The names of all these celebrated men, together with
the wicked deeds for which they were admired, were given in detail,
after the true historic method. We all take a great interestin
reading every particular relating to the lives of notorious tyrants
and great sinners; we like to know what clothes they wore, and how
they swore. But the lives of great and good men and women are very
uninteresting; some young ladies even, when travelling by train,
prefer, as I observe, French novels inspired by Cloacina to the
"Lives of the Saints."
Some people in the colonies are said to have had no grandfathers; but
John Smithers was even more deficient in pedigree, for he had neither
father nor mother, as far as he could recollect. He commenced life
as a stable boy and general drudge in England, at a village inn owned
and conducted by a widow named Cobbledick. This widow had a
daughter named Jemima. The mischief wrought in this world by women,
from Eve to Jemima downwards, is incalculable, and Smithers averred
that it was this female, Jemima, who brought on his sorrow, grief,
and woe. She was very advanced in wordly science, as young ladies
are apt to be when they are educated in the retail liquor trade. When
Smithers had been several years at the inn, and Jemima was already in
her teens, she thought the world went slowly; she had no lover, there
was nobody coming to marry her, nobody coming to woo.
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