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They have better heads, stronger wills, richer natures than the good and kind ones who are their butts. Dobbin, as the author himself tells us, "is a spooney." Amelia, as he says also, "is a little fool." Peggy O'Dowd, dear old goody, is the laughing-stock of the regiment, though she is also its grandmother. Vanity Fair has here and there some virtuous and generous characters.
But here you sit defenseless tied to the whim of a horse greased for a runaway. The beast Dobbin turns his head and holds you with his hard eye. There is a convulsive movement along his back, a preface, it may be, to a sudden seizure. A real friend would have loosed the straps that run along the horse's flanks. Then, if any deviltry take him, he might go off alone and have it out.
Captain Dobbin was an especial favourite of this old General. Dobbin was versed in the literature of his profession, and could talk about the great Frederick, and the Empress Queen, and their wars, almost as well as the General himself, who was indifferent to the triumphs of the present day, and whose heart was with the tacticians of fifty years back.
"From the smiling bays of Devonshire To the frowning cliffs of Filey, Leaps forth every son of an English sire, To fight for his native isley. He hath drawn the sword of his father now From the rusty sheath it rattled in; And Dobbin, who dragged the peaceful plough, Is neighing for the battle-din.
He always was. I remember the confounded blackleg and the way in which he used to cheat and hoodwink poor George. Wasn't there a scandal about their separation? I think I heard something," cried out Major Dobbin, who did not care much about gossip, and whom Jos tried in vain to convince that Mrs. Becky was in all respects a most injured and virtuous female. "Well, well; let's ask Mrs.
He would not listen: and so, as Dobbin, upon those days when he visited the Osborne house, seldom had the advantage of meeting his old friend, much painful and unavailing talk between them was spared. Our friend George was in the full career of the pleasures of Vanity Fair.
These were home letters bearing an earlier postmark than that of the former packets, and as Major Dobbin recognized among his the handwriting of his sister, who always crossed and recrossed her letters to her brother gathered together all the possible bad news which she could collect, abused him and read him lectures with sisterly frankness, and always left him miserable for the day after "dearest William" had achieved the perusal of one of her epistles the truth must be told that dearest William did not hurry himself to break the seal of Miss Dobbin's letter, but waited for a particularly favourable day and mood for doing so.
Dobbin was much too modest a young fellow to suppose that this happy change in all his circumstances arose from his own generous and manly disposition; he chose, from some perverseness, to attribute his good fortune to the sole agency and benevolence of little George Osborne, to whom henceforth he vowed such a love and affection as is only felt by children, an affection as we read of in the charming fairy-book, which uncouth Orson had for splendid young Valentine, his conqueror.
Dobbin was not as young and frisky as Prince, so they jogged along, looking at the gardens, the trees, the wild masses of vines and sumac, and then stretches of rocky space interspersed with squatters' cabins and the goats, pigs, geese, and chickens. Sometimes in after years when she rode through Central Park, she wondered if she had not dreamed all this, instead of seeing it with her own eyes.
And each time they prayed to God to bless dear papa, as if he were alive and in the room with them. Besides her pension of fifty pounds a year, as an army officer's widow, there had been five hundred pounds left with the agent of her estate for her, for which Amelia did not know that she was indebted to Major Dobbin, until years later.
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