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Whilst ladies persist in maintaining the strictly defensive condition, men must naturally, as it were, take the opposite line, that of attack; otherwise, if both parties held aloof, there woud be no more marriages; and the two hosts would die in their respective inaction, without ever coming to a battle. Thus it is evident that as the ladies will not, the men must take the offensive. I, for my part, have made in the course of my life, at least a score of offensive attacks upon several strongly fortified hearts. Sometimes I began my works too late in the season, and winter suddenly came and rendered further labours impossible; sometimes I have attacked the breach madly, sword in hand, and have been plunged violently from the scaling-ladder into the ditch; sometimes I have made a decent lodgement in the place, when--bang! blows up a mine, and I am scattered to the deuce! and sometimes when I have been in the very heart of the citadel--ah, that I should say it!-- a sudden panic has struck me, and I have run like the British out of Carthagena!

One grows tired after a while of such perpetual activity. Is it not time that the ladies should take an innings? Let us widowers and bachelors form an association to declare that for the next hundred years we will make love no longer. Let the young women come and make love to us; let them write us verses; let them ask us to dance, get us ices and cups of tea, and help us on with our cloaks at the hall-door; and if they are eligible, we may perhaps be induced to yield and say, "La, Miss Hopkins--I really never--I am so agitated--ask papa!"

Thackeray, The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon (1844), chapter 1.