exion, with blood on your
conscience, upwards of six feet high, and accustomed to wander from land
to land, like Childe Harold. You were extremely Vealy when you used to
fancy that you were sure to be a very great man, and to think how proud
your relations would some day be of you, and how you would come back and
excite a great commotion at the place where you used to be a school-boy.
And it is because the world has still left some impressionable spot in
your hearts, my readers, that you still have so many fond associations
with "the school-boy spot we ne'er forget, though we are there
forgot." They were Vealy days, though pleasant to remember, my old
school-companions, in which you used to go to the dancing-school, (it
was in a gloomy theatre, seldom entered by actors,) in which you fell
in love with several young ladies about eleven years old, and (being
permitted occasionally to select your own partners) made frantic rushes
to obtain the hand of one of the beauties of that small society. Those
were the days in which you thought, that, when you grew up, it would
be a very fine thing to be a pirate, bandit, or corsair, rather than a
clergyman, barrister, or the like; even a cheerful outlaw like Robin
Hood did not come up to your views; you would rather have been a man
like Captain Kyd, stained with various crimes of extreme atrocity, which
would entirely preclude the possibility of returning to respectable
society, and given to moody laughter in solitary moments. Oh, what truly
asinine developments the human being must go through, before arriving at
the stage of common sense! You were very Vealy, too, when you used
to think it a fine thing to astonish people by expressing awful
sentiments,--such as that you thought Mahometans better than Christians,
that you would like to be dissected after death, that you did not care
what you got for dinner, that you liked learning your lessons better
than going out to play, that you would rather read Euclid than
"Ivanhoe," and the like. It may be remarked, that this peculiar
Vealiness is not confined to youth; I have seen it appearing very
strongly in men with gray hair. Another manifestation of Vealiness,
which appears both in age and youth, is the entertaining a strong belief
that kings, noblemen, and baronets are always in a condition of ecstatic
happiness. I have known people pretty far advanced in life, who not only
believed that monarchs must be perfectly happy, but that all who