Charles James Lever

“ Lord George, who knew him intimately in his prosperity, arranged to take the villa for us; and it is confessedly one of the handsomest on the whole lake. Imagine, Kitty, a splendid marble façade, with a Doric portico, so close to the water's edge that the whole stands reflected in the crystal flood; an Alpine mountain at the back; while around and above us the orange and the fig, the vine, the olive, the wild cactus, and the cedar wave their rich foliage, and load the soft air with perfume. It is not alone that Nature unfolds a scene of gorgeous richness and beauty before us ”

“ The epithet was lost in a scream, Tom, for she went off in strong hysterics; so I just rang the bell for Mary Anne, and slipped quietly away to my own room. I trust it is a good conscience does it for me, but I find that I can almost always sleep soundly when I go to bed; and it is a great blessing, Tom,—for let me tell you, that after five or six and fifty, one's waking hours have more annoyances than pleasures about them; but the world is just like a man's mistress: he cares most for it when it is least fond of him! ”

“ Think of us as you saw us last, even in all the darkness of Dodsborough, and you will find it difficult to believe we are the same! Yet, dearest, it might all have been different,—how different! But papa—there is no use trying to conceal it—has a talent for ruining the prospects of his family, that no individual advantages, no combination of events, however felicitous, can avail against! An absurd and most preposterous notion of being what he calls "honest and aboveboard" leads him to excesses of every kind, and condemns us to daily sorrows and humiliations. ”

“ The monotony and sameness so wearisome in health are boons to the sick man. The old familiar faces are all dear to him; the well-known voices do not disturb him; the little gleam of light that steals in between the curtains checkers some accustomed spot in the room that he has watched on many a former sick-bed. The stray words he catches are of home and homely topics. In a word, he is the centre of a little world, all anxious and eager about him, and even the old watchdog subdues his growl out of deference to his comfort. ”

“ As Lord George says, coming abroad and not crossing the Alps, is like going to a dinner-party and getting up after the "roast,"— "you have all the solids of the entertainment, but none of the light and elegant trifles that aid digestion, and engage the imagination."'It's a beautiful simile, Molly, and very true besides; for, after all, the heart requires more than mere material enjoyments! ”

“ Oh, my dearest friend, if there be a moment in life which combines within it the most exquisite delight with the most torturing agony, it is that in which an affection is sought for by one who, immeasurably above us in all the gifts of fortune, still seems to feel that there is a presumption in his demand, and that his appeal may be rejected. I know not how to speak of that conflict between pride and shame, between the ecstasy of conquest and the innate sense of the unworthiness that had won the victory! ”

“ There is the great lesson, Tom; you grow lenient to everything save the reprobation of wrong, and that you set down for rank hypocrisy, and cry out against as the blackest of all the blemishes of humanity.
Nor is it a small evil that our attachment to home is weakened, and even a sense of shame engendered with respect to a hundred little habits and customs that to foreign eyes appear absurd—and perhaps vulgar. And lastly comes the great question, How are we ever to live in our own country again, with all these exotic notions and opinions? ”

“ Had we remained in Ireland, my dear Miss Cox, this had never been the case. There is a corrective force in the vicinity of those who have known us long and intimately, who can measure our pretensions by our station, and pronounce upon our mode of life from the knowledge they have of our condition; and this discipline, if at times severe and even unpleasant, is, upon the whole, beneficial to us. Now, abroad, this wholesome—shall I call it—"surveillance" is wanting altogether, and people are induced by its very absence to give themselves airs, and assume a style quite above them. ”

“ I went to bed so full of them that I dreamed all night of the play-table, and fancied myself once again the terror of croupiers, and the admired of the fashionable circle in the salon. To crown all, a waiter called me to say that the carriage I had ordered for the baths was at the door. I attempted to undeceive him; but even there my effort was a failure; and, convinced that there was a fate in the matter, I jumped out of bed, dressed, and set off, firmly impressed with the notion that I was not a free agent, but actually impelled and driven by destiny to go and win my millions at Homburg. ”

“ Bitter winds, piercing snow-drift, pelting showers of powdered ice, starvation, and danger,—dreadful danger,—them was the enjoyments that cost us something over eighteen pounds! Why?—you naturally say,—why? And well may you ask, Mrs. Gallagher. It is nothing remarkable in your saying that this is singular and almost unintelligible. The answer, however, is easy, and the thing itself no mystery. It's as old as Adam, my dear, and will last as long as his family. The natural baseness and depravity of the human heart! Oh, Molly, what a subject that is! ”

“ I bethought me, too, how unjust the prejudice of the vulgar mind that attributes to our youthful nobility habits of selfish indolence and effeminate ease. Here was one reared in all the voluptuous enjoyment of a splendid household, trained from his cradle to be waited on and served, and yet was he there wilfully encountering perils and hardships from which the very bravest might recoil. Ah, Kitty! it is impossible to deny it,—the highly born have a native superiority in everything. Their nobility is not a thing of crosses and ribbons, but of blood. ”

“ We all agreed that Cary should hear nothing whatever of the matter, but, as Fra Giacomo said, "we 'd keep the disgrace for our own hearts."
I own to you, Kitty, that if the religious question could be got over, I do not think the thing so inadmissible. Cary is evidently not destined to advance our family interests; had she even the capacity, she lacks the ambition. Her tastes are humble, commonplace, and—shall I say it?—vulgar.
It gives her no pleasure to move in high society, and she esteems the stupid humdrum of domestic life as the very supreme of happiness. ”

“ This is, however, only a breathing canter for what awaits you at the Cascini,—a sort of "promenade," where all the people meet in their carriages, and exchange confidences in scandal and invitations to tea,—the Cascini being to the club what the ballet is to the opera. After this, you have barely time to dress for dinner; which over, the opera begins. There you pay visits from box to box; learn all that is going on for the evening; hear where the prettiest women are going, and where the smartest play will be found. Midnight arrives, and then—but not before—the real life of Florence begins. ”

“ You see, therefore, what it is to have a shrewd and intelligent friend. You and I might have walked the main street of Bregenz till our shoes were thin, before we discovered that the word "Gelegenheit," chalked up on the back-leather of an old calèche, meant "A return conveniency to be had cheap." The word is a German one, and means "Opportunity:" and ah! my dear Tom, into what a strange channel does it entice one's thoughts! What curious reflections come across the mind as we think of all our real opportunities in this world, and how little we did of them! ”

“ The doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the soldier,—ay, and even your Parliament man, if he be an old member, has got to take a House of Commons standard for everything and everybody. It is only your true idler, your genuine good-for-nothing vagabond, that ever takes wide or liberal views of life; one like myself, in short, whose prejudices have not been fostered by any kind of education, and who, whatever he knows of mankind, is sure to be his own. ”

“ I can give you no better nor speedier illustration of the kind of life we lead here, than by saying that even the governor has felt the fascination of the place, and goes the pace, signing checks and drawing bills without the slightest hesitation, or any apparent sense of a coming responsibility. He plays, too, and loses his money freely, and altogether comports himself as if he had a most liberal income, or—terrible alternative—not a sixpence in the world. I own to you, Bob, that this recklessness affrights me far more than all his former grumbling over our expensive and wasteful habits. ”

“ The stormy incidents of university life, its curious vicissitudes, and its strange, half-crazed modes of thought blend into the quiet realities of after-life, and make up men such as one sees nowhere else. The tinge of romance they have contracted in boyhood is never thoroughly washed out of their natures, and although statecraft may elevate them to be grave privy councillors, or good fortune select them for its revenue officers, they cherish the old memories of Halle and Heidelberg, and can grow valorous over the shape of a rapier, or pathetic about the color of Fräulein Lydchen's hair. ”

“ The Orleans family was more remarkable for the qualities which shine in the middle ranks of life than either for any towering genius or any unscrupulous ambition. Their strength was essentially in this mediocrity, and it was a momentary forgetfulness of that same stronghold—by the Spanish marriage—that cost the King his throne. The truth was, Tom, that the nation never liked us,—they hated England just as they hated it at Cressy, at Blenheim, and at Waterloo, and will hate it, notwithstanding your great Industrial gatherings, to the end of time. ”

“ As to a good-looking peasantry, Bob, it's all humbug. It's only the well-to-do classes, in any country, have pretensions to beauty. The woman of rank numbers amongst her charms the unmistakable stamp of her condition. Even in her gait, like the Goddess in Virgil, she displays her divinity. The pretty "bourgeoise" has her peculiar fascination in the brilliant intelligence of her laughing eye, and the sly archness of her witty mouth; but your peasant beauty is essentially heavy and dull. ”

“ Then I revelled in all that petty tyranny illness admits of, but which is only practicable amongst one's own people, refusing this, and insisting on that, just to exercise the little despotism that none rebel against, but which declines into a mixed monarchy on the first day you eat chicken-broth, and from which you are utterly deposed when you can dine at table. In good truth, Tom, I don't wonder at men becoming malades imaginaires, seeing the unnatural importance they attain to by a life of complaining, and days passed in self-commiseration and sorrow. ”

“ To tell what misery this has cost us all is quite beyond me; scorned affection,—blasted hopes,—ambitions scattered to the winds,—a glorious future annihilated! Conceive all of these that you can, and then couple them with meaner and more vulgar regrets, as to what enormous extravagance the pursuit has involved us in, the expense of a style of living that even a prince could scarcely have maintained, and all at a little secluded capital where nobody comes, nobody lives; so that we do not reap even the secondary advantage of that notoriety for which we have to pay so dearly. ”

“ Nothing of the kind, Bob: a dozen or so of young fellows, in all manner of costumes, and all shapes of beards and moustaches; all smoking cigars or cigarettes, talking, singing, laughing, thumping the piano, shouting choruses, playing tricks with cards,—all manner of tomfoolery, in fact; with a dash of enthusiasm in the nonsense that carries you along in spite of yourself. The conversation—if one can dare to call it such—is a wild chaos of turf-talk, politics, scandal, literature, buffoonery, and the ballet. There is abundance of wit,—plenty of real smartness on every side. ”

“ You must know that we had to take the wheels off the carriage and put it on something like a pair of big skates, for the snow was mountains high, and as soft as an egg-pudding. You may think what floundering we had through it for twelve hours, sometimes sinking up to the chin, now swimming, now digging, and now again being dragged out of it by ropes, till we came to what they call the "Refuge-house;" a pretty refuge, indeed, with no door, and scarcely a window, and everybody—guides, postboys, diggers, and travellers—all hickledy-pickledy inside! ”

“ Rome will follow,—then Naples,—e poi?—who knows! I think he must have received some very agreeable tidings from your uncle Purcell, for he has been in better spirits than I have seen him latterly, and shows something like a return to his old vein of pleasantry. Not but I must own that it is what the French would call, very often, a mauvaise plaisanterie in its exercise, his great amusement being to decry and disparage the people of the Continent. He seems quite to forget that in every country the traveller is, and must be, a mark for knavery and cheating. ”

“ Of course I have little sympathy with a heretic, but still I venerate the martyr, the more since I am strongly disposed to think that it is one of those characters which are not the peculiar product of an age of railroads and submarine telegraphs. The expansion of the intelligence, Tom, seems to be in the inverse ratio of the expansion of the conscience, and the stubborn old spirit of right that was once the mode, would nowadays be construed into a dogged, stupid bull-headedness, unworthy of the enlightenment of our glorious era. ”