Stephen Dugard

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. Oh what a noble combat hast thou fought Between compulsion and a brave respect. King John. We have shown how Mr. and Mrs. Azle- dine were affected by the occurrences that had taken place; but we have said nothing of any one else, and especially of two persons whose happiness seemed to be...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. Oh what a noble combat hast thou fought Between compulsion and a brave respect. King John. We have shown how Mr. and Mrs. Azle- dine were affected by the occurrences that had taken place; but we have said nothing of any one else, and especially of two persons whose happiness seemed to be utterly blighted. It is hardly necessary to add that we mean Aston and Arabella. When Aston learned from his father the reason of that prohibition which dragged him from his betrothed on the eve of their marriage day, he treated it with disdainful indifference. The loss of fortune was one of the last circumstances which, in his mind, would carry with it any prejudice to the individual by whom it was sustained; and least of all could it do so in a case where the individualhad never derived from its possession one additional merit in his estimation. He was, indeed, one of those characters which it might almost be thought Nature had intended for some purer sphere, but, escaping from her hands, had accidentally wandered into this. All his feelings, all his opinions, partook of this origin. They were not derived from the world, and were scarcely applicable to it. His morality was not of that elastic kind which adapts itself to the dimensions of the offender. Vice was vice with him, unchanged and unchangeable, whether clothed in purple or rags; whether it betrayed itself in his dearest friend, or most despised enemy. He laughed at the prostitute virtue which dwells only on a glib tongue. Yet, he was no day dreamer, no seeker of visionary perfection; he did not expect the brightness of heaven in the dim ways of the earth. Nevertheless, though he was content to take man as he is, with all his capacity for what is noble, and all his proneness to what is vile, he was every ho...