cy. Everybody admired her; everybody danced with her; but
no one proposed that was worth marrying.... Undismayed by forty or
fifty previous defeats, Glorvina laid siege to Major Dobbin. She
sang Irish melodies at him unceasingly. She asked him so frequently
and so pathetically 'Will you come to the bower,' that it is a
wonder how any man of feeling could have resisted the invitation.
She was never tired of inquiring if 'Sorrow had his young days
faded,' and was ready to listen and weep like Desdemona at the
stories of his dangers and campaigns. She was constantly writing
notes over to him at his house, borrowing his books, and scoring
with her great pencil marks such passages of sentiment or humour,
as awakened her sympathy. No wonder that public rumour assigned her
to him."

In the following, Thackeray is more severe--

"His wife never cared about being called Lady Newcome. To manage
the great house of Hobson brothers and Newcome, to attend to the
interests of the enslaved negro: to awaken the benighted Hottentot
to a sense of the truth; to convert Jews, Turks, Infidels, and
Papists; to arouse the indifferent and often blasphemous mariner;
to guide the washerwoman in the right way; to head all the public
charities of her sect, and do a thousand secret kindnesses that
none knew of; to answer myriads of letters, pension, endless
ministers, and supply their teeming wives with continuous
baby-linen, to hear preachers daily bawling for hours, and listen
untired on her knees, after a long day's labour, while florid
rhapsodists belaboured cushions above her with wearisome
benedictions; all these things had this woman to do, and for nearly
fourscore years she fought her fight womanfully."

This pious lady's residence was a "serious Paradise;"

"As you entered at the gate gravity fell on you; and decorum
wrapped you in a garment of starch. The butcher boy who galloped
his horse and cart madly about the adjoining lanes and commons,
whistled wild melodies (caught up in abominable play-house
galleries) and joked with a hundred cook-maids,--on passing that
lodge fell into an undertaker's pace, and delivered his joints and
sweetbreads silently at the servant's entrance. The rooks in the
elms cawed sermons at morning and evening: the peacocks walked
demurely