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Updated: June 14, 2025
Two men only were visible upon the after deck; the one lay reclining upon an arm chest, muffled up in a dread-nought pea jacket, the other paced up and down hurriedly, and with an air of deep pre-occupation.
They, it is true, had suffered greatly in the recent sanguinary action with their enemies; but the excitement of victory, and the intense sympathy with their unexampled triumph, had again swelled their ranks and would probably act with the force of a vortex to draw in their simple countrymen from the Caspian. The question, therefore, of pre-occupation was reduced to a race.
"It is quite air-tight, I think," he said with some satisfaction, as he smoothed his hair with his hand. "Oh, quite," said Mrs. Goddard. "It was so very good of you." "Not a bit of it," returned the squire cheerily. "A landlord's chief pre-occupation ought to be the comfort of his tenants and his next thought should be to keep his houses in repair.
We have seen John in nothing but the stormiest conditions; we have seen him reckless, desperate, tried beyond his moderate powers: of his daily self, cheerful, regular, not unthrifty, we have seen nothing; and it may thus be a surprise to the reader to learn that he was studiously careful of his health. This favourite pre-occupation now awoke.
The engendering idea of some works is stylistic; a technical pre-occupation stands them instead of some robuster principle of life. And with these the execution is but play; for the stylistic problem is resolved beforehand, and all large originality of treatment wilfully foregone.
Here I am in another digression, and sorry am I not to follow it out further; but for the present I must not so now, to try back: I will suppose my absentee friend to have passed his “day in town,” amazed and surprised at the various changes about him; I will not bewilder him with any glance at our politics, nor puzzle him with that game of cross corners by which every one seems to have changed his place; nor attempt any explanation of the mysterious doctrine by which the party which affects the strongest attachment to the sovereign should exult in any defeat to her armies; nor how the supporters of the government contribute to its stability, by rabid attacks on its members, and absurd comparisons of their own fitness for affairs, with the heads of our best and wisest. These things he must have remembered long ago, and with respect to them, we are pretty much as we were; but I will introduce him to an evening party a society where the élite of Dublin are assembled; where, amid the glare of wax lights, and the more brilliant blaze of beauty, our fairest women and most gifted and exalted men are met together for enjoyment. At first blush there will appear to him to have been no alteration nor change here. Even the very faces he will remember are the same he saw a dozen years ago: some pursy gentlemen with bald foreheads or grey whiskers who danced before, are now grown whisters; a few of the ladies, who then figured in the quadrille, have assumed the turban, and occupy an ottoman; the gay, laughing, light-hearted youth he formerly hobnobbed with at supper, is become a rising barrister, and has got up a look of learned pre-occupation, much more imposing to his sister than to Sir Edward Sugden; the wild, reckless collegeman, whose name was a talisman in the “Shades,” is now a soft-voiced young physician, vibrating in his imitation of the two great leaders in his art, and alternately assuming the “Epic or the Lake” school of physic. All this may amuse, but cannot amaze him: such is the natural current of events, and he ought to be prepared for it. The evening wears on, however; the frigid politeness and ceremonious distance which we have for some years back been borrowing from our neighbours, and which seem to suit our warmer natures pretty much as a suit of plate armour would a danseuse in a ballet this begins to wear off, and melt away before the genial heat of Irish temperament; “the mirth and fun grow fast and furious;” and a new dance is called for. What, then, is the amazement, shall I say the horror, of our friend to hear the band strike up a tune which he only remembered as associated with everything base, low, and disgraceful; which, in the days of his “libertine youth,” he only heard at riotous carousals and roistering festivals; whose every bar is associated with words ay, there’s the rub which, in his maturer years, he blushes to have listened to! he stares about him in wonderment; for a moment he forgets that the young lady who dances with such evident enjoyment of the air, is ignorant of its history; he watches her sparkling eye and animated gesture, without remembering that she knows nothing of the associations at which her partner is, perhaps, smirking; he sees her vis-
She was waiting patiently for him to wake up to the fact that he had not yet given her anything to eat; after helping Annie and the boy, he helped himself, and pending his wife's pre-occupation with the tea, he forgot her. "Why didn't you throw something at me," he roared, in grief and self-reproach.
There is absolutely no dispute about this fact either namely that the main pre-occupation of a consular officer, charged primarily under the Treaties with the simple preservation of law and order among his nationals, was the closing-up of a vexatious outstanding case, by force if necessary, before he handed over his office to his successor.
As it has been, so it will be, now, henceforth, and for ever, in and out, in and out, without pause or stint, futile, trivial, silly, stale, tedious, monotonous, and vain! The long pre-occupation of men with religion, philosophy, and art, seemed to me now as incomprehensible as it was ridiculous. There was nothing after all to be interested about! There was simply this!
Their conscience was sickened, their imagination hag-ridden, by the discovery of so much beauty united to so much corruption; and, among our latter-day students of the Renaissance, there became manifest the same morbid pre-occupation, the same exaggerated repulsion, which is but inverted attraction, which were rife among the playwrights who wrote of Avengers and Atheists, Giovannis and Annabellas, Brachianos and Corombonas, and other White Devils, as old Webster picturesquely put it, of Italy.
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