24 Sample oj tome Gentleman 's Autobiography. 



The august creature who accompanied my employer, had enthralled 

 fascinated victimized my usually unsusceptible heart. It amazed me 

 how she could have so cast herself away. Gideon Crowthorpe had no 

 pretensions to beauty, when I first met him, yet, it is said, in his younger 

 days, he had been reckoned the handsomest Albino ever exhibited. His 

 eyes were small, ferrety, deep-set, and apparently in danger of being soon 

 smothered in their sockets, by circumjacent fat. His face was so bloated, 

 carbuncled, and inflamed, in all parts, that it bled at the least touch 

 like an over-ripe blackberry. Having lost the flaxen locks which had 

 adorned him in youth, by dipping his head, when drunk, into a pail of 

 hot water, by mistake, he partially concealed his baldness by a prim little 

 wig, white as powder could make it, and displaying three strata of diminu- 

 tive curls above each ear. A massive gold guard chain emerged from 

 the fifth button-hole of his dog-skin waistcoat, and passed across to the 

 left pocket, in which he carried a small enamelled lady's watch. He wore 

 a green hunting frock, buff small-clothes, and high boots, without tops. 

 In figure, he was a Dutch Hercules, fat and squab, but muscular enough 

 to fell an ox. His temperament seemed to be naturally jovial; his man- 

 ners those of one who had visited every fair in the three kingdoms. Juno, 

 his transcendent companion, was deaf and dumb, and I soon disco- 

 vered that Gideon, debarred as he was from oral conversation, had 

 acquired a habit of thinking aloud. As some cannot comprehend with- 

 out whispering what they read, so Gideon appeared to be incapable even 

 of multiplying two by three, unless he went audibly through the process 

 with his tongue. He tried the effect of all such projects as occurred 

 to him, consciously, upon his ear, which to him seemed to be the touch- 

 stone of their value j and thus he never moved or made a halt without 

 literally asking himself a few questions. Such in brief was Gideon Crow- 

 thorpe. 



Juno, the peerless Juno, rose considerably above the general stature of 

 her sex. She had been exhibited, before Gideon wooed and won her, as a 

 Circassian giantess. Her majestic form was exquisitely moulded, and, 

 as an Oxford under-graduate who saw her when we were at Henley, said, 

 her features were absolutely Phidian. The perfect harmony of her 

 proportions made the spectator forget her unusual height, and, if 

 reminded of it, he did but admire her the more. They who first called 

 her Juno, displayed much feeling and taste : she was just such a creature 

 as the classic enthusaist sees in a dream about Mount Olympus, sitting 

 cheek-by-jowl with the Thunderer. Aristotle says, that beauty consists in 

 magnitude -, here was a woman who would have made him love-lorn as 

 Hercules under the influence of Dejanira. To her, Xenophon's Panthea, 

 distinguished as he describes her to have been, for stature and strength, 

 must have meekly succumbed. But for her youth I could have fancied 

 her " Cybele, mother of a hundred gods." She could be gentle as a 

 Dryad, but when the bumpkins at a fair held back, she looked so awful 

 that I thought of Nemesis j and when irritated by any rustic flash of 

 gallantry, she embodied what one may venture to term an Homeric concep- 

 tion of a Fury. In such a mood the lovely Titaness would have domi- 

 neered over Jove himself, take what shape he might but that of Gideon 

 Crowthorpe. The hideous brute enjoyed some mysterious hold upon her 

 affections, and dared to be despotic with her, as though he were a Satrap 

 and she his purchased slave. To lull the fiercest storm in her bosom, he 



