Sublime

Lydgate could only say, ‘Poor, poor darling!’ but he secretly wondered over the terrible tenacity of this mild creature. There was gathering within him an amazed sense of his powerlessness over Rosamond. His superior knowledge and mental force, instead of being, as he had imagined, a shrine to consult on all occasions, was simply set aside on every

Poor Lydgate! or shall I say, Poor Rosamond! Each lived in a world of which the other knew nothing. It had not occurred to Lydgate that he had been a subject of eager meditation to Rosamond, who had neither any reason for throwing her marriage into distant perspective, nor any pathological studies to divert her mind from that ruminating habit, that

Mrs Cadwallader said, privately, ‘You will certainly go mad in that house alone, my dear. You will see visions. We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by. To be sure, for younger sons and women who have no money, it is a sort of provision to go mad: they are taken care o

She had that rare sense which discerns what is unalterable, and submits to it without murmuring. Adoring her husband’s virtues, she had very early made up her mind to his incapacity of minding his own interests, and had met the consequences cheerfully. She had been magnanimous enough to renounce all pride in teapots or children’s frilling, and had

In 1598 Alice was sent to Mr Brooke, along with another woman, Barbara Allen, who earned thirty shillings from the encounter. The bawd took half, but that still left Barbara with more money than some maidservants earned in a year (although they did get board and lodgings as well as the cash). Mr Brooke was a rich and powerful man, brother to Lord C

‘I will write to him, then. But my cousins are bores.’ It seemed magnificent to Rosamond to be able to speak so slightingly of a baronet’s family, and she felt much contentment in the prospect of being able to estimate them contemptuously on her own account.

Her mother, too, had possessed this dangerous faculty of tears; and it was not wonderful if the sober-minded Doctor, roused for the first time to consider his little girl as a creature possessed of individual character, should recognise, with a thrill of dismay, the appearance of the same qualities which had wearied his life out, and brought his yo