How Not To Do It


This is Gladstone, the great Victorian prime minister, as a young man (not yet quite 30) proposing marriage:

"I seek much in a wife in gifts better than those of our human pride, and am also sensible that she can find little in me: sensible that, were you to treat this note as the offspring of utter presumption, I must not be surprised: sensible that the lot I invite you to share, even if it be not attended, as I trust it is not, with peculiar disadvantages of an outward kind, is one, I do not say unequal to your deserts, for that were saying little,but liable at best to changes and perplexities and pains which, for myself, I contemplate without apprehension, but to which it is perhaps selfishness in the main, with the sense of inward dependence counteracting an opposite sense of my too real unworthiness, which would make me contribute to expose another -- and that other!"

WTF? KEEP IT SIMPLE, WILLIE!

This sentence is absolutely genuine, quoted in at least two academic studies of the old boy. Moreover, there's plenty more like that in the rest of the letter. Most amazing of all, reader: she married him. They were married for sixty years, during which time Mary Gladstone no doubt had time to figure out what the old loon was on about in the first place.

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