her on the penniless Sylvius, and when the latter began to court her in earnest, she rebuffed him.  She tore up his love-letters, she teased him by sending her black page to the window when he was ogling for her in the street below, she told him he was too young for her, and although she had no objection to his addressing verses to her, she gave him no serious encouragement.  She was to be married, he hints, to some one of her own rank—­some rich “country booby.”

At last, early in 1698, in company with the Duchess of Grafton, and possibly on the occasion of the second marriage of the latter, Amasia was taken off to France, and Hopkins never saw her again.  A year later he received news of her death, and his little romance was over.  He became ill, and Dr. Gibbons, the great fashionable physician of the day, was called in to attend him.  The third volume closes by his summoning the faithful and unupbraiding Martin back to his heart: 

  Love lives in Sun-Shine, or that Storm, Despair,
  But gentler Friendship Breathes a Mod’rate Air.

And so Sylvius, with all his galaxy of lovely Irish ladies, his fashionable Muses, and his trite and tortured fancy, disappears into thin air.

The only literary man whom he mentions as a friend is George Farquhar, himself a native of Londonderry, and about the same age as Hopkins.  This playwright seems to be sometimes alluded to as Daphnis, sometimes under his own name.  Before the performance of Love and a Bottle, Hopkins prophesied for the author a place where

  Congreve, Vanbrook, and Wicherley must sit,
  The great Triumvirate of Comick Wit,

and later on he thought that even Collier himself ought to commend the Constant Couple, or A Trip to the Jubilee.  At the first performance of this play, towards the close of 1699, Hopkins was greatly perturbed by the presence of a lady who reminded him of Amasia, and when he visited the theatre next he was less pleased with the play.  He had a vague and infelicitous scheme for turning Paradise Lost into rhyme.  These are the only traces of literary bias.  In other respects Hopkins is interested in nothing more serious than a lock of Amasia’s hair; the china cup she had, “round the sides of which were painted Trees, and at the bottom a Naked Woman Weeping;” her box of patches, in which she finds a silver penny; or the needlework embroidered on her gown.  When Amasia died there was no reason why Sylvius should continue to exist, and he fades out of our vision like a ghost.

LOVE AND BUSINESS

LOVE AND BUSINESS:  in a Collection of occasionary Verse and epistolary Prose not hitherto published.  By Mr. George Farquhar.  En Orenge il n’y a point d’oranges. London, printed for B. Lintott, at the Post-House, in the Middle Temple-Gate, Fleet Street. 1702.