The Land of Bondage: A Romance

A few years before, viz., in the fourth year of the reign of our late Queen Anne, and the year of Our Lord, 1706, no one who had then known Gerald, Lord Viscount St. Amande, would have ventured to foretell so evil an ending for him, since he and life were well at evens with each other. Ever to have his purse fairly well filled with crowns if not guineas had been his lot in those days, as it had also been to have good credit at the fashioners, to be able to treat his friends to a fine turtle or a turbot at the coffee-houses he used, to take a hand at ombra or at whisk, to play at pass-dice or at billiards, and to be always carefully bedeck't in the best of satins and velvets and laces, and to eat and drink of the best. For to eat and drink well was ever his delight, as it was to frequent port clubs and Locketts or Rummers, to empty his glass as soon as it was filled, to toss down beaker after beaker, while, meantime, he would sing jovial chaunts and songs of none too delicate a nature, fling a handful of loose silver to the servers and waitresses, and ogle each of the latter who was comely or buxom.

Yet now he was being buried at the public expense!

How had it come about? I must set it down so that you shall understand. During this period of wassailing and carousing, of ridottos at St. James's and dances at lower parts of the town, for he affected even the haunts at Rotherhithe in his search for pleasure, as he did those in the common parts of Dublin when he was in that, his native, city--and during the time when he varied his pursuits by sometimes frequenting the playhouses where he would regard fondly the ladies at one moment and amuse himself by kicking a shop-boy or poor clerk, or scrivener, at another, and by sometimes retiring into the country for shooting, or hunting, or fighting a main, his heart had become entendered towards a young and beautiful girl, one Louise Sheffield.