With a rhapsody upon her beauty, he informs her of his rank, for a flourish to the proposal of honourable and immediate marriage.  He cannot wait.  This is the fatal condition of his love:  apparently a characteristic of amorous dukes.  We read them in the signs extended to us.  The minds of these august and solitary men have not yet been sounded; they are too distant.  Standing upon their lofty pinnacles, they are as legible to the rabble below as a line of cuneiform writing in a page of old copybook roundhand.  By their deeds we know them, as heathendom knows of its gods; and it is repeatedly on record that the moment they have taken fire they must wed, though the lady’s finger be circled with nothing closer fitting than a ring of the bed-curtain.  Vainly, as becomes a candid country lass, blue-eyed Susan tells him that she is but a poor dairymaid.  He has been a student of women at Courts, in which furnace the sex becomes a transparency, so he recounts to her the catalogue of material advantages he has to offer.  Finally, after his assurances that she is to be married by the parson, really by the parson, and a real parson—­

     Sweet Susie is off for her parents’ consent,
     And long must the old folk debate what it meant. 
     She left them the eve of that happy May morn,
     To shine like the blossom that hangs from the thorn!

Apart from its historical value, the ballad is an example to poets of our day, who fly to mythological Greece, or a fanciful and morbid mediaevalism, or—­save the mark!—­abstract ideas, for themes of song, of what may be done to make our English life poetically interesting, if they would but pluck the treasures presented them by the wayside; and Nature being now as then the passport to popularity, they have themselves to thank for their little hold on the heart of the people.  A living native duke is worth fifty Phoebus Apollos to Englishmen, and a buxom young lass of the fields mounting from a pair of pails to the estate of duchess, a more romantic object than troops of your visionary Yseults and Guineveres.

CHAPTER II

A certain time after the marriage, his Grace alighted at the Wells, and did himself the honour to call on Mr. Beamish.  Addressing that gentleman, to whom he was no stranger, he communicated the purport of his visit.

‘Sir, and my very good friend,’ he said, ’first let me beg you to abate the severity of your countenance, for if I am here in breach of your prohibition, I shall presently depart in compliance with it.  I could indeed deplore the loss of the passion for play of which you effectually cured me.  I was then armed against a crueller, that allows of no interval for a man to make his vow to recover!’

‘The disease which is all crisis, I apprehend,’ Mr. Beamish remarked.

’Which, sir, when it takes hold of dry wood, burns to the last splinter.  It is now’—­the duke fetched a tender groan—­’three years ago that I had a caprice to marry a grandchild!’