THE SPINET¹.

 

In no very pleasant frame of mind did Lord Aspenly retrace² his steps toward the old house. His lordship had, all his life, been firmly persuaded that the whole female creation had been sighing and pining for the possession of his heart and equipage. He knew that among those with whom his chief experience lay, his fortune and his coronet were considerations not to be resisted; and he as firmly believed, that even without such recommendations, few women, certainly none of any taste or discrimination, could be found with hearts so steeled against the archery of Cupid, as to resist the fascinations⁴ of his manner and conversation, supported and directed, as both were, by the tact⁵ and experience drawn⁶ from a practice of more years than his lordship cared to count, even to himself. He had, however, smiled, danced, and chatted, in impregnable celibacy⁷, through more than half a century of gaiety and frivolity—breaking, as he thought, hearts innumerable, and, at all events, disappointing very many calculations—until, at length, his lordship had arrived at that precise period of existence at which old gentlemen, not unfrequently, become all at once romantic, disinterested⁸, and indiscreet—nobody exactly knows why—unless it be for variety, or to spite an heir presumptive, or else that, as a preliminary to second childhood, nature has ordained⁹ a second boyhood too. Certain, however, it is, that Lord Aspenly was seized, on a sudden, with a matrimonial frenzy¹⁰; and, tired of the hackneyed schemers, in the centre of whose manœuvres he had stood and smiled so long in contemptuous security, he resolved that his choice should honour some simple, unsophisticated beauty, who had never plotted his matrimony.

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