“As Don Juan says, I make a resolution every spring of reformation ere the year runs out, but I certainly have more confidence in myself now than I ever before had. I will go home, free myself from all fetters of every species of acquaintanceship that can only consume time and give nothing in return, put my shoulder to the wheel, and in one year I shall find if I am ever to turn out well or not.
“Like every man who has lost time and let good opportunities escape him without an effort to profit by them, I employ my leisure hours in wishes that I had to begin the world again.”
He speaks in a postscript of an English family who were stopping at his hotel:--
“I am going to convey one of the daughters, who is certainly pretty, to the Louvre to-day. She is to have £10,000, and that might not be a bad spec, but I should rather make my fortune by any other means....
“The old padrone had the impudence to half propose my going to Italy as tutor to his young cub, but I answered him very brusquely. He was certainly very spirited in his offer of compensation, but my prospects have not come to that as yet. Remember me most affectionately to father, mother, John, and Anne....
“I wrote to you a few lines on the selvage of my note to my father. As the tenor of them may not have been very intelligible, allow me to repeat. If any letter from Vienna should arrive in Talbot Street, secure it for me. My mother might open it, and although she does not comprehend German, yet there might be more of it understood than I should like. I know your reflections very well at this moment, but you are in the wrong. As the song says,
But wait a week and you shall hear it all orally.”
Spencer evidently came promptly to the aid of the traveller, for the same month of March found him once more in his native land.
It is stated by Dr Fitzpatrick in the later editions of his ‘Life of Charles Lever’ that the novelist obtained in 1824 an appointment as medical officer in charge of an emigrant ship bound from New Boss to Quebec. In 1824 Lever would have been only in his eighteenth year, and he would not have been in possession of any medical degree, nor would his brief experience as a student of the healing art have entitled him to undertake the medical charge of a passenger ship. Moreover, in a letter quoted by Dr Fitzpatrick, Lever speaks of spending the summer of 1829 in Canada, and there is no suggestion that he made two voyages to America. It may be safely asserted that the date of the American voyage was not 1824; and in all probability 1829 was the year of the Hegira.
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