The Choice Humorous Works, Ludicrous Adventures, Bons Mots, Puns, and Hoaxes of Theodore HookHook, Theodore Edward
General
The Choice Humorous Works, Ludicrous Adventures, Bons Mots, Puns, and Hoaxes of Theodore Hook
Hook, Theodore Edward
English wit and humor
"Towards evening," says his highness, "I arrived at the house of
my worthy colonel--a true Englishman in the best sense of the
word" (from being a Welshman, we presume). "He and his amiable
family received me in the friendliest manner. Country gentlemen
of his class, who are in easy circumstances, (with us they would
be thought rich,) and fill a respectable station in society; who
are not eager and anxious pursuers of fashion in London, but
seek to win the affection of their neighbours and tenants; whose
hospitality is not mere ostentation; whose manners are neither
'exclusive' nor outlandish, but who find their dignity in a
domestic life polished by education and adorned by affluence,
and in the observance of the strictest integrity; such form the
most truly respectable class of Englishmen. In the great world
of London, indeed, they play an obscure part; but on the wide
stage of humanity, one of the most noble and elevated that can
be allotted to man. Unfortunately, however, the predominance and
the arrogance of the English aristocracy is so great, and that
of fashion yet so much more absolute and tyrannous, that such
families, if my tribute of praise and admiration were ever to
fall under their eye, would probably feel less flattered by it,
than they would be if I enumerated them among the leaders of
_ton_."--Pp. 137, 138.
Little did his highness think that a few short months only would
elapse before the brow of his "worthy colonel, filling a respectable
station in society," would be encircled with a baronial coronet;
little did he imagine that his "country gentleman," who "played an
obscure part" in London, was so soon to be converted into one of
the "leaders of _ton_," from amongst whom he had so flatteringly
excluded him; little did he think that his hospitable friend was
destined so soon to adorn the British peerage as Lord Dinorben.
On the 5th of August he walked, while all the rest of the family were
yet in bed, "with the charming little Fanny, the youngest daughter of
the house, who is not yet out."--"She took me," says his highness,
"round the park and garden, and showed me her dairy and aviary."
His highness then describes the dairy, which, we presume, from a
laudable desire of the "worthy colonel" to bring the article into
fashion, is surrounded with lumps of copper, forming "a gorgeous bed
for rare and curious plants." His highness enumerates the comforts
of the colonel's cocks and hens, and the ducks and the pigeons--he
feels at the sight thereof a fit of "pastoral sensibility" come over
him, and "turns homewards to get rid of his fit of romance before
breakfast:"--"Miss Fanny," he adds, "exclaimed, with true English
pathos,
'We do but row,
And we are steered by fate.'"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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