Page:Guy Mannering Vol 2.djvu/146

whereas I was partial to the involved intrigues of private life, or at farthest, to so much only of the supernatural as is conferred by the agency of an eastern genie or a beneficent fairy. You would have loved to shape your course of life over the broad ocean with its dead calms and howling tempests, its tornadoes, and its billows mountain high,—whereas I should like to trim my little pinnace to a brisk breeze in some inland lake or tranquil bay, where there was just difficulty of navigation sufficient to give interest and to require skill, without any great degree of danger. So that, upon the whole, Matilda, I think you should have had my father, with his pride of arms and of ancestry, his chivalrous point of honour, his high talents, and his abstruse and mystic studies—You should have had Lucy Bertram too for your friend, whose fathers, with names which alike defy memory and orthography, ruled over this romantic country, and whose birth took place, as I have been indistinctly in-