So these worthy people sat down to dinner presently.
They talked about war and glory, and Boney and Lord
Wellington, and the last Gazette. In those famous
days every gazette had a victory in it, and the two
gallant young men longed to see their own names in
the glorious list, and cursed their unlucky fate to
belong to a regiment which had been away from the
chances of honour. Miss Sharp kindled with this
exciting talk, but Miss Sedley trembled and grew quite
faint as she heard it. Mr. Jos told several of
his tiger-hunting stories, finished the one about
Miss Cutler and Lance the surgeon; helped Rebecca
to everything on the table, and himself gobbled and
drank a great deal.
He sprang to open the door for the ladies, when they
retired, with the most killing grace—and
coming back to the table, filled himself bumper after
bumper of claret, which he swallowed with nervous
rapidity.
“He’s priming himself,” Osborne
whispered to Dobbin, and at length the hour and the
carriage arrived for Vauxhall.
Vauxhall
I know that the tune I am piping is a very mild one
(although there are some terrific chapters coming
presently), and must beg the good-natured reader
to remember that we are only discoursing at present
about a stockbroker’s family in Russell Square,
who are taking walks, or luncheon, or dinner, or talking
and making love as people do in common life, and without
a single passionate and wonderful incident to mark
the progress of their loves. The argument stands
thus—Osborne, in love with Amelia, has asked
an old friend to dinner and to Vauxhall—Jos
Sedley is in love with Rebecca. Will he marry
her? That is the great subject now in hand.
We might have treated this subject in the genteel,
or in the romantic, or in the facetious manner.
Suppose we had laid the scene in Grosvenor Square,
with the very same adventures—would not
some people have listened? Suppose we had shown
how Lord Joseph Sedley fell in love, and the Marquis
of Osborne became attached to Lady Amelia, with the
full consent of the Duke, her noble father: or
instead of the supremely genteel, suppose we had resorted
to the entirely low, and described what was going
on in Mr. Sedley’s kitchen—how black
Sambo was in love with the cook (as indeed he was),
and how he fought a battle with the coachman in her
behalf; how the knife-boy was caught stealing a cold
shoulder of mutton, and Miss Sedley’s new femme
de chambre refused to go to bed without a wax candle;
such incidents might be made to provoke much delightful
laughter, and be supposed to represent scenes of “life.”
Or if, on the contrary, we had taken a fancy for the
terrible, and made the lover of the new femme de chambre
a professional burglar, who bursts into the house
with his band, slaughters black Sambo at the feet of
his master, and carries off Amelia in her night-dress,
not to be let loose again till the third volume, we
