Your irony, my good Sir, is rather too severe. I don't pretend to be romantic; but in the sincerity and disinterestedness of my attachment to Miss Frankland, I hope you will do me the honour and the justice to place confidence.—I now take my leave, and I hope, with your permission, to repeat my visits.
[Exit, Colonel Franklandbowing coldly to him.
COLONEL FRANKLAND (alone).
This won't do; no, it won't do.—O that the silly fellow should have allowed himself to be bewildered with the rhapsodies of such a fool as Lady Worrymore! Surely, writing verses must have some power of intoxication in it, and can turn a sensible man into a fool by some process of mental alchemy.—Thank God, I never had any personal experience of the matter!—I once tried to turn a few common expressions of civility into two couplets of metre, to please a dainty lady withal, but it would not do: so I e'en gave it up, and kept the little portion of mother-wit that Nature had bestowed upon me uninjured.
