It had been fixed that the ceremony should be gone through at an early hour, to give time for a little dejeune afterwards, to which a select party of friends had been invited.  We were in church a little before the clock struck eight.

Nothing could be more judicious or graceful than the dress of the bride-maids—­the three charming Miss Foresters—­on this morning.  To give the bride an opportunity of shining singly, they had come habited all in green.  I am ill at describing female apparel; but, while she stood at the altar in vestments white and candid as her thoughts, a sacrificial whiteness, they assisted in robes, such as might become Diana’s nymphs—­Foresters indeed—­as such who had not yet come to the resolution of putting off cold virginity.  These young maids, not being so blest as to have a mother living, I am told, keep single for their father’s sake, and live altogether so happy with their remaining parent, that the hearts of their lovers are ever broken with the prospect (so inauspicious to their hopes) of such uninterrupted and provoking home-comfort.  Gallant girls! each a victim worthy of Iphigenia!

I do not know what business I have to be present in solemn places.  I cannot divest me of an unseasonable disposition to levity upon the most awful occasions.  I was never cut out for a public functionary.  Ceremony and I have long shaken hands; but I could not resist the importunities of the young lady’s father, whose gout unhappily confined him at home, to act as parent on this occasion, and give away the bride. Something ludicrous occurred to me at this most serious of all moments—­a sense of my unfitness to have the disposal, even in imagination, of the sweet young creature beside me.  I fear I was betrayed to some lightness, for the awful eye of the parson—­and the rector’s eye of Saint Mildred’s in the Poultry is no trifle of a rebuke—­was upon me in an instant, souring my incipient jest to the tristful severities of a funeral.

This was the only misbehaviour which I can plead to upon this solemn occasion, unless what was objected to me after the ceremony by one of the handsome Miss T——­s, be accounted a solecism.  She was pleased to say that she had never seen a gentleman before me give away a bride in black.  Now black has been my ordinary apparel so long—­indeed I take it to be the proper costume of an author—­the stage sanctions it—­that to have appeared in some lighter colour would have raised more mirth at my expense, than the anomaly had created censure.  But I could perceive that the bride’s mother, and some elderly ladies present (God bless them!) would have been well content, if I had come in any other colour than that.  But I got over the omen by a lucky apologue, which I remembered out of Pilpay, or some Indian author, of all the birds being invited to the linnets’ wedding, at which, when all the rest came in their gayest feathers, the raven alone apologised for his cloak because “he had no