The Adventures of Harry Richmond — Volume 3Meredith, George
General
The Adventures of Harry Richmond — Volume 3
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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