“Were I to trace back this part of my career, I might perhaps amuse you more by the incidents it contained, than by any other portion of my life; nothing indeed is so suggestive of adventure, as that anomaly which the French denominate so significantly--‘a false position,’ The man who--come, come, don’t be afraid, though that sounds very like Joseph Surface, I’m not going to moralize--the man, I say, who endeavours to sustain two distinct lines in life, is very likely to fail in both, and so I felt it, for while my advantages all inclined to one side, my taste and predilections leaned to the other; I could never adopt knavery as a profession--as an amateur I gloried in it: roguery, without risk, was a poor pettifogging policy that I spurned; but a practical joke that involved life or limb, a hearty laugh, or a heavy reckoning, was a temptation I never could resist. The more I mixed in society, the greater my intimacy with persons of education and refinement, the stronger became my repugnance to my actual condition, and the line of life I had adopted. While my position in society was apparently more fixed, I became in reality more nervously anxious for its stability. The fascinations which in the better walks of life are thrown around the man of humble condition, but high aspirings, are strong and sore temptations, while he measures and finds himself not inferior to others, to whom the race is open, and the course is free, and yet feels in his own heart, that there is a bar upon his escutcheon which excludes him from the lists. I began now to experience this in all its poignancy. Among the acquaintances I had formed, one of my most intimate was a young baronet, who had just succeeded to a large estate in the county Kilkenny. Sir Harvey Blundell was an Anglo-Irishman in more than one sense: from his English father he had inherited certain staid and quiet notions of propriety, certain conventional ideas regarding the observance of etiquette, which are less valued in Ireland; while, from his mother, he succeeded to an appreciation of native fun and drollery, of all the whims and oddities of Irish life, which, strange enough, are as well understood by the Anglo-Irishman, as by one ‘to the manner born.’ “I met Sir Harvey at a supper party in College. Some song I had sung of my own composing, or some story of my inventing, I forget which, tickled his fancy: he begged to be introduced to me, drew his chair over to my side of the table, and ended by giving an invitation to his house for the partridge-shooting, which was to begin in a few days; I readily assented--it was a season in which I had nothing to do, my friend Dan had gone over to the Highlands to make a purchase of some ponies; I was rather flush of cash, and consequently in good spirits. It was arranged, then, that I should drive him down in my drag, a turn-out with four spanking greys, of whose match and colour, shape and action, I was not a little vain.