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1Author:  Cox William d. 1851?Requires cookie*
 Title:  Crayon sketches  
 Published:  1997 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Modern English collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: In few places are the “lights and shadows” of life more strongly and vividly contrasted than in the streets of a great metropolis; where bloated wealth and hollow-eyed poverty trudge side by side, and gay, fluttering vanity and squalid wretchedness gaze strangely at each other. It is dramatic, but unpleasant; at least until custom has produced the callousness of heart requisite to enable a man to look philosophically on all human sorrow, save his own peculiar portion. Before he has arrived at this state, however, a stroll through the streets of a crowded city is apt to be uncommonly beneficial. It generates a series of practical sermons, for which every poor distressed object furnishes an eloquent text, tending to inculcate gratitude for his own station, charity for the miseries, and toleration for the frailties of others. A back street in London shows a man a few of the realities of life. To use a pugilistic phrase, “it takes the conceit out of him.” I am sometimes sorrier for my own disappointments than for any person's; and occasionally pity and indulge in the tenderest and most delicate sympathy imaginable towards myself, on account of any trivial inconvenience or privation to which I may happen to be subjected; but I have never entered a London by-lane in this frame of mind without walking out “a wiser and a sadder man” at the other end.” There is a vast deal of difference between fanciful or poetical unhappiness and harsh prose misery—plain, unvarnished, substantial misery, arising from tangible wants and physical sufferings. It is too much the fashion of the world to exaggerate and swell into undue importance half real and half imaginary mental woes, and to sneer at and undervalue common bodily evils. Your young poets and lady poetesses (heaven bless them!) and indeed all persons of genteel sensibilities, are continually plunging into the extreme depths of desolation on what would appear to a common-sense man rather insufficient grounds. But going arithmetically to work, it will be a tolerably-sized grief which produces as much pain as a prolonged, stinging tooth-ache; and six-and-thirty hours, or upwards, without victuals, must be almost as bad to bear as slighted love, notwithstanding the assertions of sensitive young ladies (who have chicken at command) to the contrary. Indeed, it has always struck me that going without a dinner must be provocative of a vast deal of pathos; and that it is rather unfair to make such an outcry about “woes that rend the breast,” while the pangs and twinges of the contiguous parts of the body, on a descending scale, are never taken into consideration by those who have never felt them. If this view of things be correct—and it is correct—how much intense suffering does the blessed sun look down upon every day! Ah! who that has seen the gaunt, shrivelled frame—the sharpened features—the bloodless, compressed lips, and sunken greedy eye which famine produces, but has felt sick at heart, and inwardly prayed to be preserved, above all things, from inanition. The omission of even such commonplace things as victuals, will, in an astonishingly short time, convince the most wretchedly romantic youth that ever fell in love, folded his arms, and turned his face moonwards, of the excellent properties, moral and physical, of a beef-steak.
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