Olla Podrida   By: Frederick Marryat (1792-1848)

Captain Frederick Marryat was born July 10 1792, and died August 8 1848. He retired from the British navy in 1828 in order to devote himself to writing. In the following 20 years he wrote 26 books, many of which are among the very best of English literature, and some of which are still in print.

Marryat had an extraordinary gift for the invention of episodes in his stories. He says somewhere that when he sat down for the day's work, he never knew what he was going to write. He certainly was a literary genius.

"Olla Podrida" was published in 1840, the fifteenth book to flow from Marryat's pen. It consists of short stories, articles, his Diary on the Continent, (as opposed to his Diary in America), short plays. Except for "The Modern Town House" there is very little of great importance in the book.

OLLA PODRIDA, BY CAPTAIN MARRYAT.

CHAPTER ONE.

April 3, 1835.

Reader, did you ever feel in that peculiarly distressing state of mind in which one oppressing idea displaces or colours every other, absorbing, intermingling with, empoisoning, and, like the filth of the harpy, turning every thing into disgust when a certain incubus rides upon the brain, as the Old Man of the Mountain did upon the shoulders of Sinbad, burdening, irritating, and rendering existence a misery when, looking around, you see but one object perched everywhere and grinning at you when even what you put into your mouth tastes of but that one something, and the fancied taste is so unpleasant as almost to prevent deglutition when every sound which vibrates in your ear appears to strike the same discordant note, and all and every thing will remind you of the one only thing which you would fain forget; have you ever felt any thing like this, reader? If you have not, then thank God, by way of grace, before you out with your knife and fork and begin to cut up the contents of these pages.

I have been and am now suffering under one of these varieties of "Phobias," and my disease is a Politicophobia, I will describe the symptoms.

I am now in the metropolis of England, and when I walk out every common house appears to me to be the House of Commons every lordly mansion the House of Lords every man I meet, instead of being a member of society, is transferred by imagination into a member of the senate every chimney sweep into a bishop, and a Bavarian girl, with her "Py a proom," into an ex chancellor. If I return home, the ring at the bell reminds me of a Peel as I mount the stairs I think of the "Lobby" I throw myself on the sofa, and the cushion is transformed into a woolsack if a solitary visitor calls in, I imagine a public meeting, and call out chair! chair! and I as often address my wife as Mr Speaker, as I do with the usual appellative of "my dear."