marriage, may have been anointed in mortality. But in his later life as was Wordsworth-he was a paragon of propriety, and he must be acquitted of indiscretion until more damning facts are mustered to accuse him. All surviving evidence presents him as a model of rigid decorum. In so far as he has revealed himself, all but the most restrained and well-behaved and standardised emotions fell within the forbidden degrees. It is certain that no flower ever gave him thoughts too deep for tears.

His courtship seems to have been a model of discretion, and might well have been modelled after Mrs. Hannah More's Coelebs in Search of a Wife. There survive two gifts that he made while he was meditating on the serious verge of matrimony. A year before his marriage he bought, fresh from the press, a copy of The Pleasures of Imagination by Mark Akenside, M.D., with a critical essay on the poem, by Mrs. Barbauld, prefixed. Whether either Allan or Maria ever read a line of Dr. Akenside we do not know: Maria's copy, it must be confessed, is suspiciously well-preserved. But Allan had the authority of Coelebs that "the condensed vigour, so indispensable to blank verse, the skilful variation of the pause, the masterly structure of the period, and all the occult mysteries of the art, can, perhaps, be best learned from Akenside." That the poet's object was "to establish the infinite superiority of mind over unconscious matter, even in its fairest terms," gave Allan opportunity to pay Maria a veiled compliment.

This same Anna Letitia Barbauld, whose introductory essay gave the final stamp of respectability to Dr. Akenside, had, in a chapter of advice to young girls, earlier remarked, and with best-intentioned seriousness, that "An ass is much better adapted than a horse to show off a lady." It may be so. In any event, Allan inscribed on the fly-leaf of Dr. Akenside's effusion:

MISS MARIA GANSEVOORT

FROM HER FRIEND

A. M.

The emotions that smouldered beneath this chaste inscription he vented, and with no compromise to himself, in a tropical tangle of copy-book flourishes that he made below his initials.

The second gift is also a book-Mrs. Chapone's Letters on the Improvement of the Mind. Lydia Languish, it is true, had, on a memorable occasion, with unblushing deceit, placed Mrs. Chapone and the reverend Fordyce ostentatiously on a table together. But it is certain that Allan was not consciously furnishing Miss Gansevoort with any of the stage-properties of hypocrisy. Mrs. Chapone's pronouncements were then being accepted by the adoring middle class as Protestant Bulls. And Allan purchased Mrs. Chapone's little volume with his ear to the verdict of Mrs. Delany, who wrote: "They speak to the heart as well as to the head; and I know no book (next to the Bible) more entertaining or edifying."

It was within a few months before his marriage that Allan, in the most orthodox manner of that "Happy Half Century" so happily celebrated by Miss Agnes Repplier, undertook to heighten the virtues of Miss Maria Gansevoort by exposing her to the "pure and prevailing superiority" of Mrs. Chapone. For Allan was a cautious man, and marriage, he knew, was a step not lightly to be made. "I do not want a Helen, or a Saint Cecilia, or a Madame Dacier," said Coelebs, in sketching an ideal wife; "yet must she be elegant or I could not love her; sensible, or I could not respect her; prudent, or I could not confide in her; well-informed, or she could not educate my children; well-bred, or she could not entertain my friends; pious, or I should not be happy with her, because the prime comfort in a companion for life is the delightful hope that she will be a companion for eternity."

Maria was patently elegant, well-bred and pious. The present of Dr. Akenside and Mrs. Chapone gave her generous opportunity of coming to be well-informed. But Allan did not hesitate to make further and more direct contributions to her information. Prudence he rated prime among virtues; and he approached marriage with Miltonic preconceptions. By no means confident that the eternal truths enunciated by Mrs.

Chapone would penetrate Maria's female intellect, Allan prudently summarised the most sacred verities of the volume in two manuscript introductions. Maria's copy of the Letters bears three inscriptions made by Allan on three separate flyleaves. The first is in a formal upright hand, rigid in propriety:

"Prudence should be the governing principle of Woman's existence, domestick life her peculiar sphere; no rank can exempt her from an observation of the laws of the former, from an attention to the duties of the latter. To neglect both is to violate the sacred statutes of social happiness, and to írustrate the all-wise intention of that Providence who framed them."

In the second inscription, made with acknowledgment to Miss Owensong, Allan takes all the precautions of a Coelebs to make certain that at his table "the eulogist of female ignorance might dine in security against the intrusion and vanity of erudition." The inscription reads:

"The liberal cultivation of the female mind is the best security for the virtues of the female heart; and genius, talents and grace, where regulated by prudence and governed by good sense, are never incompatible with domestic qualities or meek and modest virtues."

On the third fly-leaf, this double pronouncement is presented to "Miss Maria Gansevoort" and "from A. M." Allan had doubtless learned from Mrs. Chapone that "our feelings are not given us for ornament, but to spur us on to right action." And Miss Maria may have taken to heart Mrs. Chapone's dictum that "compassion is not impressed upon the human heart, only to adorn the fair face with tears and to give an agreeable languor to the eyes." There survives no trace of a record of Allan's indulging emotions for decorative purposes. How far his sentiments were moved in "right action" to melt Miss Maria to becoming compassion can never