Calcutta Magazine and Monthly Register Volume 25-28 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE LOG-BOOK, ?No. I. I believe there are few men who have attained the age of advanced manhood, and have experienced the changes and caprices of fortune, however induced, whether by carelessness, unavoidable accident, or a wilful neglect of those opportunities of advancement, which invited their attention, or which chance seemed to throw in their way, but have to mourn over the loss of disappointed prospects, and to see their early aspirations stripped of those gaudy colours in which young hope had clothed them. This is natural?it is the quit-rent imposed upon humanity, and as we advance in years and knowledge of mankind and experience, the frustration of our wishes and desires that present themselves successively to the heart, as if in mockery of possession, we feel . the bitterness of disappointment so keenly, that we must look to a higher source for consolation than the poor resources of our own unassisted miud.-! I had been led into these reflections from a review of my own juvenile career: destined from the cradle for the naval profession I was brought up under those expectations, and my young and growing mind was fed by all those external incentives to ambition, which the localities of a naval sea-port town abounded with, during the progress and climax of an unexampled war. My earliest recollections are rife with sailors and soldiers; martial music and military reviews; ships of war and the roar of their artillery; military and naval uniforms flaunting in all the variegated colours of the rainbow; and in- deed all the paraphernalia of what Lord Byron styles " the Windpipe- Slitting and Throat-Cutting Trade"! I remember that my early conceptions were pretty vivid, and I was not slow in asking what all this meant? My mother was the grand fount of knowledge from whom I...