The Adventures of Harry Richmond — CompleteMeredith, George
General
The Adventures of Harry Richmond — Complete
Meredith, George
Adventure and adventurers -- Fiction
'To have stirred up the old place and given it something to dream of
for the next half century, is a satisfaction, Richie. I have a kindness
for Bath. I leave it with its factions reconciled, its tea-tables
furnished with inexhaustible supplies of the chief thing necessary, and
the persuasion firmly established in my own bosom that it is impossible
to revive the past, so we must march with the age. And let me add, all
but every one of the bills happily discharged, to please you. Pray, fag
at your German. If (as I myself confess to) you have enjoyment of old
ways, habits, customs, and ceremonies, look to Court life. It is only
in Courts that a man may now air a leg; and there the women are works
of Art. If you are deficient in calves (which my boy, thank heaven!
will never be charged with) you are there found out, and in fact every
deficiency, every qualification, is at once in patent exhibition at a
Court. I fancy Parliament for you still, and that is no impediment as a
step. Jorian would have you sit and wallow in ease, and buy (by the
way, we might think of it) a famous Burgundy vineyard (for an
investment), devote the prime of your life to the discovery of a cook,
your manhood to perfect the creature's education—so forth; I imagine
you are to get five years of ample gratification (a promise hardly to
be relied on) in the sere leaf, and so perish. Take poor Jorian for an
example of what the absence of ambition brings men to. I treasure
Jorian, I hoard the poor fellow, to have him for a lesson to my boy.
Witty and shrewd, and a masterly tactician (I wager he would have won
his spurs on the field of battle), you see him now living for one hour
of the day—absolutely twenty-three hours of the man's life are chained
slaves, beasts of burden, to the four-and-twentieth! So, I repeat, fag
at your German.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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