Idonia: A Romance of Old LondonWallis, Arthur Frederick
History
Idonia: A Romance of Old London
Wallis, Arthur Frederick
Great Britain -- History -- Elizabeth, 1558-1603 -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction
(Followed the sign of the Inn he lay at, which I remembered to have
once noted going through Tolland, and passed it by as a place of mean
and beggarly entertainment.)
This letter I overread a score of times, and each time with the more
admiration that a man of so principal a dignity and so observed, could
find it in his mind thus voluntarily to lay by his honourable estate
and depart a mere exile from his ancient home; and that with never a
murmur of self pity; but quitting all simply and with a grand
negligence, as a man might do that puts up a fair-bound book he has
been reading, but now hath concluded.
'Twas sometime afterward I let my thought stay upon the meaning of that
he had writ of myself; and a longer time ere I could allow the plain
truth that we were come into an absolute poverty. I think not well to
set down all the shifting considerations that moved me then, nor the
weight of humiliation I undertook at this lapse and derogation from our
name. But all my dreams brake utterly asunder, and my hopes that had
until now sustained me in pride. To be penniless I found a greater
evil far than to be sick, and in the first rage of my disappointment, I
quite lost all remembrance of my father (sick too) in the wayside
tavern I had myself disdained to enter.
I was aloft in my room in the warden's house when this letter was
delivered to me in the afternoon of the day following my passage with
the hosier's wife, and I remember how I sat by the window looking
across the Bridge street, betwixt the tall houses, out upon the River
and the great galleys in the Pool, and upon that square grey shadow of
the Tower. All I saw appeared to me so large and unfettered, and to be
spread so comely in the soft blue air that I could hardly bear to
reduce my thoughts to the narrowness and cooped discipline of my own
future. The eulogy which Mr. Nelson had seen fit to pronounce upon
merchants and traders troubled my spleen not a little at the
remembrance of it; and so out of measure did my resentment run that I
stood by the mullion gnawing at my nails and casting blame hither and
thither, so as none hardly escaped being made a party (as the attorneys
called it) to the case of poverty into which I was fallen. Amongst
other follies I allowed, was this: that I dared not now seek out my old
schoolmaster, lest from the height of his new soldier's calling he
should rail down upon me in Latin, which tongue seemeth to have been
expressly fashioned for satire.
But such a resolution extended no further than to Mr. Jordan, for I
still cherished and held fast to the hope of discovering the maid and
of thanking her, as was necessary (or at least upon the necessity of it
I would admit no argument); and also of acquainting her of my present
and intolerable trouble. That she were, like enough, engaged in some
trade, as well as I, I never so much as conceived possible, but drew in
advance upon her store of pity for my singular misfortune.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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