 not actually
believe it, but only suspected it, or framed speech to account for the
transformation he had undergone into a desperately beseeching creature, having
lost acquaintance with his habitual personality, the operations of an impish
host had undoubtedly smitten his consciousness.
    He had them in his brain: for while burning with an ardour for Lætitia, that
incited him to frantic excesses of language and comportment, he was aware of
shouts of the names of Lady Busshe and Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, the which,
freezing him as they did, were directly the cause of his hurrying to a wilder
extravagance and more headlong determination to subdue before break of day the
woman he almost dreaded to behold by daylight, though he had now passionately
persuaded himself of his love of her. He could not, he felt, stand in the
daylight without her. She was his morning. She was, he raved, his predestinated
wife. He cried: »Darling!« both to her and to solitude. Every prescription of
his ideal of demeanour as an example to his class and country, was abandoned by
the enamoured gentleman. He had lost command of his countenance. He stooped so
far as to kneel, and not gracefully. Nay, it is in the chronicles of the
invisible host around him, that in a fit of supplication, upon a cry of
»Lætitia!« twice repeated, he whimpered.
    Let so much suffice. And indeed not without reason do the multitudes of the
servants of the Muse in this land of social policy avoid scenes of an inordinate
wantonness, which detract from the dignity of our leaders and menace human
nature with confusion. Sagacious are they who conduct the individual on broad
lines, over familiar tracks, under well-known characteristics. What men will do,
and amorously minded men will do, is less the question than what it is politic
that they should be shown to do.
    The night wore through. Lætitia was bent, but had not yielded. She had been
obliged to say - and how many times, she could not bear to recollect: »I do not
love you; I have no love to give«; and issuing from such a night to look again
upon the face of day, she scarcely felt that she was alive.
    The contest was renewed by her father with the singing of the birds. Mr.
Dale then produced the first serious impression she had received. He spoke of
their circumstances, of his being taken from her and leaving her to poverty, in
weak health; of the injury done to her health by writing for bread; and of the
oppressive weight he
