he flames----

_B._ Where your book would also be, by the disgusted reader--worse and
worse.

_A._ Confound it--you will not allow me to expose her to earth, air,
fire or water. I have a great mind to hang her in her garters, and make
the hero come and cut her down.

_B._ You might do worse--and better.

_A._ What--hang myself?

_B._ That certainly would put an end to all your difficulties. But,
Ansard, I think I can put your heroine in a situation really critical
and eminently distressing, and the hero shall come to her relief, like
the descent of a god to the rescue of a Greek or Trojan warrior.

_A._ Or of Bacchus to Ariadne in her distress.

_B._ Perhaps a better simile. The consequence will be, that eternal
gratitude in the bosom of the maiden will prove the parent of eternal
love, which eternity of passion will, of course, last until they are
married.

_A._ I'm all attention.

_B._ Get up a splendid dinner party for their first casual meeting.
Place the company at table.

_A._ Surely you are not going to choke her with the bone of a chicken.

_B._ You surely are about to murder me, as Samson did the
Philistines----

_A._ With the jaw-bone of a fashionable novel writer, you mean.

_B._ Exactly. But to proceed:--they are seated at table; can you
describe a grand dinner?

_A._ Certainly, I have partaken of more than one.

_B._ Where?

_A._ I once sat down three hundred strong at the Freemasons' Tavern.

_B._ Pshaw! a mere hog feed.

_A._ Well, then, I dined with the late lord mayor.

_B._ Still worse. My dear Ansard, it is however of no consequence.
Nothing is more difficult to attain, yet nothing is more easy to
describe, than a good dinner. I was once reading a very fashionable
novel by a very fashionable bookseller, for the author is a mere
nonentity, and was very much surprised at the accuracy with which a good
dinner was described. The mystery was explained a short time afterwards,
when casually taking up Eustache Eude's book in Sams's library, I found,
that the author had copied it out exactly from the injunctions of that
celebrated gastronome. You can borrow the book.

_A._ Well, we will suppose that done; but I am all anxiety to know what
is the danger from which the heroine is to be rescued.

_B._ I will explain. There are two species of existence--that of mere
mortal existence, which is of little consequence, provided, like Caesar,
the hero and heroine die decently: the other is