Mr. Rochester’s proposal to Jane Eyre should be read in the works both of Bret Harte and of Miss Bronte.  We own that we prefer Bret Harte’s Mr. Rawjester, who wearily ran the poker through his hair, and wiped his boots on the dress of his beloved.  Even in the original authority, Mr. Rochester conducted himself rather like a wild beast.  He “ground his teeth,” “he seemed to devour” Miss Eyre “with his flaming glance.”  Miss Eyre behaved with sense.  “I retired to the door.”  Proposals of this desperate and homicidal character are probably rare in real life, or, at least, out of lunatic asylums.  To be sure, Mr. Rochester’s house was a kind of lunatic asylum.

Adam Bede’s proposal to Dinah was a very thoughtful, earnest proposal.  John Inglesant himself could not have been less like that victorious rascal, Tom Jones.  Colonel Jack, on the other hand, “used no great ceremony.”  But Colonel Jack, like the woman of Samaria in the Scotch minister’s sermon, “had enjoyed a large and rich matrimonial experience,” and went straight to the point, being married the very day of his successful wooing.  Some one in a story of Mr. Wilkie Collins’s asks the fatal question at a croquet party.  At lawn-tennis, as Nimrod said long ago, “the pace is too good to inquire” into matters of the affections.  In Sir Walter’s golden prime, or rather in the Forty-five as Sir Walter understood it, ladies were in no hurry, and could select elegant expressions.  Thus did Flora reply to Waverley, “I can but explain to you with candour the feelings which I now entertain; how they might be altered by a train of circumstances too favourable, perhaps, to be hoped for, it were in vain even to conjecture; only be assured, Mr. Waverley, that after my brother’s honour and happiness, there is none which I shall more sincerely pray for than yours.”  This love is indeed what Sidney Smith heard the Scotch lady call “love in the abstract.”  Mr. Kingsley’s Tom Thurnall somehow proposed, was accepted, and was “converted” all at once—­a more complex erototheological performance was never heard of before.

Many of Mr. Abell’s thirty-five cases are selected from novelists of no great mark; it would have been more instructive to examine only the treatment of the great masters of romance.  But, after all, this is of little consequence.  All day long and every day novelists are teaching the “Art of Love,” and playing Ovid to the time.  But what are novels without love?  Mere waste paper, only fit to be reduced to pulp, and restored to a whiteness and firmness on which more love lessons may be written. {135}

MASTER SAMUEL PEPYS.