into a lover, and learned to spell by the force of beauty?  Or with Lorenzo, the lover of Isabella, whom her three brethren hated (as your brother does me), who was a merchant’s clerk?  Or with Federigo Alberigi, an honest gentleman, who ran through his fortune, and won his mistress by cooking a fair falcon for her dinner, though it was the only means he had left of getting a dinner for himself?  This last is the man; and I am the more persuaded of it, because I think I won your good liking myself by giving you an entertainment—­of sausages, when I had no money to buy them with.  Nay now, never deny it!  Did I not ask your consent that very night after, and did you not give it?  Well, I should be confoundedly jealous of those fine gallants, if I did not know that a living dog is better than a dead lion; though, now I think of it, Boccaccio does not in general make much of his lovers:  it is his women who are so delicious.  I almost wish I had lived in those times, and had been a little more amiable.  Now if a woman had written the book, it would not have had this effect upon me:  the men would have been heroes and angels, and the women nothing at all.  Isn’t there some truth in that?  Talking of departed loves, I met my old flame the other day in the street.  I did dream of her one night since, and only one:  every other night I have had the same dream I have had for these two months past.  Now, if you are at all reasonable, this will satisfy you.

Thursday morning.  The book is come.  When I saw it I thought you had sent it back in a huff, tired out by my sauciness, and coldness, and delays, and were going to keep an account of dimities and sayes, or to salt pork and chronicle small beer as the dutiful wife of some fresh-looking, rural swain; so that you cannot think how surprised and pleased I was to find them all done.  I liked your note as well or better than the extracts; it is just such a note as such a nice rogue as you ought to write after the provocation you had received.  I would not give a pin for a girl ‘whose cheeks never tingle’, nor for myself if I could not make them tingle sometimes.  Now, though I am always writing to you about ‘lips and noses’, and such sort of stuff, yet as I sit by my fireside (which I do generally eight or ten hours a day), I oftener think of you in a serious, sober light.  For, indeed, I never love you so well as when I think of sitting down with you to dinner on a boiled scrag-end of mutton, and hot potatoes.  You please my fancy more then than when I think of you in—­no, you would never forgive me if I were to finish the sentence.  Now I think of it, what do you mean to be dressed in when we are married?  But it does not much matter!  I wish you would let your hair grow; though perhaps nothing will be better than ’the same air and look with which at first my heart was took’.  But now to business.  I mean soon to call upon your brother in form, namely,