Just as unable should I feel myself were I to attempt a description
from what Mrs. Dove was when I knew her, of what Deborah Bacon might
be supposed to have been,—just as unable as this dreaming rhymer
should I be, and you would be no whit the wiser. What the disposition
was which gave her face its permanent beauty you may know by what has
already been said. But this I can truly say of her and of her husband,
that if they had lived in the time of the Romans when Doncaster was
called Danum, and had been of what was then the Roman religion, and
had been married, as consequently they would have been, with the
rights of classical Paganism, it would have been believed both by
their neighbours and themselves that their nuptial offerings had been
benignly received by the god Domicius and the goddesses Maturna and
Gamelia; and no sacrifice to Viriplaca would ever have been thought
necessary in that household.
CHAPTER CXI.
CONCERNING MAGAZINES, AND THE FORMER AND PRESENT RACE OF ALPHABET-MEN.
_Altri gli han messo nome Santa Croce,
Altri lo chiaman l' A. B. C. guastando
La misura, gl' accenti, et la sua voce._
SANSOVINO.
The reader has now been informed who Mrs. Dove was, and what she was
on that day of mingled joy and grief when the bells of St. George's
welcomed her to Doncaster as a bride. Enough too has been related
concerning the Doctor in his single state, to show that he was not
unworthy of such a wife. There is, however, more to be told; for any
one who may suppose that a physician at Doncaster must have been
pretty much the same sort of person in the year 1761 as at present,
can have reflected little upon the changes for better and worse which
have been going on during the intervening time. The fashions in dress
and furniture have not altered more than the style of intellectual
upholstery.
Our Doctor flourished in the Golden Age of Magazines, when their pages
were filled with voluntary contributions from men who never aimed at
dazzling the public, but came each with his scrap of information, or
his humble question, or his hard problem, or his attempt in verse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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