Kenelm Chillingly — Complete eBook

I leave this place to-morrow morning in company with a friend of the name of Bowles:  no relation to the reverend gentleman of that name who held the doctrine that a poet should bore us to death with fiddle-faddle minutia of natural objects in preference to that study of the insignificant creature Man, in his relations to his species, to which Mr. Pope limited the range of his inferior muse; and who, practising as he preached, wrote some very nice verses, to which the Lake school and its successors are largely indebted.  My Mr. Bowles has exercised his faculty upon Man, and has a powerful inborn gift in that line which only requires cultivation to render him a match for any one.  His more masculine nature is at present much obscured by that passing cloud which, in conventional language, is called “a hopeless attachment.”  But I trust, in the course of our excursion, which is to be taken on foot, that this vapour may consolidate by motion, as some old-fashioned astronomers held that the nebula does consolidate into a matter-of-fact world.  Is it Rochefoucauld who says that a man is never more likely to form a hopeful attachment for one than when his heart is softened by a hopeless attachment to another?  May it be long, my dear father, before you condole with me on the first or congratulate me on the second.

   Your affectionate son,

     KENELM.

Direct to me at Mr. Travers’s.  Kindest love to my mother.

The answer to this letter is here subjoined as the most convenient place for its insertion, though of course it was not received till some days after the date of my next chapter.

SIR PETER CHILLINGLY, BART., TO KENELM CHILLINGLY, ESQ.

MY DEAR Boy,—­With this I despatch the portmanteau you require to the address that you give.  I remember well Leopold Travers when he was in the Guards,—­a very handsome and a very wild young fellow.  But he had much more sense than people gave him credit for, and frequented intellectual society; at least I met him very often at my friend Campion’s, whose house was then the favourite rendezvous of distinguished persons.  He had very winning manners, and one could not help taking an interest in him.  I was very glad when I heard he had married and reformed.  Here I beg to observe that a man who contracts a taste for low company may indeed often marry, but he seldom reforms when he does so.  And, on the whole, I should be much pleased to hear that the experience which has cost you forty-five pounds had convinced you that you might be better employed than earning two, or even six shillings as a day-labourer.

I have not given your love to your mother, as you requested.  In fact, you have placed me in a very false position towards that other author of your eccentric being.  I could only guard you from the inquisition of the police and the notoriety of descriptive hand-bills by allowing my lady to suppose that you had gone abroad with the Duke of Clairville and his family.  It is easy to tell a fib, but it is very difficult to untell it.  However, as soon as you have made up your mind to resume your normal position among ladies and gentlemen, I should be greatly obliged if you would apprise me.  I don’t wish to keep a fib on my conscience a day longer than may be necessary to prevent the necessity of telling another.