vian back (what a field for displaying to
mankind his royal scarlet!) whilst inspecting professionally the buckles,
the straps, and the silver turrets of his harness, than I raised Miss
Fanny's hand to my lips, and, by the mixed tenderness and respectfulness of
my manner, caused her easily to understand how happy it would have made
me to rank upon her list as No. 10 or 12, in which case a few casualties
amongst her lovers (and observe--they _hanged_ liberally in those days)
might have promoted me speedily to the top of the tree; as, on the other
hand, with how much loyalty of submission I acquiesced in her allotment,
supposing that she had seen reason to plant me in the very rearward of her
favor, as No. 199+1. It must not be supposed that I allowed any trace
of jest, or even of playfulness, to mingle with these expressions of my
admiration; that would have been insulting to her, and would have been
false as regarded my own feelings. In fact, the utter shadowyness of our
relations to each other, even after our meetings through seven or eight
years had been very numerous, but of necessity had been very brief, being
entirely on mail-coach allowance--timid, in reality, by the General
Post-Office--and watched by a crocodile belonging to the antepenultimate
generation, left it easy for me to do a thing which few people ever _can_
have done--viz., to make love for seven years, at the same time to be
as sincere as ever creature was, and yet never to compromise myself by
overtures that might have been foolish as regarded my own interests,
or misleading as regarded hers. Most truly I loved this beautiful and
ingenuous girl; and had it not been for the Bath and Bristol mail, heaven
only knows what might have come of it. People talk of being over head and
ears in love--now, the mail was the cause that I sank only over ears in
love, which, you know, still left a trifle of brain to overlook the whole
conduct of the affair. I have mentioned the case at all for the sake of
a dreadful result from it in after years of dreaming. But it seems, _ex
abundanti_, to yield this moral--viz., that as, in England, the idiot and
the half-wit are held to be under the guardianship of chancery, so the man
making love, who is often but a variety of the same imbecile class, ought
to be made a ward of the General Post-Office, whose severe course of
_timing_ and periodical interruption might intercept many a foolish
declaration, such as lays a solid foundat