tant Lover,' 'The Discarded Son,'[101]

"'The Rose of Raby,'[102] 'Delmore,' or 'The Nun'[103]--
These promise something, and may please, perhaps,
Like 'Ethelinda'[104] and the dear 'Relapse.'[105]
To these her heart the gentle maid resigned
And such the food that fed the gentle mind."

But even the "delicate distress" of heroines, like Niobe, all
tears, palls at last, and Belinda, having wept her fill, craves
now for "sterner stuff."

"Yet tales of terror are her dear delight,
All in the wintry storm to read at night."

In _The Preceptor Husband_,[106] the pretty wife, whose notions
of botany are delightfully vague, and who, in English history,
light-heartedly confuses the Reformation and the Revolution, has
tastes similar to those of Belinda. Pursued by an instructive
husband, she turns at bay, and tells her priggish preceptor what
kind of books she really enjoys:

"Well, if I must, I will my studies name,
Blame if you please--I know you love to blame--
When all our childish books were set apart,
The first I read was 'Wanderings of the Heart.'[107]
It was a story where was done a deed
So dreadful that alone I feared to read.
The next was 'The Confessions of a Nun'--
'Twas quite a shame such evils should be done.
Nun of--no matter for the creature's name,
For there are girls no nunnery can tame.
Then was the story of the Haunted Hall,
When the huge picture nodded from the wall,

"When the old lord looked up with trembling dread,
And I grew pale and shuddered as I read.
Then came the tales of Winters, Summers, Springs
At Bath and Brighton--they were pretty things!
No ghosts or spectres there were heard or seen,
But all was love and flight to Gretna-green.
Perhaps your greater learning may despise
What others like--and there your wisdom lies."

To this attractive catalogue the preceptor husband, no doubt,
listened with the expression of Crabbe's _Old Bachelor_:

"that kind of cool, contemptuous smile
Of witty persons overcharged with bile,"

but she at least succeeds in interrupting his flow of information
for the time being. He retires routed. Crabbe's close
acquaintance with "the flowery pages of sublime distress," with
"vengeful monks who play unpriestly tricks," with banditti

"who, in forest wide
Or cavern vast, indignant virgins hide,"

was, as he confesses, a relic of those unregenerate days, when

"To the heroine's soul-d