In truth, it is a sight full of sad warning, that ever-recurring
spectacle of an engaged man (the lady is always provokingly at her ease)
in general society. His friends turn away in compassion and charity; the
girls, whom he ought to have married and--didn't, look on, exchanging
smiles with their mothers; it is their hour of savage triumph. The
French manage things more comfortably, I think. The promessi sposi meet
so seldom before the contract is signed--between sentence and execution
the time is so brief that there is little space for intermediate
terrors.

Nature had not been bountiful to Mr. Bruce in externals. He was very
tall, with round shoulders, long, lean limbs, large feet and hands, and
immense joints. There was a good deal of strength about him, but it
wanted concentration and arrangement. His features were rather
exaggerated and coarse in outline, with the high cheek-bones common on
the north side of the Tweed; his hair of an unhappy vacillating color
that could not make its mind up to be red; and his eyes, that rarely met
you fairly, of a light cold gray. About the mouth, in particular, there
was a very unpleasant expression, alternately vicious and cunning.

I do not believe that his intimates, if he had any, in their wildest
moments of conviviality, ever called him "Jack;" nor his mother, in his
earliest childhood, "Johnnie." Plain "John Bruce" was written
uncompromisingly in every line of his face; just the converse of
Forrester, whom old maids of rigid virtue, after seeing him twice, were
irresistibly impelled to speak of as "Charley."

I wish some profound psychologist would give us his theory on the
question of "The influence of nomenclature on disposition and destiny."
It is all very well to ask, "What's in a name?" I think there is a great