Charles OMalley, vol 1 | Page 3

indicative of the peculiar coloring he might lend his narrative; and how
it taught me to know the force of the French epigram that has declared
how it was entirely the alternating popularity of Marshal Soult that
decided whether he won or lost the battle of Toulouse.
While, however, I was sifting these evidences, and separating, as well
as I might, the wheat from the chaff, I was in a measure training myself
for what, without my then knowing it, was to become my career in life.

This was not therefore altogether without a certain degree of labor, but
so light and pleasant withal, so full of picturesque peeps at character
and humorous views of human nature, that it would be the very rankest
ingratitude of me if I did not own that I gained all my earlier
experiences of the world in very pleasant company,--highly enjoyable
at the time, and with matter for charming souvenirs long after.
That certain traits of my acquaintances found themselves embodied in
some of the characters of this story I do not to deny. The principal of
natural selection adapts itself to novels as to Nature, and it would have
demanded an effort above my strength to have disabused myself at the
desk of all the impressions of the dinner-table, and to have forgotten
features which interested or amused me.
One of the personages of my tale I drew, however, with very little aid
from fancy. I would go so far as to say that I took him from the life, if
my memory did not confront me with the lamentable inferiority of my
picture to the great original it was meant to portray.
With the exception of the quality of courage, I never met a man who
contained within himself so many of the traits of Falstaff as the
individual who furnished me with Major Monsoon. But the major--I
must call him so, though that rank was far beneath his own--was a man
of unquestionable bravery. His powers as a story-teller were to my
thinking unrivalled; the peculiar reflections on life which he would
passingly introduce, the wise apothegms, were after a morality
essentially of his own invention. Then he would indulge in the
unsparing exhibition of himself in situations such as other men would
never have confessed to, all blended up with a racy enjoyment of life,
dashed occasionally with sorrow that our tenure of it was short of
patriarchal. All these, accompanied by a face redolent of intense humor,
and a voice whose modulations were managed with the skill of a
consummate artist,--all these, I say, were above me to convey; nor
indeed as I re-read any of the adventures in which he figures, am I other
than ashamed at the weakness of my drawing and the poverty of my
coloring.
That I had a better claim to personify him than is always the lot of a

novelist; that I possessed, so to say, a vested interest in his life and
adventures,--I will relate a little incident in proof; and my accuracy, if
necessary, can be attested by another actor in the scene, who yet
survives.
I was living a bachelor life at Brussels, my family being at Ostende for
the bathing, during the summer of 1840. The city was comparatively
empty,--all the so-called society being absent at the various spas or
baths of Germany. One member of the British legation, who remained
at his post to represent the mission, and myself, making common cause
of our desolation and ennui, spent much of our time together, and dined
tête-à-tête every day.
It chanced that one evening, as we were hastening through the park on
our way to dinner, we espied the major--for as major I must speak of
him--lounging along with that half-careless, half-observant air we had
both of us remarked as indicating a desire to be somebody's, anybody's
guest, rather than surrender himself to the homeliness of domestic fare.
"There's that confounded old Monsoon," cried my diplomatic friend.
"It's all up if he sees us, and I can't endure him."
Now, I must remark that my friend, though very far from insensible to
the humoristic side of the major's character, was not always in the vein
to enjoy it; and when so indisposed he could invest the object of his
dislike with something little short of antipathy. "Promise me," said he,
as Monsoon came towards us,--"promise me, you'll not ask him to
dinner." Before I could make any reply, the major was shaking a hand
of either of us, and rapturously expatiating over his good luck at
meeting us. "Mrs. M.," said he, "has got a dreary party of old ladies to
dine with her, and I have come out here to find some pleasant fellow to
join me, and take our