h without, and equability was to be desired at the fireside
even at a sacrifice of deeper pleasures. So, from a wife, of all women,
he would not ask much. One letter to her which has come down to us is, I
had almost said, conspicuous for coldness.[95] He calls her, as he
called other female correspondents, "dearly beloved sister"; the epistle
is doctrinal, and nearly the half of it bears, not upon her own case,
but upon that of her mother. However, we know what Heine wrote in his
wife's album; and there is, after all, one passage that may be held to
intimate some tenderness, although even that admits of an amusingly
opposite construction. "I think," he says, "I _think_ this be the first
letter I ever wrote to you." This, if we are to take it literally, may
pair off with the "two _or three_ children" whom Montaigne mentions
having lost at nurse; the one is as eccentric in a lover as the other in
a parent. Nevertheless, he displayed more energy in the course of his
troubled wooing than might have been expected. The whole Bowes family,
angry enough already at the influence he had obtained over the mother,
set their faces obdurately against the match. And I daresay the
opposition quickened his inclination. I find him writing to Mrs. Bowes
that she need not further trouble herself about the marriage; it should
now be his business altogether; it behoved him now to jeopard his life
"for the comfort of his own flesh, both fear and friendship of all
earthly creatures laid aside."[96] This is a wonderfully chivalrous
utterance for a Reformer forty-eight years old; and it compares well
with the leaden coquetries of Calvin, not much over thirty, taking this
and that into consideration, weighing together dowries and religious
qualifications and the instancy of friends, and exhibiting what M.
Bungener calls "an honourable and Christian difficulty" of choice, in
frigid indecisions and insincere proposals. But Knox's next letter is in
a humbler tone; he has not found the negotiation so easy as he fancied;
he despairs of the marriage altogether, and talks of leaving
England,--regards not "what country consumes his wicked carcass." "You
shall understand," he says, "that this sixth of November, I spoke with
Sir Robert Bowes" (the head of the family, his bride's uncle) "in the
matter you know, according to your request; whose disdainful, yea,
despiteful, words hath so pierced my heart that my life is bitter to me.
I bear a good countenance w