I will not
pretend to sentiment about anything else, for everything else had in it
the element of self-support belonging to all actual afflictions. When the
day of moving finally came, and the furniture wagon, which ought to have
been only a shade less dreadful to us than a hearse, drew up at our door,
our hearts were of a Neronian hardness.
"Were I Diogenes," says wrathful Charles Lamb in one of his letters, "I
would not move out of a kilderkin into a hogshead, though the first had
nothing but small beer in it, and the second reeked claret." I fancy this
loathing of the transitionary state came in great part from the rude and
elemental nature of the means of moving in Lamb's day. In our own time, in
Charlesbridge at least, everything is so perfectly contrived, that it is
in some ways a pleasant excitement to move; though I do not commend the
diversion to any but people of entire leisure, for it cannot be denied
that it is, at any rate, an interruption to work. But little is broken,
little is defaced, nothing is heedlessly outraged or put to shame.
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