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Smiles and Tears, Or The Romance of Life (1848)
Smiles and Tears Or The Romance of Life - 1848 Author:Charles Whitehead Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: EDWARD SAVILLE. The doctor tells me I must take no wine. Pshaw ! It is not that which mounts into my brain; and sometimes—but I must not wander. Wine is the b... more »est corrector of these fancies: one bottle more of sober claret, and I shall be able to finish before midnight the brief sketch of my life which I promised Travers long ago. It were worse than useless to set down any particulars of my boyhood. An only son is usually a spoiled one, and that which is so easy and delightful a task to most parents, was by no means difficult or unpleasant to mine ; and yet, to do myself justice, I believe I was not more conceited, insolent, selfish, and rapacious than others are during those days of innocence, as they are called,—those days of innocence which form the germ of that noble and disinterested creature, man. At the age of three-and-twenty I succeeded to my father's estate. It was to divert a sense of loneliness which beset me that I plunged into—as they term it, but the phrase is a wrong one,—that I ventured uponthe course of folly and dissipation into which so many young men of fortune like myself hurry themselves, or are led, or are driven. But why recount these scenes of pleasure—so called, or miscalled, whose reaction is utter weariness, satiety, and disgust ? I was at the theatre one night, when the friend who accompanied me directed my attention to t very lovely girl, who, with her mother and a party of friends, occupied the next box. She was, certainly., the loveliest creature my eyes had ever lighted upon;' with a sylph-like form, (that is the usual phrase, I believe,) wanting perhaps that complete roundness of limb which is considered essential to perfect beauty in a woman—but she was barely sixteen,—and yet suggesting, too, the idea of consummate symmetry. Her face...« less