Tales of Passion Volume 2 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1829 edition. Excerpt: ...the qualities personal and mental--nay the feeling, as far as feeling was represented--were all and always on the side of the vicious;--those whose own conduct was correct, and who were the objects of the foulest injury, were always painted as old, and ugly, and silly--people to be laughed at, not pitied, --to be cheated grossly, and wronged infamously, and never to meet with redress. And the whole was dressed up in such gay and captivating colours, that though this is a true portraiture, and must, upon reflection, be owned by every one to be so, yet it is the least like of anything in the world to the image which these productions presented in the minds of their young spectators. " What men call gallantry, and gods adultery," bedecked with youth, and beauty, and wit, and gaiety, totally outvied and overshadowed poor Virtue, who appeared only in the shape of age, ugliness, and ridicule. What food could contain a larger proportion of poison than this? But Mabel did not allow her doctrines to rest in such generalities as these: there existed at that time in France, a real person who embodied the whole spirit of the system I have sketched above. Her life had been notoriously and avowedly licentious from her youth upwards--and the very intensity and extremity of that licentiousness had gained her the most widely-spread celebrity and fame: not the celebrity and fame, if I may use such an expression, of infamy--not that notoriety which serves, like the mark of Cain, to exclude its possessor from all intercourse and communion with her species--but a celebrity which attracted all the civilized world to her feet, a fame which rendered admission to her society an object the most keenly desired and sought after by every one--women as well...