The Luck of Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray (good english books to read TXT) 📕

whom our writers love to describe? There is something naive and simple in that time-honoured style of novel-writing by which Prince Prettyman, at the end of his adventures, is put in possession of every worldly prosperity, as he has been endowed with every mental and bodily excellence previously. The novelist thinks that he can do no more for his darling hero than make him a lord. Is it not a poor standard that, of the summum bonum? The greatest good in life is not to be a lord; perhaps not even to be happy. Poverty, illness, a humpback, may be rewards and conditions of good, as well as that bodily prosperity which all of us unconsciously set up for worship. But this is a subject for an essay, not a note; and it is best to allow Mr. Lyndon to resume the candid and ingenious narrative of his virtues and defects. ↩

The Memoirs seem to have been written about the year 1814, in that calm retreat which Fortune had selected for the author at the close of his life. ↩

These exploits of Mr. Lyndon are not related in the narrative. He probably, in the cases above alluded to, took the law into his own hands. ↩

Colophon

The Luck of Barry Lyndon
was published in 1844 by
William Makepeace Thackeray.

This ebook was produced for
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Alex Cabal,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2009 by
Steve Harris, Charles Franks, David Widger, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
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HathiTrust Digital Library.

The cover page is adapted from
Portrait of John Talbot, Later 1st Earl Talbot,
a painting completed in 1773 by
Pompeo Batoni.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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May you do good and not evil.
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