s that either the bond should be dissoluble, or that the subjects of
it should be sacramentally strengthened to maintain it. "So help me God,"
the formula of every oath, is emphatically necessary here.

But Agellius is contemplating a superhuman engagement without superhuman
assistance; and that in a state of society in which public opinion, which
in some sense compensates for the absence of religion, supplied human
motives, not for, but against keeping it, and with one who had given no
indication that she understood what marriage meant. No wonder then, that,
in spite of his simplicity, his sanguine temperament, and his delusion,
the more he thought of the step he had taken, the more unsatisfactory he
found it, and the nearer he grew to the time when he must open the subject
with Aristo, the less he felt able to do so. In consequence he was in a
distress of mind, as he ascended the staircase which led to his friend's
lodging, to which his anxiety, as he mounted the hill on the other side of
the city, was tranquillity itself; and, except that he was coming by
engagement, he would have turned back, and for the time at least have put
the whole subject from his thoughts. Yet even then, as often as Callista
rose in his mind's eye, his scruples and misgivings vanished before the
beauty of that image, as mists before the sun; and when he actually stood
in her sweet presence, it seemed as if some secret emanation from her
flowed in upon his heart, and he stood breathless and giddy under the
intensity of the fascination.

However, the reader must not suppose that in the third century of our era
such negotiations as that which now seems to be on the point of coming off
between Callista and Agellius, were embellished with those transcendental
sentiments and that magnificent ceremonial with which chivalry has
invested them in these latter ages. There was little occasion then for
fine speaking or exquisite deportment; and if there had been, we, who are
the narrators of these hitherto unrecorded transactions, should have been
utterly unable to do justice to them. At that time of day the Christian
had too much simplicity, the heathen too little of real delicacy, to
indulge in the sublimities of modern love-making, at least as it is found
in novels; and in the case before us both gentleman and lady will be
thought, we consider, sadly matter-of-fact, or rather semi-barbarous, by
the votaries of what is just now called European civilizati