Morley Ernstein; or, the Tenants of the HeartJames, G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford)
General
Morley Ernstein; or, the Tenants of the Heart
James, G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford)
Fiction
In passing through life we must have remarked, not only that the
satirical maxim of La Rochefoucauld is true, with a great number of
people, in regard to the pleasures that they derive from the
misfortunes of their friends, but that the general world contrives to
extract an infinite quantity of amusement, delight, and satisfaction
from all the evils that are going on throughout the universe. What a
fund of pleasant excitement is there to the minds of many, in that
column of a newspaper, headed "Accidents and Offences." What
gratification to multitudes in a child being scalded to death, a house
being burnt down, a retired tradesman, in a solitary cottage,
undergoing the process of murder! And such is the joy and delight the
great mass of mankind in crime and sorrow, that I do really
believe, if any person could invent an unheard-of iniquity, or
contrive to die some unknown kind of death, not only would rags of his
clothes be kept as relics, locks of his hair preserved in lockets, or
the rope that hanged him be sold at a guinea an inch, but a very
handsome subscription might be gathered, to raise a statue to him, as
the man who furnished the public with a new kind of excitement.
Fie upon it! The morbid taste for stimulating things, that habitual
drunkenness of the mind, which is increasing day by day more and more
throughout the whole world, excluding the sane, the simple, and the
just, must end in moral death--the sad, worn-out, apathetic death of
the spirit drinker. On my life, I have a great inclination to shake
hands with Father Mathew, and preach a mental teetotalism!
The prevailing spirit, the love of excitement, which is in every human
being, was not wanting even amongst the quiet fields and villages
around Yelverly; and the news of that famous burglary having spread
far and wide, the retired house of Mr. Carr became an object of
attention and visitation, for all the places in the neighbourhood.
Magistrates flocked in, farmers and yeomen made their appearance,
constables, from every place in the vicinity, travelled thither
without loss of time; and though many a one winked the eye and laughed
at Old Carr's misfortune, the general pleasure derived by the
multitude from an extensive robbery in that part of the country was of
the higher and more interesting kind called excitement.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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