“Above a week has passed, and I have received no
letter—not one of those letters ‘in which I live, or have no life at
all.’ What is become of you? Are you married, hearing that I was
dead (for so it has been reported)? Or are you gone into a nunnery? Or are you
fallen in love with some of the amorous heroes of Boccaccio? Which of them is it? Is it with Chynon, who was transformed from a clown into a
lover, and learned to spell by the force of beauty? Or with Lorenzo, the lover of Isabella, whom her three brethren hated (as your brother does me), who was a merchant’s
clerk? Or with Federigo Alberigi, an honest
gentleman, who ran through his fortune, and won his mistress by cooking a fair
falcon for her dinner, though it was the only means he had left of getting a
dinner for himself? This last is the man; and I am the more persuaded of it,
because I think I won your good liking myself by giving you an entertainment—of
sausages, when I had no money to buy them with. Nay now, never deny it! Did not
I ask your consent that very night after, and did you not give it? Well, I
should be confoundedly jealous of those fine gallants, if I did not know that a
living dog is better than a dead lion: though, now I think of it,
Boccaccio does not in general make much of his lovers:
it is his women who are so delicious. I almost wish I had lived in those times,
and had been a little more amiable. Now if a woman had
written the book, it would not have had this effect upon
| 154 | MR. HAZLITT’S ONLY LOVE LETTER. |
“Thursday morning.—The book is come. When I saw it I thought that you had sent it back in a huff, tired out by my sauciness, and coldness, and delays, and were going to keep an account of dimities and sayes, or to salt pork and chronicle small beer as the dutiful wife of some fresh-looking, rural swain; so that you cannot think how surprised and pleased I was to find them all done. I liked your note as well or better than the extracts; it is just such a note as such a nice rogue as you ought to write after the provocation you had received. I would not give a pin for a girl ‘whose cheeks never tingle,’ nor for myself if I could not make them tingle sometimes. Now, though I am always writing to you about ‘lips and noses,’ and such sort of stuff, yet as I sit by my fireside (which I do generally eight or ten hours a day), I oftener think of you in a serious, sober light. For, indeed, I never love you so well as when I think of sitting down with you to dinner on a boiled scrag-end of mutton, and hot potatoes. You please my fancy more then than when I think of you
* This is the reference I meant. I suspect it was Miss Shepherd—Sally Shepherd, daughter of Dr. Shepherd of Gateacre. See above, p. 103.—W. C. H. |
| MR. HAZLITT’S ONLY LOVE LETTER. | 155 |
“Good-bye, little dear!
