📔 The History of Pendennis

If the secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

As you come in the desert to a ground where camels' hoofs are marked in the clay, and traces of withered herbage are yet visible, you know that water was there once;

Bred up, like a bailiff or a shabby attorney, about the purlieus of the Inns of Court, Shepherd’s Inn is always to be found in the close neighbourhood of Lincoln’s-Inn Fields, and the Temple.

When our Mahmouds or Selims of Baker Street or Belgrave Square visit their Fatimas with condign punishment, their mothers sew up Fatima’s sack for her, and her sisters and sisters-in-law see her well under water.

A britzka came up at this moment as the three men were speaking.

I like better gin-and-water than claret. I like a sanded floor in Carnaby Market better than a chalked one in Mayfair. I prefer Snobs, I own it.

[A]s the London coaches drove up, which in those early days used to set off from the George, Mr. Foker flung the coffee-room window open, and called the guards and coachmen by their Christian names, too, asking about their respective families, and imitating with great liveliness and accuracy the tooting of the horns as Jem the ostler whipped the horses’ cloths off, and the carriages drove gaily away.

You treat me like a slave, and bid me bow to my master! Is this the guerdon of a free maiden—is this the price of a life’s passion?

Susan Bonner’s mistress hearing of Strong’s arrival sent for him at this juncture, and the Chevalier went up to her ladyship not without hopes that he should find her more tractable than her factotum Mrs. Bonner.

What glamour of infatuation was it which made that nonsense beautiful? One wonders that such puling and trash could ever have made one happy. And yet there were dates when you kissed those silly letters with rapture—lived upon six absurd lines for a week, and until the reactionary period came, when you were restless and miserable until you got a fresh supply of folly.