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His body was indefatigable, doing him yeoman's service in this breathless chase of pleasures. On April 11, 1662, he mentions that he went to bed "weary, WHICH I SELDOM AM;" and already over thirty, he would sit up all night cheerfully to see a comet. But it is never pleasure that exhausts the pleasure-seeker; for in that career, as in all others, it is failure that kills.
She was comforted by her daughter's coming to her while the Queen was dressing, showing herself quiet and composed. The day was fine, with a winter sun shining brightly, as all England, especially all London knew, for many a pleasure-seeker was abroad betimes to enjoy the holiday. The marriage was to take place, like the Queen's marriage, in the little Chapel Royal of St. James's.
The best example of this which ever existed in mediæval France, and which exists to-day in a more than ordinary remarkable state of preservation, is the famous Mount St. Michel, a few miles only to the eastward, and famed of all, historian, ecclesiast, artist, and mere pleasure-seeker, alike.
If he were weary of the city, there was the Marmora, always ready to reiterate the hues of the sky, and in it the Isles of the Princes, their verdurous shades permeated with dreamful welcome to the pleasure-seeker as well as the monk; or if he longed for a further flight, old Asia made haste with enticing invitation to some of the villas strewing its littoral behind the Isles; and yonder, to the eye fainting in the distance, scarce more than a pale blue boundary cloud, the mountain beloved by the gods, whither they were wont to assemble at such times as they wished to learn how it fared with Ilium and the sons of Priam, or to enliven their immortality with loud symposia.
We always note a deficiency in the man whose life is lived for the present, for immediate enjoyment: in him we see the typical pleasure-seeker, peculiarly prone to temptation, to break the rules of life, to indulge himself at the expense of others or of his own future. He is characteristically the weakling, the wrongdoer.
It is not likely that in the broad sense he will ever be a popular writer, for the mass of novel-readers are an idle and pleasure-loving folk, and no mere idler and pleasure-seeker will read Meredith often or read him long at a time. The little book which the angel gave to John of Patmos, commanding that he should eat it, was like honey in the mouth, but in the belly it was bitter.
Them no pleasure-seeker counts among his opportunities, no foreigner visits as essential for his study of the English soul. Not even our literary men and Civil Servants, who talk so much about architecture, discuss their architecture in the clubs. Not one in a thousand of us has ever known a human soul among their inhabitants. To the comfortable classes the Libyan desert is more familiar.
He is versed in parades, mass meetings, caucuses, and will soon shine on the stump. I observe, also, that he is not far behind us in the observance of the fashions, and that he is as good a church-goer, theatre-goer, and pleasure-seeker generally, as his means will allow.
As a peroration, I shall expand upon the subject of pleasure as an incidental of work showing how the mere pleasure-seeker never finds what he is seeking, but that the man who works is the one who finds pleasure. I think I shall be able to find some apt quotation from Emerson before the time for the speech comes around.
For Etta and Susan the city had meant shabby to filthy tenements, toil and weariness and sorrow. There was opened to their ravished young eyes "the city" what reveals itself to the pleasure-seeker with pocket well filled what we usually think of when we pronounce its name, forgetting what its reality is for all but a favored few of those within its borders.
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