Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
General
Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
American essays; English essays
party, he anticipates a "glut of pleasure." When he has a new watch, "to
see my childishness," says he, "I could not forbear carrying it in my
hand and seeing what o'clock it was an hundred times." To go to
Vauxhall, he says, and "to hear the nightingales and other birds, hear
fiddles, and there a harp and here a Jew's trump, and here laughing, and
there fine people walking, is mighty divertising." And the nightingales,
I take it, were particularly dear to him; and it was again "with great
pleasure" that he paused to hear them as he walked to Woolwich, while the
fog was rising and the April sun broke through.
He must always be doing something agreeable, and, by preference, two
agreeable things at once. In his house he had a box of carpenter's
tools, two dogs, an eagle, a canary, and a blackbird that whistled tunes,
lest, even in that full life, he should chance upon an empty moment. If
he had to wait for a dish of poached eggs, he must put in the time by
playing on the flageolet; if a sermon were dull, he must read in the book
of Tobit or divert his mind with sly advances on the nearest women. When
he walked, it must be with a book in his pocket to beguile the way in
case the nightingales were silent; and even along the streets of London,
with so many pretty faces to be spied for and dignitaries to be saluted,
his trail was marked by little debts "for wine, pictures, etc.," the true
headmark of a life intolerant of any joyless passage. He had a kind of
idealism in pleasure; like the princess in the fairy story, he was
conscious of a rose-leaf out of place. Dearly as he loved to talk, he
could not enjoy nor shine in a conversation when he thought himself
unsuitably dressed. Dearly as he loved eating, he "knew not how to eat
alone;" pleasure for him must heighten pleasure; and the eye and ear must
be flattered like the palate ere he avow himself content. He had no zest
in a good dinner when it fell to be eaten "in a bad street and in a
periwig-maker's house;" and a collation was spoiled for him by
indifferent music. His body was indefatigable, doing him yeoman service
in this breathless chase of pleasures. On April 11, 1662, he mentions
that he went to bed "weary, _which I seldom am_;" and already over
thirty, he would sit up all night cheerfully to see a comet. But it is
never pleasure that exhausts the pleasure-seeker; for in that career, as
in all others, it is failure that kills. The man who enjoys so wholly
and bears so impatiently the slightest widowhood from joy, is just the
man to lose a night's rest over some paltry question of his right to
fiddle on the leads, or to be "vexed to the blood" by a solecism in his
wife's attire; and we find in consequence that he was always peevish when
he was hungry, and that his head "aked mightily" after a dispute. But
nothing could divert him from his aim in life; his remedy in care was the
same as his delight in prosperity; it was with pleasure, and with
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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