Chapter 37

Jacques. There is, suie, another flood toward, and these couples are
coming to the ark!--Here comes a pair of very strange beasts.--As You
Like It.

The fashion of such narratives as the present, changes like other
earthly things. Time was that the tale-teller was obliged to wind up
his story by a circumstantial description of the wedding, bedding, and
throwing the stocking, as the grand catastrophe to which, through so
many circumstances of doubt and difficulty, he had at length happily
conducted his hero and heroine. Not a circumstance was then omitted,
from the manly ardour of the bridegroom, and the modest blushes of the
bride, to the parson's new surplice, and the silk tabinet mantua of
the bridesmaid. But such descriptions are now discarded, for the same
reason, I suppose, that public marriages are no longer fashionable,
and that, instead of calling together their friends to a feast and a
dance, the happy couple elope in a solitary post-chaise, as secretly
as if they meant to go to Gretna-Green, or to do worse. I am not
ungrateful for a change which saves an author the trouble of
attempting in vain to give a new colour to the commonplace description
of such matters; but, notwithstanding, I find myself forced upon it in
the present instance, as circumstances sometimes compel a stranger to
make use of an old road which has been for some time shut up. The
experienced reader may have already remarked, that the last chapter
was employed in sweeping out of the way all the unnecessary and less
interesting characters, that I might clear the floor for a blithe
bridal.

In truth, it would be unpardonable to pass over slightly what so
deeply interested our principal personage, King James. That learned
and good-humoured monarch made no great figure in the politics of
Europe; but then, to make amends, he was prodigiously busy, when he
could find a fair opportunity of intermeddling with the private
affairs of his loving subjects, and the approaching marriage of Lord
Glenvarloch was matter of great interest to him. He had been much
struck (that is, for him, who was not very accessible to such
emotions) with the beauty and embarrassment of the pretty Peg-a-
Ramsay, as he called her, when he first saw her, and he glorified
himself greatly on the acuteness which he had displayed in detecting
her disguise, and in carrying through the whole inquiry which took
place in consequence of it.

He laboured for several weeks, while the courtship was in progress,
with his own royal eyes, so as wellnigh to wear out, he declared, a
pair of her father's best barnacles, in searching through old books
and documents, for the purpose of establishing the bride's pretensions
to a noble, though remote descent, and