e_
stood at the altar in vestments white and candid as her thoughts, a
sacrificial whiteness, _they_ assisted in robes, such as might become
Diana's nymphs--Foresters indeed--as such who had not yet come to the
resolution of putting off cold virginity. These young maids, not being
so blest as to have a mother living, I am told, keep single for their
father's sake, and live altogether so happy with their remaining
parent, that the hearts of their lovers are ever broken with the
prospect (so inauspicious to their hopes) of such uninterrupted
and provoking home-comfort. Gallant girls! each a victim worthy of
Iphigenia!

I do not know what business I have to be present in solemn places. I
cannot divest me of an unseasonable disposition to levity upon the
most awful occasions. I was never cut out for a public functionary.
Ceremony and I have long shaken hands; but I could not resist the
importunities of the young lady's father, whose gout unhappily
confined him at home, to act as parent on this occasion, and _give
away the bride._ Something ludicrous occurred to me at this most
serious of all moments--a sense of my unfitness to have the disposal,
even in imagination, of the sweet young creature beside me. I fear I
was betrayed to some lightness, for the awful eye of the parson--and
the rector's eye of Saint Mildred's in the Poultry is no trifle of a
rebuke--was upon me in an instant, souring my incipient jest to the
tristful severities of a funeral.

This was the only misbehaviour which I can plead to upon this solemn
occasion, unless what was objected to me after the ceremony by one of
the handsome Miss T----s, be accounted a solecism. She was pleased to
say that she had never seen a gentleman before me give away a bride in
black. Now black has been my ordinary apparel so long--indeed I take
it to be the proper costume of an author--the stage sanctions it--that
to have appeared in some lighter colour would have raised more mirth
at my expense, than the anomaly had created censure. But I could
perceive that the bride's mother, and some elderly ladies present (God
bless them!) would have been well content, if I had come in any other
colour than that. But I got over the omen by a lucky apologue, which
I remembered out of Pilpay, or some Indian author, of all the birds
being invited to the linnets' wedding, at which, when all the rest
came in their gayest feathers, the raven alone apologised for his
cloak because "he had no