Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray (english readers .TXT) 📖

well as the actions of those fairy-tale princes, those perfect impossible heroes, whom our writers love to describe? There is something naive and simple in that time-honoured style of novel-writing by which Prince Prettyman, at the end of his adventures, is put in possession of every worldly prosperity, as he has been endowed with every mental and bodily excellence previously. The novelist thinks that he can do no more for his darling hero than make him a lord. Is it not a poor standard that, of the summum bonum? The greatest good in life is not to be a lord; perhaps not even to be happy. Poverty, illness, a humpback, may be rewards and conditions of good, as well as that bodily prosperity which all of us unconsciously set up for worship. But this is a subject for an essay, not a note; and it is best to allow Mr. Lyndon to resume the candid and ingenious narrative of his virtues and defects.]

Her infernal temper (Mrs. Stammer was the jade’s name) and my wife’s moody despondency, made my house and home not over-pleasant: hence I was driven a good deal abroad, where, as play was the fashion at every club, tavern, and assembly, I, of course, was obliged to resume my old habit, and to commence as an amateur those games at which I was once unrivalled in Europe. But whether a man’s temper changes with prosperity, or his skill leaves him when, deprived of a confederate, and pursuing the game no longer professionally, he joins in it, like the rest of the world, for pastime, I know not; but certain it is, that in the seasons of 1774-75 I lost much money at ‘White’s’ and the ‘Cocoa-Tree,’ and was compelled to meet my losses by borrowing largely upon my wife’s annuities, insuring her Ladyship’s life, and so forth. The terms at which I raised these necessary sums and the outlays requisite for my improvements were, of course, very onerous, and clipped the property considerably; and it was some of these papers which my Lady Lyndon (who was of a narrow, timid, and stingy turn) occasionally refused to sign: until I PERSUADED her, as I have before shown.

My dealings on the turf ought to be mentioned, as forming part of my history at this time; but, in truth, I have no particular pleasure in recalling my Newmarket doings. I was infernally bit and bubbled in almost every one of my transactions there; and though I could ride a horse as well as any man in England, was no match with the English noblemen at backing him. Fifteen years after my horse, Bay Bulow, by Sophy Hardcastle, out of Eclipse, lost the Newmarket stakes, for which he was the first favourite, I found that a noble earl, who shall be nameless, had got into his stable the morning before he ran; and the consequence was that an outside horse won, and your humble servant was out to the amount of fifteen thousand pounds. Strangers had no chance in those days on the heath: and, though dazzled by the splendour and fashion assembled there, and surrounded by the greatest persons of the land,—the royal dukes, with their wives and splendid equipages; old Grafton, with his queer bevy of company, and such men as Ancaster, Sandwich, Lorn,—a man might have considered himself certain of fair play and have been not a little proud of the society he kept; yet, I promise you, that, exalted as it was, there was no set of men in Europe who knew how to rob more genteelly, to bubble a stranger, to bribe a jockey, to doctor a horse, or to arrange a betting-book. Even I couldn’t stand against these accomplished gamesters of the highest families in Europe. Was it my own want of style, or my want of fortune? I know not. But now I was arrived at the height of my ambition, both my skill and my luck seemed to be deserting me. Everything I touched crumbled in my hand; every speculation I had failed, every agent I trusted deceived me. I am, indeed, one of those born to make, and not to keep fortunes; for the qualities and energy which lead a man to effect the first are often the very causes of his ruin in the latter case: indeed, I know of no other reason for the misfortunes which finally befell me. [Footnote: The Memoirs seem to have been written about the year 1814, in that calm retreat which Fortune had selected for the author at the close of his life.]

I had always a taste for men of letters, and perhaps, if the truth must be told, have no objection to playing the fine gentleman and patron among the wits. Such people are usually needy, and of low birth, and have an instinctive awe and love of a gentleman and a laced coat; as all must have remarked who have frequented their society. Mr. Reynolds, who was afterwards knighted, and certainly the most elegant painter of his day, was a pretty dexterous courtier of the wit tribe; and it was through this gentleman, who painted a piece of me, Lady Lyndon, and our little Bryan, which was greatly admired at the Exhibition (I was represented as quitting my wife, in the costume of the Tippleton Yeomanry, of which I was major; the child starting back from my helmet like what-d’ye-call’im—Hector’s son, as described by Mr. Pope in his ‘Iliad’); it was through Mr. Reynolds that I was introduced to a score of these gentlemen, and their great chief, Mr. Johnson. I always thought their great chief a great bear. He drank tea twice or thrice at my house, misbehaving himself most grossly; treating my opinions with no more respect than those of a schoolboy, and telling me to mind my horses and tailors, and not trouble myself about letters. His Scotch bear-leader, Mr. Boswell, was a butt of the first quality. I never saw such a figure as the fellow cut in what he called a Corsican habit, at one of Mrs. Cornely’s balls, at Carlisle House, Soho. But that the stories connected with that same establishment are not the most profitable tales in the world, I could tell tales of scores of queer doings there. All the high and low demireps of the town gathered there, from his Grace of Ancaster down to my countryman, poor Mr. Oliver Goldsmith the poet, and from the Duchess of Kingston down to the Bird of Paradise, or Kitty Fisher. Here I have met very queer characters, who came to queer ends too: poor Hackman, that afterwards was hanged for killing Miss Reay, and (on the sly) his Reverence Doctor Simony, whom my friend Sam Foote, of the ‘Little Theatre,’ bade to live even after forgery and the rope cut short the unlucky parson’s career.

It was a merry place, London, in those days, and that’s the truth. I’m writing now in my gouty old age, and people have grown vastly more moral and matter-of-fact than they were at the close of the last century, when the world was young with me. There was a difference between a gentleman and a common fellow in those times. We wore silk and embroidery then. Now every man has the same coachmanlike look in his belcher and caped coat, and there is no outward difference between my Lord and his groom. Then it took a man of fashion a couple of hours to make his toilette, and he could show some taste and genius in the selecting it. What a blaze of splendour was a drawing-room, or an opera, of a gala night! What sums of money were lost and won at the delicious faro-table! My gilt curricle and out-riders, blazing in green and gold, were very different objects from the equipages you see nowadays in the ring, with the stunted grooms behind them. A man could drink four times as much as the milksops nowadays can swallow; but ‘tis useless expatiating on this theme. Gentlemen are dead and gone. The fashion has now turned upon your soldiers and sailors, and I grow quite moody and sad when I think of thirty years ago.

This is a chapter devoted to reminiscences of what was a very happy and splendid time with me, but presenting little of mark in the way of adventure; as is