Ernest Maltravers — Volume 02Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
General
Ernest Maltravers — Volume 02
Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
English fiction -- 19th century
With this, Ferrers sought his own room; there, as he slowly undressed,
he thus soliloquised: "I think I have put this man to all the use I can
make of him. We don't pull well together any longer; perhaps I myself
am a little tired of this sort of life. That is not right. I shall
grow ambitious by and by; but I think it a bad calculation not to make
the most of youth. At four or five-and-thirty it will be time enough to
consider what one ought to be at fifty."
CHAPTER IV.
"Most dangerous
Is that temptation that does goad us on
To sin in loving virtue."--/Measure for Measure/.
"SEE her to-morrow!--that morrow is come!" thought Maltravers, as he
rose the next day from a sleepless couch. Ere yet he had obeyed the
impatient summons of Ferrers, who had thrice sent to say that "/he/
never kept people waiting," his servant entered with a packet from
England, that had just arrived by one of those rare couriers who
sometimes honour that Naples, which /might/ be so lucrative a mart to
English commerce, if Neapolitan kings cared for trade, or English
senators for "foreign politics." Letters from stewards and bankers were
soon got through; and Maltravers reserved for the last an epistle from
Cleveland. There was much in it that touched him home. After some dry
details about the property to which Maltravers had now succeeded, and
some trifling comments upon trifling remarks in Ernest's former letters,
Cleveland went on thus:
"I confess, my dear Ernest, that I long to welcome you back to England.
You have been abroad long enough to see other countries; do not stay
long enough to prefer them to your own. You are at Naples, too--I
tremble for you. I know well that delicious, dreaming, holiday-life of
Italy, so sweet to men of learning and imagination--so sweet, too, to
youth--so sweet to pleasure! But, Ernest, do you not feel already how
it enervates?--how the luxurious /far niente/ unfits us for grave
exertion? Men may become too refined and too fastidious for useful
purposes; and nowhere can they become so more rapidly than in Italy. My
dear Ernest, I know you well; you are not made to sink down into a
virtuoso, with a cabinet full of cameos and a head full of pictures;
still less are you made to be an indolent /cicisbeo/ to some fair
Italian, with one passion and two ideas: and yet I have known men as
clever as you, whom that bewitching Italy has sunk into one or other of
these insignificant beings. Don't run away with the notion that you
have plenty of time before you. You have no such thing. At your age,
and with your fortune (I wish you were not so rich), the holiday of one
year becomes the custom of the next. In England, to be a useful or a
distinguished man, you must labour. Now, labour itself is sweet, if we
take to it early. We are a hard race, but we are a manly one; and our
stage is the most exciting in Europe for an able and an honest ambition.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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