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Updated: May 10, 2025
It is easy to use negations: to say he did not know nor sympathize with the middle class nor the lower and outcast classes as did Dickens; that his interest was in peccadilloes and sins, not in courageous virtues: and that he judged the world from a club window.
It was whispered that he had in old times done dirty work for Dublin Castle bureaucrats nay, that he had even, in a very hard season, written court poetry for the Morning Post; but all these little peccadilloes he carefully veiled in that kindly mist which hung over his youthful years. He had been a medical student, and got plucked, his foes declared, in his examination.
You are at first faintly reminded of some of the vagaries of the morbid religious diarist; but at a moment's thought the resemblance disappears. The design of Pepys is not at all to edify; it is not from repentance that he chronicles his peccadilloes, for he tells us when he does repent, and, to be just to him, there often follows some improvement.
"Well, Austin," said Mr. Balderby, turning to the cashier, "we may prepare ourselves to meet our new chief very speedily. He must know that you and I cannot be entirely ignorant of the story of his youthful peccadilloes, and he will scarcely give himself airs to us, I should fancy." "I don't know that, Mr.
As regards the clergy, glimpses of a pretty large cloven hoof kept peeping out from under the saintly robe of Pryer's conversation, to the effect, that so long as they were theoretically perfect, practical peccadilloes or even peccadaccios, if there is such a word, were of less importance.
But what gives Ahab his prominence among the Jewish kings is neither his power nor his wealth, but his sinful conduct. For him the gravest transgressions committed by Jeroboam were slight peccadilloes. At his order the gates of Samaria bore the inscription: "Ahab denies the God of Israel."
These were the days for the upper classes: the Church bore them all in her bosom as a tender nursing-mother, and provided for all their little peccadilloes with even grandmotherly indulgence, and in return the world was immensely deferential towards the Church; and it was only now and then some rugged John Baptist, in raiment of camel's hair, like Savonarola, who dared to speak an indecorous word of God's truth in the ear of power, and Herod and Herodias had ever at hand the good old recipe for quieting such disturbances.
I hope you have escaped often since, old sinner. Ah, what a lucky thing it is, for you and me, my man, that we are NOT found out in all our peccadilloes; and that our backs can slip away from the master and the cane! Just consider what life would be, if every rogue was found out, and flogged coram populo! What a butchery, what an indecency, what an endless swishing of the rod!
But peccadilloes such as these, which it is well to realize in view of the absurd claims to artistic impeccability for Thackeray made by rash admirers, melt away into nothing when one recalls Rawdon Crawley's horsewhipping of the Marquis; George Osborn's departure for battle, Colonel Newcome's death, or the incomparable scene where Lady Castlewood welcomes home the wandering Esmond; that "rapture of reconciliation"! It is by such things that great novelists live, and it may be doubted if their errors are ever counted against them, if only they can create in this fashion.
As soon as I was left alone with the Sclavonian woman, she took me up to the garret, where she pointed out my bed in a row with four others, three of which belonged to three young boys of my age, who at that moment were at school, and the fourth to a servant girl whose province it was to watch us and to prevent the many peccadilloes in which school-boys are wont to indulge.
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