Leading but seldom, always sure to guide, To false or silly, if ’twas borne aside, His quick correction silent he expressed, And stopped you short, and forced you to your best. Often, I think, he suffered from some pain Of mind, that on the body worked again; One felt it in his sort of half-disdain, Impatient not, but acrid in his speech; The world with him her lesson failed to teach To take things easily and let them go. He, for what special fitness I scarce know, For which good quality, or if for all, With less of reservation and recall And speedier favour than I e’er had seen, Took, as we called him, to the rural dean. As grew the gourd, as grew the stalk of bean, So swift it seemed, betwixt these differing two A stately trunk of confidence up-grew. Of marriage long one night they held discourse; Regarding it in different ways, of course. Marriage is discipline, the wise had said, A needful human discipline to wed; Novels of course depict it final bliss,— Say, had it ever really once been this? Our Yankee friend (whom, ere the night was done, We called New England or the Pilgrim Son), A little tired, made bold to interfere; ‘Appeal,’ he said, ‘to me; my sentence hear. You’ll reason on till night and reason fail; My judgment is you each shall tell a tale; And as on marriage you can not agree, Of love and marriage let the stories be.’ Sentence delivered, as the younger man, My lawyer friend was called on and began. ‘_Infandum jubes!_ ’tis of long ago, If tell I must, I tell the tale I know: Yet the first person using for the freak, Don’t rashly judge that of myself I speak.’ So to his tale; if of himself or not I never learnt, we thought so on the spot. Lightly he told it as a thing of old, And lightly I repeat it as he told. _THE LAWYER’S FIRST TALE._ _Primitiæ, or Third Cousins._ I