The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer — CompleteLever, Charles
General
The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer — Complete
Lever, Charles
Fiction
These, with the addition of a pair of green spectacles, the glass of
one being absent, and permitting the look-out of a sharp, grey eye,
twinkling with drollery and good humour, form the most palpable of his
externals. In point of character, they who best knew him represented
him as the best-tempered, best-hearted fellow breathing; ever ready to
assist a friend, and always postponing his own plans and his own views,
when he had any, to the wishes and intentions of others. Among the many
odd things about him, was a constant preference to travelling on foot,
and a great passion for living abroad, both of which tastes he
gratified, although his size might seem to offer obstacles to the one,
and his total ignorance of every continental language, would appear to
preclude the other; with a great liking for tobacco, which he smoked
all day—a fondness for whist and malt liquors—his antipathies were few;
so that except when called upon to shave more than once in the week, or
wash his hands twice on the same day, it was difficult to disconcert
him. His fortune was very ample; but although his mode of living was
neither very ostentatious nor costly, he contrived always to spend his
income. Such was the gentleman I now presented to my friends, who, I
must confess, appeared strangely puzzled by his manner and appearance.
This feeling, however, soon wore off; and before he had spent the
morning in their company, he had made more way in their good graces,
and gone farther to establish intimacy, than many a more accomplished
person, with an unexceptionable coat and accurate whisker might have
effected in a fortnight. What were his gifts in this way, I am, alas,
most deplorably ignorant of; it was not, heaven knows, that he
possessed any conversational talent—of successful flattery he knew as
much as a negro does of the national debt—and yet the “bon-hommie” of
his character seemed to tell at once; and I never knew him fail in any
one instance to establish an interest for himself before he had
completed the ordinary period of a visit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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