t too certainly pointed out that it was time
for these lovers to part. Romeo took his leave of his dear wife with a
heavy heart, promising to write to her from Mantua every hour in the
day; and when he had descended from her chamber-window, as he stood
below her on the ground, in that sad foreboding state of mind in which
she was, he appeared to her eyes as one dead in the bottom of a tomb.
Romeo's mind misgave him in like manner: but now he was forced hastily
to depart, for it was death for him to be found within the walls of
Verona after daybreak.

This was but the beginning of the tragedy of this pair of star-crossed
lovers. Romeo had not been gone many days, before the old Lord Capulet
proposed a match for Juliet. The husband he had chosen for her, not
dreaming that she was married already, was Count Paris, a gallant,
young, and noble gentleman, no unworthy suitor to the young Juliet, if
she had never seen Romeo.

The terrified Juliet was in a sad perplexity at her father's offer. She
pleaded her youth unsuitable to marriage, the recent death of Tybalt,
which had left her spirits too weak to meet a husband with any face of
joy, and how indecorous it would show for the family of the Capulets to
be celebrating a nuptial feast, when his funeral solemnities were hardly
over: she pleaded every reason against the match, but the true one,
namely, that she was married already. But Lord Capulet was deaf to all
her excuses, and in a peremptory manner ordered her to get ready, for by
the following Thursday she should be married to Paris: and having found
her a husband, rich, young, and noble, such as the proudest maid in
Verona might joyfully accept, he could not bear that out of an affected
coyness, as he construed her denial, she should oppose obstacles to her
own good fortune.

In this extremity Juliet applied to the friendly friar, always her
counsellor in distress, and he asking her if she had resolution to
undertake a desperate remedy, and she answering that she would go into
the grave alive rather than marry Paris, her own dear husband living; he
directed her to go home, and appear merry, and give her consent to marry
Paris, according to her father's desire, and on the next night, which
was the night before the marriage, to drink off the contents of a phial
which he then gave her, the effect of which would be that for
two-and-forty hours after drinking it she should appear cold and
lifeless; and when the bridegroom c