This page has been validated.
144
PAUL CLIFFORD.
have, at these moments, a finer opinion of ourselves than we ever had before. We call our megrims, the melancholy of a sublime soul—the yearnings of an indigestion we denominate yearnings after immortality—nay, sometimes 'a proof of the nature of the soul!' May I find some biographer who understands such sensations well, and may he style those melting emotions the offspring of the poetical character,[1] which, in reality, are the offspring of—a mutton chop!"
"You jest pleasantly enough on your low spirits," said Clifford; "but I have a cause for mine."
"What then?" cried Tomlinson. "So much
- ↑ Vide "Moore's Life of Byron."—In which it is satisfactorily shown that, if a man fast forty-eight hours, then eat three lobsters, and drink God knows how many bottles of claret—if, when he wake the next morning, he sees himself abused as a demon by half the periodicals of the country—if the afternoon be passed in interviews with his duns, or misunderstandings with his wife—if, in a word, he be broken in his health, irregular in his habits, unfortunate in his affairs, unhappy in his home—and if, then, he should be so extremely eccentric as to be low-spirited and misanthropical, the low spirits and the misanthropy are by no means to be attributed to the above agreeable circumstances—but God wot—to the "poetical character!"
