Mr Gilfil's Love Story E-Book

George Eliot

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 259

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Caterina Sarti is the orphaned daughter of an Italian music master who has been brought up by the aristocratic Cheverel family. In love with the Cheverel heir, Anthony Wybrow, her hopes of marriage are frustrated by the discovery that not only has Anthony merely been playing with her affections, but his family will never accept her as their equal. Mr. Gilfil, the faithful vicar, rescues Caterina from her despair, but not before she has been irrevocably damaged by her unkind treatment. Published alongside Amos Barton as part of George Eliot's fictional debut, Mr. Gilfil's Love Story tells the story of Barton's predecessor as the vicar at Shepperton. A masterly evocation of tragic love, it also reflects Eliot's deep ambivalence towards the upper classes.

Leseprobe

MR GILFIL’S LOVE STORY

GEORGE ELIOT

FOREWORD BYKIRSTY GUNN

Hesperus Classics

Published by Hesperides Press Limited

167-169 Great Portland Street, London W1W 5FU

www.hesperus.press

First published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1857; published together with ‘Amos Barton’ and ‘Janet’s Repentance’ as Scenes of Clerical Life in 1858.

First published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2006

eBook edition published 2025

Foreword © Kirsty Gunn, 2006

ISBN: 1-84391-142-6

ISBN13: 978-184391-142-5

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-84391-334-4

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Kirsty Gunn

Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Epilogue

Notes

Biographical Note

Also by Hesperus

FOREWORD

KIRSTY GUNN

The fictional world of George Eliot is a deeply and richly domestic place. Described by community, social norms and familiar codes of behaviour, how distinctive, how appealing it is, how it satisfies. When we visit the sites of other novels of her period we see George Eliot’s stories are self-contained by comparison, using everything within them to create a multifunctioning and complex narrative. Where other books must reach out to the world of adventure, plot and intrigues that rely on outsiders and outside information to give them buzz and energy, Eliot’s are stories built on home ground. Here is the local village, the small town.

‘When old Mr Gilfil died’ begins the story we have here, ‘thirty years ago, there was general sorrow in Shepperton…’ Right from the beginning it’s clear that in Mr Gilfil’s Love Story we’re going to feel as familiar with the characters and the situation of a plot as a neighbour or friend might – Shepperton could be just down the road, ‘old Mr Gilfil’ sounds with affection and length of acquaintance.

Mr Gilfil’s Love Story is just that, a tale of the heart that unfolds in reverse – opening with a portrait of someone who you would have thought has always been a bachelor, Maynard Gilfil as an old man, kindly, generous, with pockets full of sweeties for the local children – and then going back into the past to relate his love for an Italian orphan who came to live and grow up in the house of his benefactor.

In so many ways the story, like the length of the book itself, is slight: Gilfil’s love is unrequited then met; the object of his affections has feelings for another man, these change. Yet the whole thing aches with human aspirations and hope – all the feelings of Eliot’s much longer books gathered up and beautifully contained here. In fact, it is the very compression of this book that makes it interesting in ways that are apart from the usual satisfactions of those other novels, Eliot pointing us, quite deliberately, I think, towards a way of reading that sums up situations fast and moves on, to show us that the domestic subject that is quietly present in all her books, behind the subtle details of those slower moving dramas, is in fact her overriding theme.

She does this by creating a story that seems to undermine itself, as though we are not meant to take the main narrative at face value at all. We notice it first in the straightforward appropriation of the love story as subject – there’s much in Mr Gilfil’s Love Story that can remind us of something like Bridget Jones’s Diary, bitchy, frank, funny in parts and quite hard to take seriously. Caterina, or Tina as she’s known, bares her feelings liberally, lets herself go. And all because she’s in love with someone who doesn’t love her. How modern this seems, the blatant preoccupation with self, how shallow – yet in fact there is something of the adolescent in most of the characters Eliot has created here: Sir Christopher, the kindly but pompous father figure, blithely proposing marriages as though they were the easiest contract in the world to negotiate and remaining blind to the reality of relationships as they really are; the affianced and priggish Miss Assher and her boring mother who ‘refreshed by a doze… was in great force for monologue’. There’s Wybrow, the caddish, jilting lover who takes long self-satisfied looks at himself in the mirror; there’s old faithful Bates the gardener, crouched by the fire in his gnomish home. None of them are meant to be thoroughly realistic, not in the way Eliot makes characters in her other books real. They are almost cartoon-like by comparison (their very names enough to suggest it), drawn as parts, not wholes. Sir Christopher appears more often than not as his shirt and waistcoat front, Wybrow as his continuous flop of soft hair. Our heroine is a ‘clever black-eyed monkey’, as her adoptive father calls her, or later a little tendril ‘put[ting] up her little mouth to be kissed’.

Only Maynard Gilfil himself resists this kind of description – and that’s because he’s barely described at all. His invisibility, to Tina, to her father, and to us the reader… This is the one element of the story that moves us, lifts us. For his love, too, is invisible. In the way she has centred the book around absence, a love not recognised, a character who seems invisible, George Eliot makes her story more modern than by simply creating a contemporary-feeling plot. It becomes modern in literary terms. In the end, Mr Gilfil’s Love Story, despite all its girlish preoccupations, resonates more with Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier than anything Helen Fielding may have fashioned.

So it’s complicated then, this compressed little story. And in addition to these complications – the told against the untold story, the garishness of the cartoon character set beside the quiet, effaced individual – Eliot extends herself further. For Mr Gilfil’s Love Story is also just plain weird. There’s a strange gothic element at work in the book that overcharges certain scenes with drama, lending a feverish, melodramatic atmosphere that seems at odds with the classic Englishness of the story. As a child in Italy playing next to her dying father’s bed, Tina’s ‘large dark eyes shone from out her queer little face, like two precious stones in a grotesque image carved in old ivory’; much later she lies tossing on her bed in England and the same dark, hectic mood persists. The measured domestic familiarity is freaked by these details and by strange twists in the plot: a lover found dead in a pile of leaves, a fiendish dagger taken from the wall. This is not to say that Eliot’s bigger novels don’t contain drama on a certain scale – but here, in the forced atmosphere of the short novel, it seems more extreme and strange. And how odd to have the author of tact and felicity, who leaves her other books all open to the reader’s subtlety of interpretation, here rushing about this way: ‘Her heart throbs as if it would burst her bosom – as if every next leap must be its last. Wait, wait, O heart! – till she has done this one deed.’

Yet again I would say it’s the concentrated nature of this particular book that gives Eliot a way of championing her larger literary ambitions, present in all her work but never as obvious as here: to portray the extraordinary fact of ordinary life, to show the rich variety that is present in the domestic subject. At the end of the day, Eliot is saying, like Chekhov, with whom she shares a method of setting the outlandish alongside the mundane, Life Goes On. Maynard Gilfil, dead thirty years at the beginning of this story, lived out his quiet existence with no one having any sense of the drama he was once witness to, the love he was once able to satisfy. Yet from that quietness George Eliot has made something that sounds long after we have finished reading: a love story that would have seemed to have been invisible to the world in the way ordinary life can so often seem to be invisible… Brought out here for all of us to see.

MR. GILFIL’S LOVE STORY

CHAPTERONE

When old Mr Gilfil died, thirty years ago, there was general sorrow in Shepperton, and if black cloth had not been hung round the pulpit and reading-desk, by order of his nephew and principal legatee, the parishioners would certainly have subscribed the necessary sum out of their own pockets, rather than allow such a tribute of respect to be wanting. All the farmers’ wives brought out their black bombazines, and Mrs Jennings, at the Wharf, by appearing the first Sunday after Mr Gilfil’s death in her salmon-coloured ribbons and green shawl, excited the severest remark. To be sure, Mrs Jennings was a newcomer, and town-bred, so that she could hardly be expected to have very clear notions of what was proper, but, as Mrs Higgins observed in an undertone to Mrs Parrot when they were coming out of church, ‘Her husband, who’d been born i’ the parish, might ha’ told her better.’ An unreadiness to put on black on all available occasions, or too great an alacrity in putting it off, argued, in Mrs Higgins’ opinion, a dangerous levity of character, and an unnatural insensibility to the essential fitness of things.

‘Some folks can’t a-bear to put off their colours,’ she remarked; ‘but that was never the way i’ my family. Why, Mrs Parrot, from the time I was married, till Mr Higgins died, nine years ago come Candlemas, I niver was out o’ black two year together!’

‘Ah,’ said Mrs Parrot, who was conscious of inferiority in this respect, ‘there isn’t many families as have had so many deaths as yours, Mrs Higgins.’

Mrs Higgins, who was an elderly widow, ‘well left’, reflected with complacency that Mrs Parrot’s observation was no more than just, and that Mrs Jennings very likely belonged to a family that had had no funerals to speak of.

Even dirty Dame Fripp, who was a very rare church-goer, had been to Mrs Hackit to beg a bit of old crape, and with this sign of grief pinned on her little coal-scuttle bonnet, was seen dropping her curtsy opposite the reading-desk. This manifestation of respect towards Mr Gilfil’s memory on the part of Dame Fripp had no theological bearing whatever. It was due to an event that had occurred some years back, and which, I am sorry to say, had left that grimy old lady as indifferent to the means of grace as ever. Dame Fripp kept leeches, and was understood to have such remarkable influence over those wilful animals in inducing them to bite under the most unpromising circumstances, that though her own leeches were usually rejected, from a suspicion that they had lost their appetite, she herself was constantly called in to apply the more lively individuals furnished from Mr Pilgrim’s surgery, when, as was very often the case, one of that clever man’s paying patients was attacked with inflammation. Thus Dame Fripp, in addition to ‘property’ supposed to yield her no less than half-a-crown a week, was in the receipt of professional fees, the gross amount of which was vaguely estimated by her neighbours as ‘pouns an’ pouns’. Moreover, she drove a brisk trade in lollipop with epicurean urchins, who recklessly purchased that luxury at the rate of two hundred per cent. Nevertheless, with all these notorious sources of income, the shameless old woman constantly pleaded poverty, and begged for scraps at Mrs Hackit’s, who, though she always said Mrs Fripp was ‘as false as two folks’, and no better than a miser and a heathen, had yet a leaning towards her as an old neighbour.

‘There’s that case-hardened old Judy a-coming after the tea leaves again,’ Mrs Hackit would say; ‘an’ I’m fool enough to give ’em her, though Sally wants ’em all the while to sweep the floors with!’

Such was Dame Fripp, whom Mr Gilfil, riding leisurely in top boots and spurs from doing duty at Knebley one warm Sunday afternoon, observed sitting in the dry ditch near her cottage, and by her side a large pig, who, with that ease and confidence belonging to perfect friendship, was lying with his head in her lap, and making no effort to play the agreeable beyond an occasional grunt.

‘Why, Mrs Fripp,’ said the vicar, ‘I didn’t know you had such a fine pig. You’ll have some rare flitches at Christmas!’

‘Eh, God forbid! My son gev him me two ’ear ago, an’ he’s been company to me iver sin’. I couldn’t find i’ my heart to part wi’m, if I niver knowed the taste o’ bacon-fat again.’

‘Why, he’ll eat his head off, and yours too. How can you go on keeping a pig, and making nothing by him?’

‘O, he picks a bit hisself wi’ rootin’, and I dooant mind doing wi’out to gi’ him summat. A bit o’ company’s meat an’ drink too, an’ he follers me about, and grunts when I spake to’m, just like a Christian.’

Mr Gilfil laughed, and I am obliged to admit that he said goodbye to Dame Fripp without asking her why she had not been to church, or making the slightest effort for her spiritual edification. But the next day he ordered his man David to take her a great piece of bacon, with a message, saying, the parson wanted to make sure that Mrs Fripp would know the taste of bacon-fat again. So, when Mr Gilfil died, Dame Fripp manifested her gratitude and reverence in the simply dingy fashion I have mentioned.

You already suspect that the vicar did not shine in the more spiritual functions of his office, and indeed, the utmost I can say for him in this respect is, that he performed those functions with undeviating attention to brevity and despatch. He had a large heap of short sermons, rather yellow and worn at the edges, from which he took two every Sunday, securing perfect impartiality in the selection by taking them as they came, without reference to topics, and having preached one of these sermons at Shepperton in the morning, he mounted his horse and rode hastily with the other in his pocket to Knebley, where he officiated in a wonderful little church, with a checkered pavement that had once rung to the iron tread of military monks, with coats of arms in clusters on the lofty roof, marble warriors and their wives without noses occupying a large proportion of the area, and the twelve apostles, with their heads very much on one side, holding didactic ribbons, painted in fresco on the walls. Here, in an absence of mind to which he was prone, Mr Gilfil would sometimes forget to take off his spurs before putting on his surplice, and only become aware of the omission by feeling something mysteriously tugging at the skirts of that garment as he stepped into the reading-desk. But the Knebley farmers would as soon have thought of criticising the moon as their pastor. He belonged to the course of nature, like markets and toll gates and dirty banknotes, and being a vicar, his claim on their veneration had never been counteracted by an exasperating claim on their pockets. Some of them, who did not indulge in the superfluity of a covered cart without springs, had dined half an hour earlier than usual – that is to say, at twelve o’clock – in order to have time for their long walk through miry lanes, and present themselves duly in their places at two o’clock, when Mr Oldinport and Lady Felicia, to whom Knebley Church was a sort of family temple, made their way among the bows and curtsies of their dependants to a carved and canopied pew in the chancel, diffusing as they went a delicate odour of Indian roses on the unsusceptible nostrils of the congregation.

The farmers’ wives and children sat on the dark oaken benches, but the husbands usually chose the distinctive dignity of a stall under one of the twelve apostles, where, when the alternation of prayers and responses had given place to the agreeable monotony of the sermon, Paterfamilias might be seen or heard sinking into a pleasant doze, from which he infallibly woke up at the sound of the concluding doxology. And then they made their way back again through the miry lanes, perhaps almost as much the better for this simple weekly tribute to what they knew of good and right, as many a more wakeful and critical congregation of the present day.

Mr Gilfil, too, used to make his way home in the later years of his life, for he had given up the habit of dining at Knebley Abbey on a Sunday, having, I am sorry to say, had a very bitter quarrel with Mr Oldinport, the cousin and predecessor of the Mr Oldinport who flourished in the Revd Amos Barton’s time. That quarrel was a sad pity, for the two had had many a good day’s hunting together when they were younger, and in those friendly times not a few members of the hunt envied Mr Oldinport the excellent terms he was on with his vicar, for, as Sir Jasper Sitwell observed, ‘next to a man’s wife, there’s nobody can be such an infernal plague to you as a parson, always under your nose on your own estate.’

I fancy the original difference which led to the rupture was very slight, but Mr Gilfil was of an extremely caustic turn, his satire having a flavour of originality that was quite wanting in his sermons; and as Mr Oldinport’s armour of conscious virtue presented some considerable and conspicuous gaps, the vicar’s keen-edged retorts probably made a few incisions too deep to be forgiven. Such, at least, was the view of the case presented by Mr Hackit, who knew as much of the matter as any third person. For, the very week after the quarrel, when presiding at the annual dinner of the Association for the Prosecution of Felons, held at the Oldinport Arms, he contributed an additional zest to the conviviality on that occasion by informing the company that ‘the parson had given the squire a lick with the rough side of his tongue’. The detection of the person or persons who had driven off Mr Parrot’s heifer, could hardly have been more welcome news to the Shepperton tenantry, with whom Mr Oldinport was in the worst odour as a landlord, having kept up his rents in spite of falling prices, and not being in the least stung to emulation by paragraphs in the provincial newspapers, stating that the Honourable Augustus Purwell, or Viscount Blethers, had made a return of ten per cent on their last rent-day. The fact was, Mr Oldinport had not the slightest intention of standing for Parliament, whereas he had the strongest intention of adding to his unentailed estate. Hence, to the Shepperton farmers it was as good as lemon with their grog to know that the vicar had thrown out sarcasms against the squire’s charities, as little better than those of the man who stole a goose, and gave away the giblets in alms. For Shepperton, you observe, was in a state of Attic culture compared with Knebley; it had turnpike roads and a public opinion, whereas, in the Boeotian Knebley,⁠1 men’s minds and waggons alike moved in the deepest of ruts, and the landlord was only grumbled at as a necessary and unalterable evil, like the weather, the weevils, and the turnip-fly.

Thus in Shepperton this breach with Mr Oldinport tended only to heighten that good understanding that the vicar had always enjoyed with the rest of his parishioners, from the generation whose children he had christened a quarter of a century before, down to that hopeful generation represented by little Tommy Bond, who had recently quitted frocks and trousers for the severe simplicity of a tight suit of corduroys, relieved by numerous brass buttons. Tommy was a saucy boy, impervious to all impressions of reverence, and excessively addicted to humming-tops and marbles, with which recreative resources he was in the habit of immoderately distending the pockets of his corduroys. One day, spinning his top on the garden-walk, and seeing the vicar advance directly towards it, at that exciting moment when it was beginning to ‘sleep’ magnificently, he shouted out with all the force of his lungs – ‘Stop! don’t knock my top down, now!’

From that day ‘little Corduroys’ had been an especial favourite with Mr Gilfil, who delighted to provoke his ready scorn and wonder by putting questions that gave Tommy the meanest opinion of his intellect.

‘Well, little Corduroys, have they milked the geese today?’

‘Milked the geese! why, they don’t milk the geese, you silly!’

‘No! dear heart! why, how do the goslings live, then?’

The nutriment of goslings rather transcending Tommy’s observations in natural history, he feigned to understand this question in an exclamatory rather than an interrogatory sense, and became absorbed in winding up his top.

‘Ah, I see you don’t know how the goslings live! But did you notice how it rained sugarplums yesterday?’ (Here Tommy became attentive.) ‘Why, they fell into my pocket as I rode along. You look in my pocket and see if they didn’t.’ Tommy, without waiting to discuss the alleged antecedent, lost no time in ascertaining the presence of the agreeable consequent, for he had a well-founded belief in the advantages of diving into the vicar’s pocket. Mr Gilfil called it his wonderful pocket, because, as he delighted to tell the ‘young shavers’ and ‘two-shoes’ – so he called all little boys and girls – whenever he put pennies into it, they turned into sugarplums or gingerbread, or some other nice thing. Indeed, little Bessie Parrot, a flaxen-headed ‘two-shoes’, very white and fat as to her neck, always had the admirable directness and sincerity to salute him with the question – ‘What zoo dot in zoo pottet?’

You can imagine, then, that the christening dinners were none the less merry for the presence of the parson. The farmers relished his society particularly, for he could not only smoke his pipe, and season the details of parish affairs with abundance of caustic jokes and proverbs, but, as Mr Bond often said, no man knew more than the vicar about the breed of cows and horses. He had grazing-land of his own about five miles off, which a bailiff, ostensibly a tenant, farmed under his direction, and to ride backwards and forwards, and look after the buying and selling of stock, was the old gentleman’s chief relaxation, now his hunting days were over. To hear him discussing the respective merits of the Devonshire breed and the shorthorns, or the last foolish decision of the magistrates about a pauper, a superficial observer might have seen little difference, beyond his superior shrewdness, between the vicar and his bucolic parishioners, for it was his habit to approximate his accent and mode of speech to theirs, doubtless because he thought it a mere frustration of the purposes of language to talk of ‘shear-hogs’⁠2 and ‘ewes’ to men who habitually said ‘sharrags’ and ‘yowes’. Nevertheless the farmers themselves were perfectly aware of the distinction between them and the parson, and had not at all the less belief in him as a gentleman and a clergyman for his easy speech and familiar manners. Mrs Parrot smoothed her apron and set her cap right with the utmost solicitude when she saw the vicar coming, made him her deepest curtsy, and every Christmas had a fat turkey ready to send him with her ‘duty’. And in the most gossiping colloquies with Mr Gilfil, you might have observed that both men and women ‘minded their words’, and never became indifferent to his approbation.

The same respect attended him in his strictly clerical functions. The benefits of baptism were supposed to be somehow bound up with Mr Gilfil’s personality, so metaphysical a distinction as that between a man and his office being, as yet, quite foreign to the mind of a good Shepperton Churchman, savouring, he would have thought, of Dissent on the very face of it. Miss Selina Parrot put off her marriage a whole month when Mr Gilfil had an attack of rheumatism, rather than be married in a makeshift manner by the Milby curate.

‘We’ve had a very good sermon this morning’, was the frequent remark, after hearing one of the old yellow series, heard with all the more satisfaction because it had been heard for the twentieth time, for to minds on the Shepperton level it is repetition, not novelty, that produces the strongest effect, and phrases, like tunes, are a long time making themselves at home in the brain.

Mr Gilfil’s sermons, as you may imagine, were not of a highly doctrinal, still less of a polemical, cast. They perhaps did not search the conscience very powerfully, for you remember that to Mrs Patten, who had listened to them thirty years, the announcement that she was a sinner appeared an uncivil heresy, but, on the other hand, they made no unreasonable demand on the Shepperton intellect – amounting, indeed, to little more than an expansion of the concise thesis, that those who do wrong will find it the worse for them, and those who do well will find it the better for them; the nature of wrongdoing being exposed in special sermons against lying, backbiting, anger, slothfulness, and the like; and welldoing being interpreted as honesty, truthfulness, charity, industry, and other common virtues, lying quite on the surface of life, and having very little to do with deep spiritual doctrine. Mrs Patten understood that if she turned out ill-crushed cheeses, a just retribution awaited her; though, I fear, she made no particular application of the sermon on backbiting. Mrs Hackit expressed herself greatly edified by the sermon on honesty, the allusion to the unjust weight and deceitful balance having a peculiar lucidity for her, owing to a recent dispute with her grocer, but I am not aware that she ever appeared to be much struck by the sermon on anger.

As to any suspicion that Mr Gilfil did not dispense the pure Gospel, or any strictures on his doctrine and mode of delivery, such thoughts never visited the minds of the Shepperton parishioners – of those very parishioners who, ten or fifteen years later, showed themselves extremely critical of Mr Barton’s discourses and demeanour. But in the interim they had tasted that dangerous fruit of the tree of knowledge – innovation that is well known to open the eyes, even in an uncomfortable manner. At present, to find fault with the sermon was regarded as almost equivalent to finding fault with religion itself. One Sunday, Mr Hackit’s nephew, Master Tom Stokes, a flippant town youth, greatly scandalised his excellent relatives by declaring that he could write as good a sermon as Mr Gilfil’s; whereupon Mr Hackit sought to reduce the presumptuous youth to utter confusion, by offering him a sovereign if he would fulfil his vaunt. The sermon was written, however, and though it was not admitted to be anywhere within reach of Mr Gilfil’s, it was yet so astonishingly like a sermon, having a text, three divisions, and a concluding exhortation beginning ‘And now, my brethren’, that the sovereign, though denied formally, was bestowed informally, and the sermon was pronounced, when Master Stokes’s back was turned, to be ‘an uncommon cliver thing’.

The Revd Mr Pickard, indeed, of the Independent Meeting, had stated, in a sermon preached at Rotheby, for the reduction of a debt on New Zion, built, with an exuberance of faith and a deficiency of funds, by seceders from the original Zion, that he lived in a parish where the vicar was very ‘dark’, and in the prayers he addressed to his own congregation, he was in the habit of comprehensively alluding to the parishioners outside the chapel walls, as those who, ‘Gallio-like, cared for none of these things’⁠3. But I need hardly say that no church-goer ever came within earshot of Mr Pickard.

It was not to the Shepperton farmers only that Mr Gilfil’s society was acceptable; he was a welcome guest at some of the best houses in that part of the country. Old Sir Jasper Sitwell would have been glad to see him every week, and if you had seen him conducting Lady Sitwell in to dinner, or had heard him talking to her with quaint yet graceful gallantry, you would have inferred that the earlier period of his life had been passed in more stately society than could be found in Shepperton, and that his slipshod chat and homely manners were but like weather-stains on a fine old block of marble, allowing you still to see here and there the fineness of the grain, and the delicacy of the original tint. But in his later years these visits became a little too troublesome to the old gentleman, and he was rarely to be found anywhere of an evening beyond the bounds of his own parish – most frequently, indeed, by the side of his own sitting-room fire, smoking his pipe, and maintaining the pleasing antithesis of dryness and moisture by an occasional sip of gin-and-water.

Here I am aware that I have run the risk of alienating all my refined lady-readers, and utterly annihilating any curiosity they may have felt to know the details of Mr Gilfil’s love story. ‘Gin-and-water! foh! you may as well ask us to interest ourselves in the romance of a tallow-chandler, who mingles the image of his beloved with short dips and moulds.’

But in the first place, dear ladies, allow me to plead that gin-and-water, like obesity, or baldness, or the gout, does not exclude a vast amount of antecedent romance, any more than the neatly executed ‘fronts’⁠4 that you may some day wear, will exclude your present possession of less expensive braids. Alas, alas! we poor mortals are often little better than wood-ashes – there is small sign of the sap, and the leafy freshness, and the bursting buds that were once there; but wherever we see wood-ashes, we know that all that early fullness of life must have been. I, at least, hardly ever look at a bent old man, or a wizened old woman, but I see also, with my mind’s eye, that Past of which they are the shrunken remnant, and the unfinished romance of rosy cheeks and bright eyes seems sometimes of feeble interest and significance, compared with that drama of hope and love that has long ago reached its catastrophe, and left the poor soul, like a dim and dusty stage, with all its sweet garden scenes and fair perspectives overturned and thrust out of sight.