The conversation turning upon the incidents of the play and upon the characters, Fergus declared that the only one worth naming, as a man of fashion and spirit, was Mercutio.  ‘I could not,’ he said, ’quite follow all his old-fashioned wit, but he must have been a very pretty fellow, according to the ideas of his time.’

‘And it was a shame,’ said Ensign Maccombich, who usually followed his Colonel everywhere, ’for that Tibbert, or Taggart, or whatever was his name, to stick him under the other gentleman’s arm while he was redding the fray.’

The ladies, of course, declared loudly in favour of Romeo, but this opinion did not go undisputed.  The mistress of the house and several other ladies severely reprobated the levity with which the hero transfers his affections from Rosalind to Juliet.  Flora remained silent until her opinion was repeatedly requested, and then answered, she thought the circumstance objected to not only reconcilable to nature, but such as in the highest degree evinced the art of the poet.  ‘Romeo is described,’ said she, ’as a young man peculiarly susceptible of the softer passions; his love is at first fixed upon a woman who could afford it no return; this he repeatedly tells you,—­

    From love’s weak, childish bow she lives unharmed,

and again—­

    She hath forsworn to love.

Now, as it was impossible that Romeo’s love, supposing him a reasonable being, could continue to subsist without hope, the poet has, with great art, seized the moment when he was reduced actually to despair to throw in his way an object more accomplished than her by whom he had been rejected, and who is disposed to repay his attachment.  I can scarce conceive a situation more calculated to enhance the ardour of Romeo’s affection for Juliet than his being at once raised by her from the state of drooping melancholy in which he appears first upon the scene to the ecstatic state in which he exclaims—­

    —­come what sorrow can,
    It cannot countervail the exchange of joy
    That one short moment gives me in her sight.’

‘Good now, Miss Mac-Ivor,’ said a young lady of quality, ’do you mean to cheat us out of our prerogative? will you persuade us love cannot subsist without hope, or that the lover must become fickle if the lady is cruel?  O fie!  I did not expect such an unsentimental conclusion.’

‘A lover, my dear Lady Betty,’ said Flora, ’may, I conceive, persevere in his suit under very discouraging circumstances.  Affection can (now and then) withstand very severe storms of rigour, but not a long polar frost of downright indifference.  Don’t, even with your attractions, try the experiment upon any lover whose faith you value.  Love will subsist on wonderfully little hope, but not altogether without it.’

‘It will be just like Duncan Mac-Girdie’s mare,’ said Evan, ’if your ladyships please, he wanted to use her by degrees to live without meat, and just as he had put her on a straw a day the poor thing died!’