General Bounce; Or, The Lady and the Locusts. G. J. Whyte-Melville

mysterious charm, which makes fearful havoc in a young gentleman’s heart. There is nothing enslaves a boy so completely as a spice of romance. An elderly Strephon will go on his knees to a romping schoolgirl, and the more hoydenish and unsophisticated the object, the more will the old reprobate adore her; but beardless youth loves to own superiority where it worships, loves to invest its idol with the fabulous attributes that compose its own ideal; and of all the liaisons, honourable and otherwise, that have bound their votaries in silken fetters, those have been the most fatal, and the most invincible, which have dated their existence from an earnest boyish heart’s first devotion to a woman some years his senior, of whom the good-natured world says, “To be sure she is handsome, but Lor’! she’s old enough to be his mother!”

      Not that Charlie was as far gone as this: on the contrary, his was an imaginative poetical disposition, easily scorched enough, but almost incapable of being thoroughly done brown. Of such men, ladies, we would warn you to beware; the very temperament that clothes you in all the winning attributes of its own ideal can the most easily transfer those fancied attractions to a rival, inasmuch as the charm is not so much yours as his, exists not in your sweet face, but in his heated and inconstant brain. No, the real prize, depend upon it, is a sensible, phlegmatic, matter-of-fact gentleman, anything but “wax to receive,” yet if you can succeed in making an impression, most assuredly “marble to retain.” Such a captive clings to his affections as to his prejudices, and is properly subjected into a tame and willing Benedict in half the time it takes to guess at the intentions of the faithless rover, offering on a dozen shrines an adoration that, however brilliant, is