sation between Angelica and Foresight in _Love for
Love_ is a receipt in full for all such overstrained nonsense: while he
is wandering among the signs of the zodiac, she is standing a-tiptoe on
the earth. It has been remarked that poets do not choose mistresses very
wisely. I believe it is not choice, but necessity. If they could throw
the handkerchief like the Grand Turk, I imagine we should see scarce
mortals, but rather goddesses, surrounding their steps, and each
exclaiming, with Lord Byron's own Ionian maid--

So shalt thou find me ever at thy side,
Here and hereafter, if the last may be!

Ah! no, these are bespoke, carried of by men of mortal, not of ethereal
mould, and thenceforth the poet from whose mind the ideas of love and
beauty are inseparable as dreams from sleep, goes on the forlorn hope of
the passion, and dresses up the first Dulcinea that will take compassion
on him in all the colours of fancy. What boots it to complain if the
delusion lasts for life, and the rainbow still paints its form in the
cloud?

There is one mistake I would wish, if possible, to correct. Men of
letters, artists, and others not succeeding with women in a certain rank
of life, think the objection is to their want of fortune, and that they
shall stand a better chance by descending lower, where only their
good qualities or talents will be thought of. Oh! worse and worse. The
objection is to themselves, not to their fortune--to their abstraction,
to their absence of mind, to their unintelligible and romantic notions.
Women of education may have a glimpse of their meaning, may get a clue
to their character, but to all others they are thick darkness. If the
mistress smiles at their ideal advances, the maid will laugh outright;
she will throw water over you, get her sister to listen, send her
sweetheart to ask you what you mean, will set the village or the house
upon your back; it will be a farce, a comedy, a standing jest for
a year, and then the murder will out. Scholars should be sworn
at Highgate. They are no match for chambermaids, or wenches at
lodging-houses. They had better try their hands on heiresses or ladies
of quality. These last have high notions of themselves that may fit some
of your epithets! They are above mortality; so are your thoughts!
But with low life, trick, ignorance, and cunning, you have nothing
in common. Whoever you are, that think you can make a compromise or
a conquest there by good nature or good s