The Tale of Chloe | Page 2

sidle an eye in a blowsy
cheek' in expectation of a coronet for her pains--and a wet ditch as the
result! We may doubt it to have been such an occasion of mischief. But
that mischief may have been done by it to a nobility- loving people,
even to the love of our nobility among the people, must be granted; and
for the particular reason, that the hero of the ballad behaved so
handsomely. We perceive a susceptibility to adulteration in their
worship at the sight of one of their number, a young maid, suddenly
snatched up to the gaping heights of Luxury and Fashion through sheer
good looks. Remembering that they are accustomed to a totally reverse
effect from that possession, it is very perceptible how a breach in their
reverence may come of the change.
Otherwise the ballad is innocent; certainly it is innocent in design. A
fresher national song of a beautiful incident of our country life has
never been written. The sentiments are natural, the imagery is apt and
redolent of the soil, the music of the verse appeals to the dullest ear. It
has no smell of the lamp, nothing foreign and far-fetched about it, but
is just what it pretends to be, the carol of the native bird. A sample will
show, for the ballad is much too long to be given entire:
Sweet Susie she tripped on a shiny May morn, As blithe as the lark
from the green-springing corn, When, hard by a stile, 'twas her luck to
behold A wonderful gentleman covered with gold!
There was gold on his breeches and gold on his coat, His shirt-frill was

grand as a fifty-pound note; The diamonds glittered all up him so bright,
She thought him the Milky Way clothing a Sprite!
'Fear not, pretty maiden,' he said with a smile; 'And, pray, let me help
you in crossing the stile. She bobbed him a curtsey so lovely and smart,
It shot like an arrow and fixed in his heart.
As light as a robin she hopped to the stone, But fast was her hand in the
gentleman's own; And guess how she stared, nor her senses could trust,
When this creamy gentleman knelt in the dust!
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