The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable FamilyThackeray, William Makepeace
General
The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family
Thackeray, William Makepeace
Domestic fiction; Families -- England -- Fiction
“When Clive has had five or six years at school”—that was his
scheme—“he will be a fine scholar, and have at least as much classical
learning as a gentleman in the world need possess. Then I will go to
England, and we will pass three or four years together, in which he
will learn to be intimate with me, and, I hope, to like me. I shall be
his pupil for Latin and Greek, and try and make up for lost time. I
know there is nothing like a knowledge of the classics to give a man
good breeding—_Ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes emollunt mores, nec
sinuisse feros_. I shall be able to help him with my knowledge of the
world, and to keep him out of the way of sharpers and a pack of rogues
who commonly infest young men. I will make myself his companion, and
pretend to no superiority; for, indeed, isn’t he my superior? Of course
he is, with his advantages. _He_ hasn’t been an idle young scamp as I
was. And we will travel together, first through England, Scotland, and
Ireland, for every man should know his own country, and then we will
make the grand tour. Then, by the time he is eighteen, he will be able
to choose his profession. He can go into the army, and emulate the
glorious man after whom I named him; or if he prefers the church, or
the law, they are open to him; and when he goes to the university, by
which time I shall be in all probability a major-general, I can come
back to India for a few years, and return by the time he has a wife and
a home for his old father; or if I die I shall have done the best for
him, and my boy will be left with the best education, a tolerable small
fortune, and the blessing of his old father.”
Such were the plans of our kind schemer. How fondly he dwelt on them,
how affectionately he wrote of them to his boy! How he read books of
travels and looked over the maps of Europe! and said, “Rome, sir,
glorious Rome; it won’t be very long, Major, before my boy and I see
the Colosseum, and kiss the Pope’s toe. We shall go up the Rhine to
Switzerland, and over the Simplon, the work of the great Napoleon. By
Jove, sir, think of the Turks before Vienna, and Sobieski clearing
eighty thousand of ’em off the face of the earth! How my boy will
rejoice in the picture-galleries there, and in Prince Eugene’s prints!
You know, I suppose, that Prince Eugene, one of the greatest generals
in the world, was also one of the greatest lovers of the fine arts.
_Ingenuas didicisse_, hey, Doctor! you know the rest,—_emollunt mores
nec_——”
“_Emollunt mores!_ Colonel,” says Doctor McTaggart, who perhaps was too
canny to correct the commanding officer’s Latin. “Don’t ye noo that
Prence Eugene was about as savage a Turrk as iver was? Have ye niver
rad the mimores of the Prants de Leen?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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