The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 369, May 9, 1829 by Various
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page 4 of 50 (08%)
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new, and many of the petty feuds and jealousies that divide and
distract parishes or large families, the little circles of the great whole. At the foot of this column a paragraph records the death of a miserly bachelor schoolmaster, who had worn the same coat twenty years, and on the tester of whose bed were found, wrapped up in old stockings £1,600. in interest notes, commencing thirty-five years since, the compound interest of which would have been £4,000.; and for what purpose was this concealment?--a dread of being required to assist his relatives! Yet contrast this wicked abuse with a few of the incidents we have recorded--the dinner of St. Patrick's, for instance, and is it possible to conceive a more despicable situation (short of crime) than this poor miser deserves in our chronicle. The third column opens to us a scene of a very opposite character, the Newmarket Craven Meeting--the most brilliant assemblage ever known there; the town crammed with the children of chance, the innkeepers trebling their charges, and like the Doncaster people, doing "noting widout the guinea." What an heterogeneous mixture of fine old sport, black legs and consciences, panting steeds and hearts bursting with expectation and despair, and the grand machinery of chance working with mathematical truth, and not unfrequently beneath luxury and the mere show of hospitality. The moralist will turn away from this rural pandemonium with disgust; but what will he say to the records of wretchedness and crime that fill up nearly the remainder of the folio. A Coroner's Inquest upon a fellow creature who "died from neglect, and want of common food to support life"--and another upon a poor girl, whose young and tender wits being "turned to folly,"--died by a draught of laudanum--are still more lamentable items in the calendar. |
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