Hesperus; or, Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography. Vol. I. — John Shaqi
Hesperus; or, Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography. Vol. I.Jean Paul
General
Hesperus; or, Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography. Vol. I.
Jean Paul
Fiction
Lord Horion met Prince January twice on his journeys: the first time he
cut across the princely planetary orbit as a comet, in the sense of a
hairy star; the second, as a comet with a tail when in its perihelion.
What I mean is this: it was just when Horion was in love with a scion
of January's house, who lived in London, that he saw the Prince for the
second time, and at his house in London entertained him and his court.
Upon this very distant relative of the Prince my papers--from an
excessive deference to political and domestic relations--throw an
unseasonable veil. She was, at the time of marrying his Lordship,
twenty-two years old, and her whole person was (if I may venture to
adopt the bold expression of a London eulogist) nothing but a single,
tender, still blue eye. That is all which is vouchsafed to the public.
The Prince willingly let himself be mastered and managed--by the lord,
whom a singular mixture of coldness and genius constituted an unlimited
monarch and commander of souls. The lord had, moreover, a beautiful
niece in his house, whose charms in princes' eyes made such a spiritual
Old Man of the Mountain as he at once _younger_ and more _smooth_.
But the death-bell threw its discords into these harmonies of life. The
beloved of his Lordship fled from the rough earth, and left behind her
his first-born son as a memorial, and pledge of love; she died in her
twenty-third year, as it were of the life of her child, some days after
its birth, and the thin, tender twig broke down under the ripe fruit.
Lord Horion bowed silently to fate. He had loved her terribly, without
showing it: he mourned her in the same manner, without moistening his
deep black eye.
The Prince found in the niece, i. e. in a true Englishwoman, something
to his taste, for the reason that he _had_ found what was still more so
in the Frenchwomen; and on this ground he would, inversely, have loved
them, had he previously known her. The subsequent Chief Chamberlain, Le
Baut, had the same sentiments, and, what is still more, toward the same
person; and as Indian courtiers imitate all wounds of their sovereign,
so did Le Baut with an arrow of Cupid copy those of his master, and
transferred to himself therewith one of the severest.
These London histories cannot last much longer, and then we shall
happily get back again to our St. Luna.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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