d is innocent; certainly it is innocent in design.
A fresher national song of a beautiful incident of our country life has
never been written. The sentiments are natural, the imagery is apt and
redolent of the soil, the music of the verse appeals to the dullest ear.
It has no smell of the lamp, nothing foreign and far-fetched about it,
but is just what it pretends to be, the carol of the native bird. A
sample will show, for the ballad is much too long to be given entire:

Sweet Susie she tripped on a shiny May morn,
As blithe as the lark from the green-springing corn,
When, hard by a stile, 'twas her luck to behold
A wonderful gentleman covered with gold!

There was gold on his breeches and gold on his coat,
His shirt-frill was grand as a fifty-pound note;
The diamonds glittered all up him so bright,
She thought him the Milky Way clothing a Sprite!

'Fear not, pretty maiden,' he said with a smile;
'And, pray, let me help you in crossing the stile.
She bobbed him a curtsey so lovely and smart,
It shot like an arrow and fixed in his heart.

As light as a robin she hopped to the stone,
But fast was her hand in the gentleman's own;
And guess how she stared, nor her senses could trust,
When this creamy gentleman knelt in the dust!

With a rhapsody upon her beauty, he informs her of his rank, for a
flourish to the proposal of honourable and immediate marriage. He
cannot wait. This is the fatal condition of his love: apparently a
characteristic of amorous dukes. We read them in the signs extended
to us. The minds of these august and solitary men have not yet been
sounded; they are too distant. Standing upon their lofty pinnacles, they
are as legible to the rabble below as a line of cuneiform writing in
a page of old copybook roundhand. By their deeds we know them, as
heathendom knows of its gods; and it is repeatedly on record that the
moment they have taken fire they must wed, though the lady's finger
be circled with nothing closer fitting than a ring of the bed-curtain.
Vainly, as becomes a candid country lass, blue-eyed Susan tells him that
she is but a poor dairymaid. He has been a student of women at Courts,
in which furnace the sex becomes a transparency, so he recounts to her
the 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 par