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The Handy Volume "Waverly" ...: Redgauntlet
The Handy Volume Waverly Redgauntlet Author:Walter Scott 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: LETTER III. Daroie Latimer to Alan Shepherd's Bush. HAVE received thine absurd and most con- I ccitcd epistle. It is well for thee that, Ixjvelace I and... more » Belford-like, we came under a convention to pardon every species of liberty which we may take with each other, since, upon my word, there are some reflections in your last which would otherwise have obliged me to return forthwith to Edinburgh, merely to show you I was not what you took me for. Why, what a pair of prigs hast thou made of us!— I plunging into scrapes, without having courage to get out of them—thy sagacious self, afraid to put one foot before the other lest it should run away from its companion, and so standing still like a post, out of mere faintness and coldness of heart, while all the world were driving full speed past thee. Thou a portrait- painter!—I tell thee, Alan, I have seen a better seated on the fourth round of a ladder, and painting a bare- breeched Highlander, holding a pint-stoup as big as himself, and a booted Lowlander, in a bob-wig, supporting a glass of like dimensions; the whole being designed to represent the sign of the Salutation. How hadst thou the heart to represent thine own individual self, with all thy motions, like those of a great Dutch doll, depending on the pressure of certain springs, as duty, reflection, and the like; without the impulse of which, thou wouklst doubtless have me believe, thou wouldst not budge an inch? But have I not seen Gravity out of his bed at midnight? and must I, in. plain terms, remind thee of certain mad pranks? Thou hadst ever, with the gravest sentiments ill thy mouth, and the most starched reserve in thy manner, a kind of lumbering proclivity towards mischief, although with more inclination to set it a-going, than address to carry it through; ...« less