emembering the
incidents themselves. But, so far as we have been able to collect
evidence, the general rule in any sudden catastrophe is that which we
have described. There is nothing but a dazzling flash of surprise, which
almost excludes any decided judgment as to the painfulness or otherwise
of the situation.

If, then, we may venture to conjecture the frame of mind in which a lady
or gentleman first enters upon an engagement, we should say that it was
this sense of startled suspense. They feel as Guy Faux would have felt
after lighting the train of gunpowder--that they have done something
which they may probably never repeat in their lifetime, and every other
emotion will be for the moment absorbed. But as engagements are
generally more protracted than most of the critical situations we have
mentioned, the surprise dies away, and the victims have time to look
about them, and analyze more closely the emotions produced by their
position. To do any justice to the complicated and varying frame of mind
into which even an average lover may be thrown in the course of a few
weeks would of course require the pen, not of men, but of angels. It
would involve a condensation of a large fraction of all the poetry that
has been written in the world, and no small part of the cynical
criticism by which it has been opposed. But, taking for granted the mass
of commonplaces which has been accumulated in the course of centuries,
there are a few special modifications of the position under our present
social arrangements which are more fitted for remark. The state of mind
known as being in love is confined to no particular race or period, but
the position of the engaged persons may vary indefinitely. In a good
simple state of society, the gentleman pays down his money or his sheep
or his oxen, and takes away the lady without any superfluous sentiment.
Even in more civilized states, a marriage may be substantially a bargain
carried out in a business-like spirit. However unsatisfactory such a
mode of proceeding may be from certain points of view, it is at any rate
intelligible; all parties to the contract understand their relative
positions, and have a plain line of conduct traced for them.

But in a modern English engagement the form is necessarily different,
even when the substance of the arrangement is identical. For once in
his experience a man feels called upon to accept that view of life for
which novelists are unjustly condemned. We