SINGLE BLESSEDNESS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3802, 25 January 1927, Page 73

SINGLE BLESSEDNESS.

Probably no man of fame has gone to a bachelor grave without one or more narrow escapes from Cupid’s darts, however indifferently he may have professed to regard love (says a writer in John o’ London’s Weekly). Pitt always vowed that he had turned his back on the’altar because he was

“ wedded to his country,” and yet this cold-blooded statesman hovered more than once on the brink of matrimony, and was so infatuated with Miss W , a Devonshire beauty, that on one occasion he drank her health out of one of her dainty shoes. Theodore Hook, though he died a celibate, had his share of love adventures; and it was only lack of courage at the last moment that once kept him from the altar. He had actually posted a letter of proposal when his heart failed him, but he recovered the missive just as it was starting on its fateful journey.

Washington Irving's heart was buried in the grave of the beautiful girl to whom he had given it when consumption took her from him in her seventeenth year. “ She died in the beauty of her youth,” he wrote, “and in my memory she will ever be young and beautiful.” For 50 years he pillowed his head on her Bible and prayer book; and he died with her name on his lips. Gibbon would have found happiness in Susanna Curehod, a loving and gifted Swiss girl, if his autocratic father had not frowned on the match; and Buckle might have had more than one chance of playing the Benedick had he thought it possible to face wedded life on- a paltry £3OOO a year. *■ * * * Charles Lamb resolutely turned his back on wedlock, even when he knew that Anna Simmons’s heart and hand were his for the asking, because his sister, Mary, required his undivided care; and Horace Walpole’s affection was distributed among so many fair women, from my Lady Ossory to the charming and talented Berry sisters, that he could never make np his mind. Sir Isaac Newton’s one romance came to a tragic termination when, in a moment’s abstraction, while holding the hand of his lady-love, he used one of her fingers as ; pipe-stopper. And David Hume, the historian, when a 'lady who had refused his offer hinted delicately that she had changed her mind, gruffly replied, “So have I, madam! So have I! ” Beau Brummell would probably never have ended his days in a pauper lunatic asylum had that perfumed dandy been less fastidious. Once at least he was on the verge of marriage, when lie unaccountably broke off the engagement. “Why did' yon do it?” a friend asked him later. '- “ Well, my dear fellow,” was the answer, “ what else could I do ? I discovered that Lady Mary actually ate cabbage! ” He deserved his cud for that remark.