Adam Bede's proposal to Dinah was a very thoughtful, earnest proposal.
John Inglesant himself could not have been less like that victorious
rascal, Tom Jones. Colonel Jack, on the other hand, "used no great
ceremony." But Colonel Jack, like the woman of Samaria in the Scotch
minister's sermon, "had enjoyed a large and rich matrimonial experience,"
and went straight to the point, being married the very day of his
successful wooing. Some one in a story of Mr. Wilkie Collins's asks the
fatal question at a croquet party. At lawn-tennis, as Nimrod said long
ago, "the pace is too good to inquire" into matters of the affections. In
Sir Walter's golden prime, or rather in the Forty-five as Sir Walter
understood it, ladies were in no hurry, and could select elegant
expressions. Thus did Flora reply to Waverley, "I can but explain to you
with candour the feelings which I now entertain; how they might be
altered by a train of circumstances too favourable, perhaps, to be hoped
for, it were in vain even to conjecture; only be assured, Mr. Waverley,
that after my brother's honour and happiness, there is none which I shall
more sincerely pray for than yours." This love is indeed what Sidney
Smith heard the Scotch lady call "love in the abstract." Mr. Kingsley's
Tom Thurnall somehow proposed, was accepted, and was "converted" all at
once--a more complex erototheological performance was never heard of
before.

Many of Mr. Abell's thirty-five cases are selected from novelists of no
great mark; it would have been more instructive to examine only the
treatment of the great masters of romance. But, after all, this is of
little consequence. All day long and every day novelists are teaching
the "Art of Love," and playing Ovid to the time. But what are novels
without love? Mere waste paper, only fit to be reduced to pulp, and
restored to a whiteness and firmness on which more love lessons may be
written. {135}