the burlesque of love.

With the most strange submission these Englishwomen in their millions
undergo all degrees of derision from the tongues of men who are their
mates, equals, contemporaries, perhaps in some obscure sense their
suitors, and in a strolling manner, with one knows not what ungainly
motive of reserve, even their admirers. Nor from their tongues only;
for, to pass the time, the holiday swain annoys the girl; and if he wears
her hat, it is ten to one that he has plucked it off with a humorous
disregard of her dreadful pins.

We have to believe that unmocked love has existence in the streets,
because of the proof that is published when a man shoots a woman who has
rejected him; and from this also do we learn to believe that a woman of
the burlesque classes is able to reject. But for that sign we should
find little or nothing intelligible in what we see or overhear of the
drama of love in popular life.

In its easy moments, in its leisure, at holiday time, it baffles all
tradition, and shows us the spirit of comedy clowning after a fashion
that is insular and not merely civic. You hear the same twang in country
places; and whether the English maid, having, like the antique, thrown
her apple at her shepherd, run into the thickets of Hampstead Heath or
among sylvan trees, it seems that the most humorous thing to be done by
the swain would be, in the opinion in vogue, to stroll another way.
Insular I have said, because I have not seen the like of this fashion
whether in America or elsewhere in Europe.

But the chief inversion of all, proved summarily by the annual inversion
of the worship of images on the fifth of November, is that of a sentence
of Wordsworth's--"We live by admiration."

HAVE PATIENCE, LITTLE SAINT

Some considerable time must have gone by since any kind of courtesy
ceased, in England, to be held necessary in the course of communication
with a beggar. Feeling may be humane, and the interior act most gentle;
there may be a tacit apology, and a profound misgiving unexpressed; a
reluctance not only to refuse but to be arbiter; a dislike of the office;
a regret, whether for the unequal distribution of social luck or for a
purse left at home, equally sincere; howbeit custom exacts no word or
sign, nothing whatever of intercourse. If a dog or a cat accosts you, or
a calf in a field comes close to you with a candid infant face and
breathing nostrils of investigation, or if any kind