The Caxtons: A Family Picture — Volume 13 — John Shaqi
The Caxtons: A Family Picture — Volume 13Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
General
The Caxtons: A Family Picture — Volume 13
Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
English fiction -- 19th century; Families -- Fiction
My third selection was in a personage who could bring little physical
strength to help us, but who had more mind (though with a wrong twist in
it) than both the others put together.
A worthy couple in the village had a son, who, being slight and puny,
compared to the Cumberland breed, was shouldered out of the market of
agricultural labor, and went off, yet a boy, to a manufacturing town.
Now about the age of thirty, this mechanic, disabled for his work by a
long illness, came home to recover; and in a short time we heard of
nothing but the pestilential doctrines with which he was either shocking
or infecting our primitive villagers. According to report, Corcyra
itself never engendered a democrat more awful. The poor man was really
very ill, and his parents very poor; but his unfortunate doctrines dried
up all the streams of charity that usually flowed through our kindly
hamlet. The clergyman (an excellent man, but of the old school) walked
by the house as if it were tabooed. The apothecary said, "Miles Square
ought to have wine;" but he did not send him any. The farmers held his
name in execration, for he had incited all their laborers to strike for
another shilling a week. And but for the old Tower, Miles Square would
soon have found his way to the only republic in which he could obtain
that democratic fraternization for which he sighed; the grave being, I
suspect, the sole commonwealth which attains that dead flat of social
equality that life in its every principle so heartily abhors.
My uncle went to see Miles Square, and came back the color of purple.
Miles Square had preached him a long sermon on the unholiness of war.
"Even in defence of your king and country!" had roared the Captain; and
Miles Square had replied with a remark upon kings in general that the
Captain could not have repeated without expecting to see the old Tower
fall about his ears, and with an observation about the country in
particular, to the effect that "the country would be much better off if
it were conquered!" On hearing the report of these loyal and patriotic
replies, my father said "Papoe!" and roused out of his usual
philosophical indifference, went himself to visit Miles Square. My
father returned as pale as my uncle had been purple. "And to think,"
said he mournfully, "that in the town whence this man comes there are,
he tells me, ten thousand other of God's creatures who speed the work of
civilization while execrating its laws!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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