catalogue of
material advantages he has to offer. Finally, after his assurances that
she is to be married by the parson, really by the parson, and a real
parson--

Sweet Susie is off for her parents' consent,
And long must the old folk debate what it meant.
She left them the eve of that happy May morn,
To shine like the blossom that hangs from the thorn!

Apart from its historical value, the ballad is an example to poets of our
day, who fly to mythological Greece, or a fanciful and morbid
mediaevalism, or--save the mark!--abstract ideas, for themes of song, of
what may be done to make our English life poetically interesting, if they
would but pluck the treasures presented them by the wayside; and Nature
being now as then the passport to popularity, they have themselves to
thank for their little hold on the heart of the people. A living native
duke is worth fifty Phoebus Apollos to Englishmen, and a buxom young lass
of the fields mounting from a pair of pails to the estate of duchess, a
more romantic object than troops of your visionary Yseults and
Guineveres.

CHAPTER II

A certain time after the marriage, his Grace alighted at the Wells, and
did himself the honour to call on Mr. Beamish. Addressing that gentleman,
to whom he was no stranger, he communicated the purport of his visit.

'Sir, and my very good friend,' he said, 'first let me beg you to abate
the severity of your countenance, for if I am here in breach of your
prohibition, I shall presently depart in compliance with it. I could
indeed deplore the loss of the passion for play of which you effectually
cured me. I was then armed against a crueller, that allows of no interval
for a man to make his vow to recover!'

'The disease which is all crisis, I apprehend,' Mr. Beamish remarked.

'Which, sir, when it takes hold of dry wood, burns to the last splinter.
It is now'--the duke fetched a tender groan--'three years ago that I had
a caprice to marry a grandchild!'

'Of Adam's,' Mr. Beamish said cheerfully. 'There was no legitimate bar to
the union.'

'Unhappily none. Yet you are not to suppose I regret it. A most admirable
creature, Mr. Beamish, a real divinity! And the better known, the more
adored. There is the misfortune. At my season of life, when the greater
and the minor organs are in a conspiracy to tell me I am mortal, the
passion of love must be welcomed as a calamity, though one would not be
free of it for the renewa