The Steam-Packet: A Tale of the River and the Ocean — page 302: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE STEAM PACKET. 929 tutch, we need not travel far to find them—for they were furnished by his precipitate flight the moment after his removal from office, from the scene of his unsuccessful attempt at sovereign power, and the fact that he departed with half a dozen of the hotel silver spoons in his pocket. - CHAPTER XXI. IN WHICH MR. BUCKRAM ENCOUNTERS A RIVAL OF A DESPERATE DESCRIPTION. WE can scarcely conceive a more humiliating position, to a right- thinking mind, than that of a weak, proud man, reduced from a sphere of wealth which he never lifted a finger to earn, to become a mere narrator of its influence, while he possessed and abused it. Such -men too have we known; men who once held their noses lest the wind should come between an honest mechanic and their nobility, while their own character stank in the public nostrils ; and who, in speaking -of the masses, were wont to dwell upon the hardsNips they entailed on society, and the impropriety of their ever having been born. While ‘we can feel for and deeply sympathise with a truly unfortunate man in the loss of property honestly acquired, we yet regard it as an instruc- tive moral spectacle, when a man of the class we have indicated is seen pointing out with retrospective vanity the splendid palace in which he flourished, and dwelling upon the luxurious condition which (through. accident or something worse) was his, before he was reduced in funds and fashion, and compelled to occupy an humbler station and a less am- -bitious mansion. How different is 2s position, who in walking through - a metropolis where he has acquired wealth and honourable distinction, can point to a rickety workshop or lowly dwelling in an obseure street or alley, and say, ‘“‘ There, by the labour of these hands, and by honest dealings with my fellow men, I laid the sure foundation of that for- tune which I now enjoy.” These observations are made by every well constituted and right thinking mind, after a contemplation of the English “‘ gentlemen’? who are seen lurking about the Grande Place, on the pier, or in the cafés at Calais. ‘They have nearly all known wealth—at all events they have been acquainted with ‘‘ better days,” as the phrase goes; and all . that remains for them is to talk of the times when they hunted with (E(0) Gomichooks