Kneeling has probably gone out, though Mr. Jingle knelt before the maiden aunt, and remained in that attitude for no less than five minutes.  In Mr. Howell’s “Modern Instance,” kneeling was not necessary, and the heroine kept thrusting her face into her lover’s necktie; so the author tells us.  M. Theophile Gautier says that ladies invariably lay their heads on the shoulder of the man who proposes (if he is the right man), and for this piece of “business” (as we regret to say he considers it) he assigns various motives.  But he was a Frenchman, and the cynicism of that nation (to parody a speech of Tom Jones’s) cannot understand the delicacy of ours.  Mr. Blackmore (in “Lorna Doone”) lets his lover make quite a neat and appropriate speech, but that was in the seventeenth century.  When Artemus Ward began a harangue of this sort, Betsy Jane knocked him off the fence on which he was sitting, and first criticising his eloquence in a trenchant style, added, “If you mean being hitched, I’m in it.”  In other respects the lover of Lorna Doone behaved as the best authorities recommend.

Mr. Whyte Melville ventured to describe Chastelard’s proposal to Mary Stuart, but it was not exactly in Mr. Swinburne’s manner, and, where historical opinions disagree, no reliance can be placed on speeches which were not taken down by the intelligent reporters.  Mr. Slope had his ears boxed when he proposed to Mrs. Bold, but such Amazonian conduct is probably rare, and neither party is apt to boast of it.  He also, being accepted, behaved in the manner to which the highest authorities have lent their sanction, or, at least, he meant to do so, when the lady “fled like a roe to her chamber.”  For all widows are not like widow Malone (ochone!) renowned in song.  When Arbaces, the magician, proposed to Ione, he did so in the most necromantic and hierophantic manner in which it could be done; his “properties” including a statue of Isis, an altar, “and a quick, blue, darting, irregular flame.”  But his flame, quick, blue, darting, and irregular as it was, lighted no answering blaze in the ice-cold breast of the lovely lone.  When rejected (in spite of a splendid arrangement of magic lanterns, then a novelty, got up regardless of expense) Arbaces swore like an intoxicated mariner, rather than a necromaunt accustomed to move in the highest circles and pentacles.  Nancy, Miss Broughton’s heroine, tells her middle-aged wooer, among other things, that she accepts him, because “I did think it would be nice for the boys; but I like you myself, besides.”  After this ardent confession, he “kissed her with a sort of diffidence.”  Many men would have preferred to go out and kick “the boys.”