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He spent an hour and a half in walking about the streets, prying into all manner of dingy little bars and tap-rooms, in narrow back streets and down by the water-side; and then was fain to go across to Lincolnshire once more, and watch the departure of the train.
If it be absolutely necessary that my fortune should be enjoyed by women, I will bestow it upon a convent, where I will retire for the rest of my life; but I certainly would prefer becoming the wife of a poor, obscure, but noble-minded student, thirsting for glory and ambitious of making illustrious his plebeian name, seeking among the dust of ages for the secret of fame ... than to marry one of the degenerate scions of an old family, who crawl around crushed by the weight of their formidable name; these little burlesque noblemen who retain nothing of their high position but pride and vanity; who can neither think, act, work nor suffer for their country; these disabled knights who wage war against bailiffs and make their names notorious in the police offices and tap-rooms of the Boulevard.
All passing in a great cloud of dust, with cries, songs and trumpet calls, between two rows of miserable shacks, where could be seen prostitutes applying their make-up at their doors, tap-rooms full of soldiers and the stalls of butchers and slaughtermen. The tales I have been told about this place are quite untrue, thought Tartarin, there are fewer "Teurs" here than there are in Marseille.
Blomfield finds the pulpit a safe place for what can hardly be called the courtesies of discussion. I will not dispute the description. I defer to Mr. Blomfield's superior knowledge of taverns and tap-rooms. I notice Mr. Blomfield's great parade of "reverence." I notice also that he speaks of Freethought arguments or objections as "short-sighted folly" and "sheer nonsense."
At night, when he sat in his favourite tap-rooms over his beer, he would entertain his boon companions with the witticisms of Schimmelweis, and always won their applause. A lean old man with kid gloves and a top-hat entered the shop. It was growing dark, and he had peered carefully about before entering.
The Chevalier William of Nassau, natural son of the Stadholder, was very loud and violent in all the taverns and tap-rooms, drinking mighty draughts to the damnation of the Arminians.
Henry Thorne among his other bad qualities had one which his friends regarded as worse than all the others, and which perhaps justified the Ullathorne people in their severity. He loved to consort with low people. He not only drank that might have been forgiven but he drank in tap-rooms with vulgar drinkers; so said his friends, and so said his enemies.
Sometimes they went up stairs, to a private room on the first floor, and there scenes that were almost masonic were enacted. They made the initiated take oaths to render service to himself as well as to the fathers of families. That was the formula. In the tap-rooms, "subversive" pamphlets were read. They treated the government with contempt, says a secret report of that time.
Very galling it was to the king's troops to hear the drums of the citizens beating, and to see armed men patrolling the streets, while they were packing their equipments. It was exasperating to be cooped up in Fort William, with no opportunity to roam the streets, insult the people, drink toddy in the tap-rooms of the Tun and Bacchus and the White Horse taverns.
Old scenery, old clothes, old sentiments, old ranting, and old jokes, are handed down from generation to generation; and will probably continue to be so, until time shall be no more. Every hanger-on of a theater becomes a wag by inheritance, and flourishes about at tap-rooms and six-penny clubs, with the property jokes of the green-room.
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