Excerpt from Charles O'malley, the Irish Dragon That certain traits of my acquaintances found themselves embodied in some of the characters of this story I do not seek to deny. The principle of natural selection adapts itself to novels as to nature, and it would have demanded an effort above my strength to have disabused myself at the desk of all the impressions of the dinner table, and to have forgotten features which interested or amused me. One of the personages of my tale I drew, however, with very little aid from fancy. I would go so far as to say that I took him from the life, if my memory did not confront me with the lamentable inferiority of my picture to the great original it was meant to portray. With the exception of the quality of courage, I never met a man who contained within himself so many of the traits of Falstaff, as the individual who furnished me with Major Mon soon. But the Major - I must call him so, though that rank was far beneath his own - was a man of unquestionable bravery. His powers as a story-teller were to my thinking unrivalled, the peculiar reflections on life which he would passingly introduce the wise apothegms - were after a morality essentially of his own invention, that he would indulge in the unsparing exhibition of himself in situations such as other men would never have confessed to, all blended up with a racy enjoyment of life, dashed occasionally with sorrow that our tenure of it was short of patriarchal. All these accompanied by a face redol ent of intense humor, and a voice whose modulations were managed with the skill of a consummate artist, all these I say were above me to convey, nor indeed as I re-read any of the adventures in which he figures, am I other than ashamed at the weakness of my drawing and the poverty of my coloring. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.