The Desultory Man: Collection of Ancient and Modern British Novels and Romances. Vol. CXLVII.James, G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford)
General
The Desultory Man: Collection of Ancient and Modern British Novels and Romances. Vol. CXLVII.
James, G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford)
Fiction
There are many Protestants in Bordeaux, and consequently a Protestant
chapel, which I have attended frequently. Did you ever remark how
intolerant a persecuted sect becomes? The horrible severities
exercised for long upon the French Protestants have excited in them
the most violent hatred to the Church of Rome; and even from the
pulpit they do not spare their mother church. There is, however, here
one of the best preachers I have ever heard, a Monsieur Vermeille. His
sermons are by no means equally good; but I have heard him on many
occasions burst into the most powerful strain of eloquence you can
conceive. But my own eloquence is becoming rather tedious, and
therefore I shall merely bid you farewell.
Your's ever,
J.P.Y.
LA CHASSE.
* * * * But if the sylvan youth,
Whose fervent blood boils into violence,
Must have the chase, behold, despising flight,
The roused-up lion, resolute and slow,
Advancing full on the protended spear.--THOMSOM.
I had been wandering about one day in the neighbourhood of Bordeaux,
indulging a variety of desultory meditations, following the uneven
tenor of my own mind, sometimes sad and sometimes gay, and sometimes
of that odd mixed nature where melancholy and mirth are so intimately
commingled, that there is no separating them, when turning round an
angle in the road, I had a figure before me whose occupations puzzled
me not a little. He was one of that class of beings now nearly
extinct, who still cling with pertinacity to powder and pigtails. His
face was round, his cheekbones high, his complexion mummy-coloured,
his nose turned up and primed with snuff, and in the cavities on each
side stood two little dark eyes like black currants shining through a
dumpling. The castor which covered his head was intended for a modern
hat, but it had still a strange hankering for the form of the
old-fashioned shovel, far more pinched behind than before, with the
rear rim strongly turned up, as if to avoid the collar of his coat. It
seemed that his head had been so long accustomed to wear cocked-hats,
that whatever he put upon it assumed something of that form. To finish
the whole, on each side under the brim lay two long rows of powdered
curls, which flew off in an airy pigtail behind. This sort of man
ought to be recorded, for in the course of years it will become
unknown, like the mammoth; and strange remnants of whigs and pigtails
will be found to puzzle the naturalist and antiquary.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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