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. 1893 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VI. IN WHICH WE BECOME MEMBERS OF THE NATIVE COMPANIONS. The honourable and exclusive Society of Native Companions was the product of the fertile brain of Corboy. Impressed with a profound veneration for Shakespeare and a profound contempt for respectability, Corboy had projected the Idea of a ...
Read More
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. 1893 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VI. IN WHICH WE BECOME MEMBERS OF THE NATIVE COMPANIONS. The honourable and exclusive Society of Native Companions was the product of the fertile brain of Corboy. Impressed with a profound veneration for Shakespeare and a profound contempt for respectability, Corboy had projected the Idea of a Club into the minds of some dozen of his comrades, until somebody hired a cellar behind a trunk-maker's shop, and declared the same the habitat of good-fellowship. The Native Companions called themselves --in pleasant allusion to the trunk-maker's cellar--Comrades of the Cave, and were bound to each other by divers and frightful solemnities. The admission of a Neophyte was something tremendous in its Shakespearian ceremony, and as the repetition of pass-words, countersigns, and oaths was by the Constitution needful whenever two Companions met to have a glass of beer, the atmosphere in the neighbourhood of the trunk-maker's was heavy with Elizabethan execrations. The Constitution was the joint composition of Corboy, Jerke, Scrimminger, and a gentleman known as Erasmus Rumbelow. Mr. Eumbelow was a remarkable person. Possessed of brilliant abilities, considerable scholarship, the profession of a barrister, and the pen of a ready writer, he had arrived at sixty years of age without the accumulation of sixty brass farthings. Nor did his impecuniosity trouble him. A true philosopher, he took the world as it came, slept in the shadow and basked in the shine. "I am the leader of the bar," he was accustomed to say. "My father had the confidence of his Sovereign, --I can lecture like Coleridge, --I can write like Addison, and I haven't sixpence to pay for my dinner." One hard winter Mr. Erasmus Rumbelow sought--philosophically --the attic retirement of...
Read Less