious, and lifted up
her watch in the hollow of her hand, and said, looking at it, "I give
you as many minutes' grace as you have stayed away days, to excuse your
staying away." Victor accepted without embarrassment--like every one
who acts only according to _one_, either good or bad, principle--the
allowed time for decision, and took the _montre à régulateur_ from
under the looking-glass, that Joachime might not cheat him. This cursed
watch of the Princess grinned at him everywhere, like a percussion-ball
and powder-mine under his feet. He wound it up just to have a chance to
open this Nuremberg egg (as they used to call watches), and finally for
once to examine whether the love-declaration, i. e. the _punctum
saliens_ of love, or the Cupid,--who also, according to Plato, came out
of an egg,--was still in there. "I know well enough--he said to
himself--it has been gone this long time, but I'll just try it."
There might have been, indeed, a question whether it was the same
watch, as the one in Tostato's shop had no diamonds,--had there not
come fluttering out from this Pandora's box, so soon as it was opened
at the window, a little thin piece of paper half as big as a
butterfly's wing, and as long as the stamen of a tulip.--The little
leaf took flight at every breath of wind.----Joachime caught the
thing,--read the thing,--found the declaration of love still
there,--took it for one which he was just making to _herself_, by way
of atoning for his absence, and which, for the sake of the wit (he
might allude to its heart-shape), he had been trying to incorporate
into the watch....
Every one can imagine how he felt about the matter.--He would have got
through it very well, if he had dared to lie terribly, or if he could
have ventured at least to imitate the few courtiers who, into the
twenty-eight pounds of blood which irrigate their bodies, have not
instilled twenty-eight drops of honest blood,--of which a single one
may, as a _liquor probatorius_, leave behind in the remaining mass
confounded precipitates. But his soul loathed this new bait to lure him
to a lie. The reader cannot possibly yet know that Victor shot aside
from the mark,--that is to say, that, on account of the remoteness of
Joachime's suspicion, he did not guess it at all, but fell upon the
nearer one, that Joachime had nosed out his whole whimsical trick upon
the Princess. He was never capable of holding up another's body as a
shield against the arrows which were aimed at his own,--a habit on the
Court-Moriah, which, not, like the Old Testament plan, redeems an
_Isaac_ with a _ram_, but a ram with an Isaac; he was to-day least of
all capable of sacrificing the Princess to save himself; but neither
could he bring himself even to _this_, to sacrifice Joachime for
the sake of saving _her_, i. e. to recoin the devil's-billet into a
sweet-billet (_billet-doux_) to Joachime. The Satan in him screamed
himself hoarse to get him only so far along, that he at least would lie
by silent expression of countenance, and justify hers, wherein there
began to be less and less appearance as if she supposed it directed to
another lady.
He told her right out plainly what he was,--a fool. He narrated the
whole business in Kussewitz. He concluded by saying that it was lucky
for him that the Princess had not at all detected the crazy insertion
into the watch.... As now he recited all this monotonously without a
single flattery, out of which some sort of a new and improved edition
of the insertion might possibly have been made, he was fortunate
enough, at his departure, to leave the enlightened Joachime in a state
which, after such magnetic passes, expresses itself with cultivated
women in a fine, proud _exaltation_, and with uncultivated ones in the
attempt to put the sculptor's last touch to a man, just as the Greek
artists did to their models,--namely, with the finger-nails. Victor
took his leave with two very different sorts of _views_, those of the
future and those of Maienthal.--
She kept the billet. Not fear, however, but the bitter feeling that his
former follies ended only in another's heart with an abortive hope,
this trickled with bitter drops into the sweet, rejuvenating sensation
of having acted right at his own expense. An emotion, a tear, is an
oath before Heaven that one will be good;---but a single sacrifice
steels thy soul more than five tears of penitence and ten penitential
sermons.
I have not the courage to guess why the Princess should have given the
watch with the enclosure which she (even by the showing of her
conversation with Tostato) must have read, into the hands of Joachime;
but to the suspicious knaves whom I thought of when writing the chapter
of her eye-bandaging and kiss, this is a windfall: the present of the
watch confirms them entirely in their knavish creed; for they can
now--despite all my efforts to the contrary--allege the gift as a sign
of the Italian revenge which Agnola had proposed to herself to take
upon her rival Joachime (to whom she must needs ascribe Victor's
resistance) in the fact of communicating to her his declarations of
love in other quarters.
Victor proposed to himself, as he took the greatest physical strides
homeward, to take similar politic ones, and to confess plumply to the
Prince: "It is not much over nine months since I troubled your
Illustrious Highness's bride with a flimsy declaration of love, which
she certainly cannot have ever read, and which now changes hands." But
at present the opening of the affair of the watch-letter was
impracticable: January was a little vexed at Clotilda's withdrawal;
Victor had also for some time been less about him than usual, which
certainly with an honest favorite ought not to be so, as, e. g., the
famous Count von Brühel[56] watched, like a mother, around his master
from morn to midnight. January seemed in this loneliness to think more
of his children, and Victor had no tidings to impart to him from his
Lordship. The main thing, moreover, was his spring sickliness, which
made him again the credulous disciple of Dr. Culpepper and the gout.
This doctor's trunk under a doctor's hat, whose brain-fibres were
twisted to bass-strings, extolled his simplicities, merely by the
solemn pomposity with which he delivered himself of them, beyond
their value; of certain persons, e. g. physicians, financiers,
economical-agents, even people of fine manners require stiff ones, and
make more account of a pointed wig than of a hair-bag as big as a
buckle or a Titus's-head.[57] Sebastian appeared to people much too
waggish to allow them to think that he had learned anything. In the
article of physicians--as in every main article of property or of
life--the most distinguished vulgar think as the lowest, and prize men
and lapdogs according to shaggy wildness of exterior. Besides, Victor
had the fault of bringing himself and the physicians under suspicion of
a thirst for glory, in that he praised them outright; e. g. "By their
impressment of sailors and dead men they were a sort of buyers-up of
souls for the next world, and served for nut-crackers to the good
angels, who desired the kernel without the bodily shell, in order to
transplant it. How often do we not obviate," he continued, "the most
dangerous _transfers of maladies_ by an easy _transfer_ of the patient?
I might appeal to the _refugiés_ from this world, whether our
sandbox and inkstand (the implements of our receipts) are not the
sowing-machine and waterpot of the winter-crop of humanity; but the
survivors shall speak and answer whether, for the benefices, the
regiments, the estates in fee, the order-ribbons, which fall to them,
they have not to thank our recipes and Uriah's-letters, and whether
they or even kings would sit _high and dry_, without our frequent
_ditching_ and draining in the churchyard.--And yet, methinks, our
renown in the way of healing and bringing to life is quite as great, if
not greater; this glory--as well as the lists of mortality on which it
is based--has remained for many centuries the _same_,--our theories,
specifics, judgments, may _change_ as they will."
Such satires made the Prince right merry and incredulous. Dr.
Culpepper, on the contrary, stood upon his dignity, and would have
drawn his sword against a satirist who had talked of the slow
decimation of physicians, and by a swifter one have completely refuted
him. I advise every one who wants to be anything in the world (that
is anything different from what he is) to appear among men as a
funeral-bidder,--with women, as a godfather-bidder.--The Prince in the
sickly spring held himself, for two reasons, to be possessed with the
gout again: first, because I have never yet known a nervous weakling
who, when I had talked a disease out of him in summer, did not the next
sickly winter get it into his head again; secondly, because January
calculated that he had fallen on his knee before ladies often enough to
feel the traces of his adoration still lingering in the shape of
_gonagra_ or knee-gout.
So stood matters, when a little accident made our Victor happy again.
Only I must say beforehand that, independently of that, he was not at
all unhappy: for a lover never worries himself about anything,
certainly not about a court; he has on Cupid's bandage, and willingly
forgives Fortune and Justice theirs. And the moral Easter-eve
bonfire melted--just as superstition ascribes to the physical one a
peculiar power--all the ice wherewith they dammed up Victor's blood
into the lymph of joy; the Easter-wind--which, according to the
weather-prophets, continues till Whitsuntide--set his old joy-flowers
in motion, and wafted forth from them the pollen of future ones; the
snow dissolved on the hot spring awaking from its winter sleep, and the
first flowers and the thousand buds gave all hearts energies and hopes
and love. O when Victor looked out of doors toward the green-growing
path which, with fresh sap-colors, (for in spring the foot-paths grow
green first,) would fain lure and lead him out of the midst of the
after-grass heath to the Eden of Maienthal,--and then when he turned
round glowing and thirsting, and ran over into the sketched Maienthal,
into the borrowed views, and there climbed every colored mountain, and
encircled every dotted-out garden with his fingers and fancies,--then
he did not think himself that a little accident could make him still
more joyous.--And yet it did.
It is not well done of me that I always--and it is a thing I have
become very much accustomed to in this biography--call that an
_accident_ which is a direct great-grandchild by blood of former
chapters, and which really must come. For the crape hat--that was the
accident--must indeed come, because it was bespoken. It was, however,
the--original itself. Besides, in so small a time no hat could have
been made by the nimblest master-builder of finery; and yet Sebastian
never would have thought, had not traces of powder and opened
lace-lattices compelled him, to distinguish the old hat from a new
one. In short, Clotilda had given it to Agatha, who could not conceal
from her for whom she was taking the copy, _before_ the _third_
Easter-holiday, for the purpose of letting her copy it, and _after_ the
aforesaid day had written to her to send her the copy and pass off the
original upon the Medicus for the imitation, (as in the case of the
wax-statue,)--and why, perhaps?--O, of that her friend had a sweet
consciousness; she was sorry that she could not give a shy, delicate
heart anything, not a sound, nor a glance, nor a joy, nor a
reminiscence of the fairest evening, except its mere autumnal
after-flora, mere silk-flowers sewed together in imitation of that
flower of joy, the taffeta shadow of a taffeta-shade.... No, she did
violence to herself, in order to give the mute darling at least more
than a copy of the shadow. O, if the loving, closed heart of a good
woman should open before a man, how much controlled tenderness, how
many veiled sacrifices and dumb virtues, would he see reposing therein!
--One must, at any rate, with the German Diet and its cross-benches;
make no mystery of the fact, that Victor would not accept the ninth
Electoral hat, or in fact the eighth and last, on condition of parting
with the _crape hat_.... What can the thickest, heaviest crowns, said
he, which have been exhibited to me in my travels, weigh in the one
scale,--even supposing one should throw in also several tiaras and
doges' caps with bows and papal hats,--if Clotilda's crape hat weighs
down the other? As the reader has quite as much intelligence as I, let
him decide the question.--This hat gave him an inexpressible longing
for Maienthal, and was to him a dedicatory copper-plate which (as by an
_investitura per pileum_) first presented Clotilda to him; he stood
before this crown as an heir to the crown--every minute drew his
coronation-chariot--with two big drops of joy, which the happy eye
could not hold, and said slowly, gently shaking his head: "No, kind
destiny gives me too much.--Ah, how can I deserve this soul from
heaven?--I will merely say to her, I am thine! and by and by, some
day, Thou art mine!" And when his fancy actually opened behind the
crape-latticework the two great eyes which had once concealed behind it
the tears of a rejected heart, and when he let the remote voice
discourse again out of shadowy threads behind this nunnery-grating,
then he could no longer restrain himself from writing,--so that he
might thus go to Maienthal,--as he sat opposite the hat, his first
letter to her, which I shall certainly get from the dog by to-morrow
evening's post.--
I believe I have not yet said that Agatha handed him the hat, and that
she invited him--it is now towards the end of April--to the birthday of
her father on the 4th of May. Victor thought on the melancholy 4th of
May of the year '92, and grew still more full of yearning for the
friend who was torn from him.
Before closing the chapter, I will only say to the younger Clotildas,
the Vice-Clotildas, the illegitimate Clotildas, and the
Counter-Clotildas, who have me and my chapters in their laps: Be cool.
You cannot possibly carry the coldness of virtue too far, unless you
absolutely set no limits to it. I will, on your account, dress up this
doctrine in wise sayings and witty sentences, that it may be the better
adapted to fans and albums.
Love, like the seed of the Auricula, must be sown on snow; both are
warmed through by ice itself, and then spring up so much the more
vigorously.--You must never give yourselves as a mere present, but as a
lady's acknowledgment of thanks to her knight.--You receive and deserve
exactly as much respect as you demand, and you can, though you should
be _alloyed_ as much as you pleased, take your mint-die or coin-stamp
out of your pocket and coin yourselves therewith as a _lady d'or_ for
one gentleman, or as a miserable little _fat-mannikin_[58] for
another.--A rake indicates in a company, like a measurer of the purity
of the air, by the different degrees of his boldness, the different
degrees of female merit, only in inverse relation....
Even if it did not belong to the female point of honor, one must still
desire, merely for the sake of having one trouble more,--because, my
sex thinks on this subject entirely with me, who desire a daughter from
no recruiting-house of sons-in-law, where at least the parents have not
something against me;--and let it hereby be known (therefore I do not
insert it in the newspaper) that I expect of parents, who in their
auction-room of daughters, in their love-inoculation-hospital, have one
or two subjects to dispose of, and to whom a Mining-Superintendent,
Justice, Music-Master, and Biographer--such may be my few offices--is
no too contemptible match,--that I [I repeat] expect of such parents,
that (if they mean the thing seriously) they will at least forbid me
the house or frequent correspondence:--that enlivens sons-in-law.