The History of Henry Esmond

by William M. Thackeray

O

ur chief whom England and all Europe, saving only the Frenchmen, worshipped almost, had this of the godlike in him, that he was impassible before victory, before danger, before defeat. Before the greatest obstacle or the most trivial ceremony; before a hundred thousand men drawn in battalia, or a peasant slaughtered at the door of his burning hovel; before a carouse of drunken German lords, or a monarch’s court, or a cottage table where his plans were laid, or an enemy’s battery, vomiting flame and death, and strewing corpses round about him;—he was always cold, calm, resolute, like fate. He performed a treason or a court-bow, he told a falsehood as black as Styx, as easily as he paid a compliment or spoke about the weather. He took a mistress, and left her; he betrayed his benefactor, and supported him, or would have murdered him, with the same calmness always, and having no more remorse than Clotho when she weaves the thread, or Lachesis when she cuts it. In the hour of battle, I have heard the Prince of Savoy’s officers say, the Prince became possessed with a sort of warlike fury; his eyes lighted up, he rushed hither and thither, raging; he shrieked curses and encouragement, yelling and harking his bloody war-dogs on, and himself always at the first of the hunt. Our Duke was as calm at the mouth of the cannon as at the door of a drawing-room. Perhaps he could not have been the great man he was, had he had a heart either for love or hatred, or pity or fear or regret or remorse. He achieved the highest deed of daring, or deepest calculation of thought, as he performed the very meanest action of which a man is capable; told a lie, or cheated a fond woman, or robbed a poor beggar of a halfpenny, with a like awful serenity and equal capacity of the highest and lowest acts of our nature.

Notes and exercises:

1.   Mark the doubling of the final consonant in the following verbs in spite of the fact that the last syllable is unstressed:

worship Þ worshipped Þ worshipping

kidnap Þ kidnapped Þ kidnapping

handicap Þ handicapped Þ handicapping

2.   Long [i:] is spelt “ie” in the following words:

shriek	yield	liegeman	fiend	relief	lief
achieve	niece	siege	relieve	belief	grief
field	piece	besiege	believe	chief	shield
liege	mien	retrieve	brief	grieve	sieve

3.   The following words take the suffix “–ar”: beggar, liar, friar, scholar, burglar, commissar.

4.   The pronunciation of the word “halfpenny” is [´heipni]. Here are some other words beginning with “half”: half-wit, half-caste, halfbrother, half-back, half-crown, half-dozen, half-pay, half-price, half-term, half-tone, half-truth, half-year. Compare these with words beginning with the prefixes “mid–”, “semi–” and “demi–”:

midday	middleaged	semi-educated	demigod
midnight	middlesized	semi-circle	demijohn
midway	middleweight	semi-official	demilune
midsummer	Middlemarch	semi-opaque	demiwolf

5.   Word study:

Clotho and Lachesis [´lækisis]       in Greek and Roman mythology, two of the three Goddesses of Fate, who were supposed to spin the thread of men’s lives

Savoy [s¶´voi]        a region of France in the southwest, bordering on Switzerland and Italy; a duchy in the Middle Ages and later a part of the Kingdom of Sardinia

battalia       battle order

carouse      to drink heavily and be merry at a noisy meal, party, etc.: carousal (n.)—a noisy drinking party or revelry. Not to be confused with the noun “carrousel” [kær¶´sel] which means “a merry-go-round” or “a conveyor belt that rotates like a merry-go-round, used in airports to bring passengers’ suitcases to a collection point.”

6.   Translate the following expressions and use them in sentences of your own:

speak about the weather, fair weather friends, broken weather, weather permitting, to make heavy weather of, under stress of weather, weather beaten, weather bound, weather bureau, weather chart, weathercock (a weather vane), like a weathercock in the wind, weather glass, weather proof, weather service, weather stained, weather worn, to weather