Proposals―To-day and Yesterday.

Radio Record, Volume III, Issue 43, 9 May 1930, Page 24

Proposals―To-day and Yesterday.

CORRESPONDENT to a London paper laments the fact that we are witnessing the rapid decay of the solemn forms in which the ‘last generation made their proposals of marriage. Certainly the elaborate gestures, the poetic and stately phrases with which the great novelists of the past set the standard of courtship are remote enough from present practice, if we may believe all we see and some of that we hear. But some unbelievers will doubt whether the change is as'great as it seems. Not all the characters of eighteenth and nineteenth century real life commanded the magnificence of phrase wherwith they are endowed; not all knelt before their ladies, whereas there are, maybe, romantics even to-day. If we would make a fair comparison, we would set beside to-day’s confessions the recorded proposals of some actual suitors of, say, 1880. Will some of the ladies now celebrating their golden weddings and some of the recent brides of the present age take us into their con-fidence?-"‘Romantic."