On many houses signs were hung out, and over the door were written the words "Marriages done here;" while touters accosted passengers with the cry "Do you want a parson?" "Will you be married?" Sion Chapel, at Hampstead, which seems to have belonged to the keeper of an adjoining tavern, was a favourite place of resort, and was thus advertised in the Weekly Journal' of Sept. 8, 1718:

"Sion Chapel, at Hampstead, being a private and pleasant place, many persons of the best fashion have lately been married there. Now, as a minister is obliged constantly to attend, this is to give notice, that all persons upon bringing a license, and who shall have their wedding dinner in the gardens, may be married in the said chapel without giving any fee or reward whatsoever; and such as do not keep their wedding dinner in the gardens, only five shillings will be demanded of them for all fees." Like most abuses, the facility of celebrating clandestine marriages was clung to as a great social privilege; and the Marriage Act, 26 Geo. II. c. 33, which put an end to them, was strongly opposed. Horace Walpole says, in one of his letters, that the Act was so drawn by the judges "as to clog all matrimony in general." :

When Dr. King, the public orator at Oxford, presented can

It was for some time evaded by persons going to the Channel Islands, which were not within its operation; and in the 'Gentleman's Magazine' of 1760 we read that there were "at Southampton vessels always ready to carry on the trade of smuggling weddings, which for the price of five guineas transport contraband goods into the land of matrimony.'

didates for the degree of Doctor of Law at the Installation in 1754, he fiercely denounced the new law. "The times," he said, 66 were so horribly corrupt that we had agreed to sell our daughters by the late Marriage Act. Sweet creatures! it was ten thousand pities that such fine girls as then filled the theatre should be sold by their unnatural parents, and perhaps (dreadful thought!) even to Whig husbands. But he was sure that such beautiful and elegant ladies as were there assembled were on the right side, and he advised them to wear upon their rings, and embroider upon their garments, the maxim: 'The man who sells his country will sell his wife or his daughter,'-upon which there was loud applause."- 'Correspondence of Richardson,' vol. ii. p. 190.

CHAPTER V.

THE OLD ROMANCES—' THE FEMALE QUIXOTE.'-NOVELS OF

THE LAST CENTURY.-THEIR COARSENESS AND ITS APOLO-
GISTS.—' CHRYSAL, OR THE ADVENTURES OF A GUINEA.'
— POMPEY.'-'THE FOOL OF QUALITY.'-TWO CLASSES
OF NOVELS.—' SIMPLE STORY.'-THE COMIC NOVELS.

COME now to speak more particu-
larly of the novels. It would be

easy for an author to make a parade

of learning, if an acquaintance with novels and romances can be called learning, by quoting the names of old authors and their works, and leaving the reader to suppose that he was familiar with their contents. I might go back to remote antiquity and speak of the 'Books of Love' of Clearchus the Cilician

of Jamblichus, who wrote the 'Adventures of Rhodanes,'—of Heliodorus of Emesus, the author of 'Theogenes and Chariclea'-of Achilles Tatius, who wrote the 'Amours of Clitophon and Leucippe'—of Damascius, who composed four books of fiction of the three Xenophons mentioned by Suidas-of the parables of the Indian Sandabar and the

fables of Pilpay-of the lying legends of the Talmud—of the famous Milesian tales, and Aristides the most famous of the authors-of Dionysius the Milesian who wrote fabulous histories of the romance of 'Dinias and Dercyllis,' of which Antonius Diogenes was the author, or the still older romances of Antiphanes—of Parthenius of Nice of the 'True and Perfect Love' of Athenagoras-of the 'Golden Ass' of Apuleius of the 'Amours of Diocles and Rhodanthe,' by Theodorus Prodromus, and those of 'Ismenias and Ismene' by Gustathius, Bishop of Thessalonica; and, coming lower down into the Middle Ages, of the novels of Boccaccio and the Romances of Garin de Loheran, Tristan,' 'Lancelot du Lac,' 'St. Greal,' 'Merlin,' Arthur,' Perceval,' 'Perceforêt,' 'Amadis de Gaul,' Palmerin of England,' and 'Don Beliaris of Greece ;' and in more modern times, of the 'Astræa' of Monsieur d'Urfé, and the 'Illustrious Bassa,'--the 'Grand Cyrus' and 'Clelia' of Mademoiselle de Scuderi, who is called by Monsieur Huet, the Bishop of Avranches, in his letters to Monsieur de Legrais 'On the Original of Romances' a grave and virtuous virgin--the 'Roman Comique' of Scarron, and the 'Zaide' and 'Princesse de Cleves' of Madame de la Fayette-the 'Phara

mond,' 'Cassandra,' and 'Cleopatra' of M. de la Calprenede; and, to come to our own country, of Euphues' by John Lylie who was born in 1553—of 'the famous delectable and pleasant Hystorie, of the renowned Parrissius, Prince of Bohemia and the 'Ornatus and Artesia' of Ford, who lived in the reign of Elizabeth— of Greene's Philomela' " penned to approve women's chastity," and his Pandosto the Triumph of Time,' from which Shakspeare borrowed the plot of his 'Winter's Tale,'—of Barclay's 'Argenis,'—of 'Eliana,' published in 1661

-and of the ‘Parthenissa' of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery-I might, I say, pretend to be familiar with these works, but for two reasons, first, that many of them have long ceased to exist, and, secondly, that no appetite for books could be supposed to induce a man now to face the appalling dulness and interminable length of most of these old romances. As Sydney Smith says, "human life has been distressingly abridged since the flood," and considering the multiplicity of demands upon one's time now, it is really too short to wade through the ponderous romances of the seventeenth century, which Sir Walter Scott aptly described when he called them huge folios of inanity over which our ancestors yawned themselves to sleep."