Bildungsromans; England -- Fiction; Foundlings -- Fiction; Humorous stories; Identity (Psychology) -- Fiction; Young men -- Fiction
The reader will be pleased to recollect, that a secret affection for
Mr Jones had insensibly stolen into the bosom of this young lady. That
it had there grown to a pretty great height before she herself had
discovered it. When she first began to perceive its symptoms, the
sensations were so sweet and pleasing, that she had not resolution
sufficient to check or repel them; and thus she went on cherishing a
passion of which she never once considered the consequences.
This incident relating to Molly first opened her eyes. She now first
perceived the weakness of which she had been guilty; and though it
caused the utmost perturbation in her mind, yet it had the effect of
other nauseous physic, and for the time expelled her distemper. Its
operation indeed was most wonderfully quick; and in the short
interval, while her maid was absent, so entirely removed all symptoms,
that when Mrs Honour returned with a summons from her father, she was
become perfectly easy, and had brought herself to a thorough
indifference for Mr Jones.
The diseases of the mind do in almost every particular imitate those
of the body. For which reason, we hope, that learned faculty, for whom
we have so profound a respect, will pardon us the violent hands we
have been necessitated to lay on several words and phrases, which of
right belong to them, and without which our descriptions must have
been often unintelligible.
Now there is no one circumstance in which the distempers of the mind
bear a more exact analogy to those which are called bodily, than that
aptness which both have to a relapse. This is plain in the violent
diseases of ambition and avarice. I have known ambition, when cured at
court by frequent disappointments (which are the only physic for it),
to break out again in a contest for foreman of the grand jury at an
assizes; and have heard of a man who had so far conquered avarice, as
to give away many a sixpence, that comforted himself, at last, on his
deathbed, by making a crafty and advantageous bargain concerning his
ensuing funeral, with an undertaker who had married his only child.
In the affair of love, which, out of strict conformity with the Stoic
philosophy, we shall here treat as a disease, this proneness to
relapse is no less conspicuous. Thus it happened to poor Sophia; upon
whom, the very next time she saw young Jones, all the former symptoms
returned, and from that time cold and hot fits alternately seized her
heart.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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