She bobbed him a curtsey so lovely and smart,
It shot like an arrow and fixed in his heart.
As light as a robin she hopped to the stone,
But fast was her hand in the gentleman's own;
And guess how she stared, nor her senses could trust,
When this creamy gentleman knelt in the dust!
With a rhapsody upon her beauty, he informs her of his rank, for a
flourish to the proposal of honourable and immediate marriage. He cannot
wait. This is the fatal condition of his love: apparently a
characteristic of amorous dukes. We read them in the signs extended to
us. The minds of these august and solitary men have not yet been sounded;
they are too distant. Standing upon their lofty pinnacles, they are as
legible to the rabble below as a line of cuneiform writing in a page of
old copybook roundhand. By their deeds we know them, as heathendom knows
of its gods; and it is repeatedly on record that the moment they have
taken fire they must wed, though the lady's finger be circled with
nothing closer fitting than a ring of the bed-curtain.
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