Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Castle Richmond by Anthony Trollope
page 73 of 755 (09%)
that had been offensive to his father's pocket; he had not been
plucked. Indeed, he had taken honours, in some low unnoticed
degree;--unnoticed, that is, at Oxford; but noticed at Castle
Richmond by an ovation--almost by a triumph.

But Herbert Fitzgerald was a son to gladden a father's heart and a
mother's eye. He was not handsome, as was his cousin Owen; not tall
and stalwart and godlike in his proportions, as was the reveller of
Hap House; but nevertheless, and perhaps not the less, was he
pleasant to look on. He was smaller and darker than his cousin; but
his eyes were bright and full of good humour. He was clean looking
and clean made; pleasant and courteous in all his habits; attached
to books in a moderate, easy way, but no bookworm; he had a gentle
affection for bindings and titlepages; was fond of pictures, of
which it might be probable that he would some day know more than he
did at present; addicted to Gothic architecture, and already
proprietor of the germ of what was to be a collection of coins.

Owen Fitzgerald had called him a prig; but Herbert was no prig. Nor
yet was he a pedant; which word might, perhaps, more nearly have
expressed his cousin's meaning. He liked little bits of learning,
the easy outsides and tags of classical acquirements, which come so
easily within the scope of the memory when a man has passed some ten
years between a public school and a university. But though he did
love to chew the cud of these morsels of Attic grass which he had
cropped, certainly without any great or sustained effort, he had no
desire to be ostentatious in doing so, or to show off more than he
knew. Indeed, now that he was away from his college friends, he was
rather ashamed of himself than otherwise when scraps of quotations
would break forth from him in his own despite. Looking at his true
DigitalOcean Referral Badge