Pendennis carry himself when he proposed to Laura, and did not want to be
accepted! Lord Farintosh--his affecting adventure is published
here--proposed nicely enough, but did not behave at all well when he was
rejected. By the way, when young men in novels are not accepted, they
invariably ask the lady whether she loves another. Only young ladies,
and young men whom they have rejected, know whether this is common in
real life. It does not seem quite right.

Kneeling has probably gone out, though Mr. Jingle knelt before the maiden
aunt, and remained in that attitude for no less than five minutes. In
Mr. Howell's "Modern Instance," kneeling was not necessary, and the
heroine kept thrusting her face into her lover's necktie; so the author
tells us. M. Theophile Gautier says that ladies invariably lay their
heads on the shoulder of the man who proposes (if he is the right man),
and for this piece of "business" (as we regret to say he considers it) he
assigns various motives. But he was a Frenchman, and the cynicism of
that nation (to parody a speech of Tom Jones's) cannot understand the
delicacy of ours. Mr. Blackmore (in "Lorna Doone") lets his lover make
quite a neat and appropriate speech, but that was in the seventeenth
century. When Artemus Ward began a harangue of this sort, Betsy Jane
knocked him off the fence on which he was sitting, and first criticising
his eloquence in a trenchant style, added, "If you mean being hitched,
I'm in it." In other respects the lover of Lorna Doone behaved as the
best authorities recommend.

Mr. Whyte Melville ventured to describe Chastelard's proposal to Mary
Stuart, but it was not exactly in Mr. Swinburne's manner, and, where
historical opinions disagree, no reliance can be placed on speeches which
were not taken down by the intelligent reporters. Mr. Slope had his ears
boxed when he proposed to Mrs. Bold, but such Amazonian conduct is