enough, I warrant you. But somehow, though I then found it so much
easier to speak, I find it more difficult to recollect exactly what I
said. Is not that strange? And then she said that my happiness would
excite so much envy in the great world; that you had been admired,
courted, nay, even loved by rich, noble, clever ladies. Why was all
this? and how could you ever think to leave all these, to seek out from
her quiet home your poor little Lucy?"

"Oh, that's a story of by-gone days. These were follies of my youth,
which I thought I had lived to repent.

"'Nor knew, till seated by thy side,
My heart in all save hope the same.'"

"Why, save hope, my dear Lord? What may you not only hope, but trust,
from my constant devotion?"

"I did not mean to tie myself precisely to every word I uttered. It was
only a quotation."

"And what is a quotation?"

"A quotation is the vehicle in which imagination posts forward, when she
only hires her Pegasus from memory. Or sometimes it is only a quit-rent,
which the intellectual cultivator, who farms an idea, pays to the
original proprietor; or rather,"--(seeing that he was not making the
matter more intelligible by his explanation,)--"or rather, it is when we
convey our own thoughts by the means of the more perfect expressions of
some favourite author."