Country life -- England -- Fiction; England -- Social conditions -- 19th century -- Fiction; Rural poor -- England -- Fiction
the impressive tone in which, at the end of a long grace, he prayed
'that the daily bread of our less favoured brethren might be
mercifully vouchsafed to them.' . . . My dear readers, would you
have me, even if I could, extricate him from such an Elysium by any
denouement whatsoever?
Poor dear Luke, again, is said to be painting lean frescoes for the
Something-or-other-Kirche at Munich; and the vicar, under the name
of Father Stylites, of the order of St. Philumena, is preaching
impassioned sermons to crowded congregations at St. George's,
Bedlam. How can I extricate them from that? No one has come forth
of it yet, to my knowledge, except by paths whereof I shall use
Lessing's saying, 'I may have my whole hand full of truth, and yet
find good to open only my little finger.' But who cares for their
coming out? They are but two more added to the five hundred, at
whose moral suicide, and dive into the Roman Avernus, a quasi-
Protestant public looks on with a sort of savage satisfaction,
crying only, 'Didn't we tell you so?'--and more than half hopes that
they will not come back again, lest they should be discovered to
have learnt anything while they were there. What are two among that
five hundred? much more among the five thousand who seem destined
shortly to follow them?
The banker, thanks to Barnakill's assistance, is rapidly getting
rich again--who would wish to stop him? However, he is wiser, on
some points at least, than he was of yore. He has taken up the flax
movement violently of late--perhaps owing to some hint of
Barnakill's--talks of nothing but Chevalier Claussen and Mr.
Donellan, and is very anxious to advance capital to any landlord who
will grow flax on Mr. Warnes's method, either in England or Ireland.
. . . John Bull, however, has not yet awakened sufficiently to
listen to his overtures, but sits up in bed, dolefully rubbing his
eyes, and bemoaning the evanishment of his protectionist dream--
altogether realising tolerably, he and his land, Dr. Watts' well-
known moral song concerning the sluggard and his garden.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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