The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable FamilyThackeray, William Makepeace
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The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family
Thackeray, William Makepeace
Domestic fiction; Families -- England -- Fiction
“For I remark so many literary gentlemen with that decoration. The Jew
with the beard, as you call him, is Herr von Lungen, the eminent
hautboy-player. The three next gentlemen are Mr. Smee, of the Royal
Academy (who is shaved as you perceive), and Mr. Moyes and Mr. Cropper,
who are both very hairy about the chin. At the piano, singing,
accompanied by Mademoiselle Lebrun, is Signor Mezzocaldo, the great
barytone from Rome. Professor Quartz and Baron Hammerstein, celebrated
geologists from Germany, are talking with their illustrious _confrère_,
Sir Robert Craxton, in the door. Do you see yonder that stout gentleman
with stuff on his shirt? the eloquent Dr. McGuffog, of Edinburgh,
talking to Dr. Ettore, who lately escaped from the Inquisition at Rome
in the disguise of a washerwoman, after undergoing the question several
times, the rack and the thumbscrew. They say that he was to have been
burned in the Grand Square the next morning; but between ourselves, my
dear Colonel, I mistrust these stories of converts and martyrs. Did you
ever see a more jolly-looking man than Professor Schnurr, who was
locked up in Spielberg, and got out up a chimney, and through a window?
Had he waited a few months there are very few windows he could have
passed through. That splendid man in the red fez is Kurbash
Pasha—another renegade, I deeply lament to say—a hairdresser from
Marseilles, by name Monsieur Ferehaud, who passed into Egypt, and laid
aside the _tongs_ for a turban. He is talking with Mr. Palmer, one of
our most delightful young poets, and with Desmond O’Tara, son of the
late revered Bishop of Ballinafad, who has lately quitted ours for the
errors of the Church of Rome. Let me whisper to you that your kinswoman
is rather a searcher after what we call here _notabilities_. I heard
talk of one I knew in better days—of one who was the comrade of my
youth, and the delight of Oxford—poor Pidge of Brasenose, who got the
Newdigate in my third year, and who, under his present name of Father
Bartolo, was to have been here in his capuchin dress, with a beard and
bare feet; but I presume he could not get permission from his Superior.
That is Mr. Huff, the political economist, talking with Mr. Macduff,
the Member for Glenlivat. That is the coroner for Middlesex conversing
with the great surgeon Sir Cutler Sharp, and that pretty laughing girl
talking with them is no other than the celebrated Miss Pinnnifer, whose
novel of Ralph the Resurrectionist created such a sensation after it
was abused in the _Trimestrial Review_. It was a little bold
certainly—I just looked at it at my club—after hours devoted to parish
duty a clergyman is sometimes allowed, you know, _desipere in
loco_—there are descriptions in it certainly startling—ideas about
marriage not exactly orthodox; but the poor child wrote the book
actually in the nursery, and all England was ringing with it before Dr.
Pinnifer, her father, knew who was the author. That is the Doctor
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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