FAMOUS LOVERS REJECTED

New Zealand Mail, 22 January 1902, Page 29

FAMOUS LOVERS REJECTED

tj mav be of some consolation to the re- . lover to remember that many of the greatest men in history have suffered paues and snrvived the same ordeal to find married happiness elsewhere.

Fveu Kvron, that most ueautiful and lifted of men, had more than his share of refusals, and one of them at least was accompanied by words which left a sting to his last day. lie was only a Harrow schoolbov of 10 when befell madly in love with Miss Chaworth, of Annesley, a young Li>ps.s of some beauty, who was two vears older than himself. But Miss Chaworth treated all the boy’s shy advances with laughter and contempt, and, although lie was “suffering the tortures of the lost” for her sake, refused to take him seriously. But the crowning blow came when, in an adjacent room, he overheard Miss Chauorth say to her maid: “Do you think I could care anything for that lame boy?” “This cruel speech,” he afterwards said, “ was like a shot through my heart. Although it was late and pitch dark, I darted out of the house, and never stopped running until 1 reached Newstead.”

Shelley, too, almost as handsome and as lifted as Byron, knew from more than one experience the “pangs of rejection.” After he had been expelled from Oxford and went to London with liis fellow-cul-prit, Hogg, to live, he fell violently in love’ with his landlady's daughter, who bore the miromantic name of Eliza .lenkius; but Eliza, even though lie threatened’to commit suicide in his despair, refused to have anything to do with him; and when, a few months later, having thought better of the suicidal threat, he sought to console himself by paying court to Miss Harriet Grove, a pretty cousin, she was so alarmed at his heterodoxies that she sent him very decidedly about his business.

When Sheridan, following the example of many other amorous young men, fell over head and ears in love with Miss Liuley. the beautiful singer, "she only laughed at his ardo'ur, and made faces at him behind liis back;” and yet lie used that subtle and eloquent tongue of liis to such purpose that he actually ran away witii her to a French nunnery, and married her after fighting several duels with his rivals and her persecutors.

When Burke, the great politician and orator, was a student at Trinity College, Dublin, he is said to have had more than one love disappointment. His first infatuation was for the daughter of a small publican, "whose dark eyes fired the blood of the young Irishman;” but after coquetting with him for a time she jilted him in the most heartless fashion. tils success, too, with his beautiful countrywoman, Margaret Woffington, was no greater, although he remained her loyal lover to the last.

When Abraham Lincoln, as a youth of 18. was “living in a rude log cabin in Spencer County, Indiana, and picking up the rudiments of education in the intervafs of rail-splitting and ploughing,” he fell in love with the daughter of a poor Irish settler in a neighbouring log cabin, and after many clumsy failures to declare his love to her in person, penned with difficulty one of his hist fetters asking her to become his wife. He never received an answer to this “clumsy effusion,” as lie afterwards called it; but when next lie met Bridget “she tossed her head and looked another way.” “She was much too good,” she is said to have declared “to marry a gawky farm labourer.” Then it was that Lincoln left the paternal cabin and voyaged, as hired hand on a fbtboat, into that greater world which before long was to ring with the name of tlio gawky farm boy. When, thirteen years or so later, Abraham Lincoln became President of the United States, Bridget was still living, "the slatternly wife of a farm labourer in a log cabin,” ami still preserved the ill-penned letter which might, if she had been wise, hove made her the “first lady of the land/’ It is well known that Jean Baptiste Bernadotte, when he was a private of marines, was indignantly refused by a girl of very humble rank who thought herself "much too good to marry a common soldier.” What her reflections were in later years, when the despised private was the powerful King Christian XIV. ol Sweden and -Norway, history does not record.