Eleanor by Mrs. Humphry Ward
page 40 of 565 (07%)
page 40 of 565 (07%)
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for a time the scandal and offence of the English political party to which
ancestrally he belonged, in whose interests he had entered Parliament and taken office. He had broken with his party on the ground that it had become a party of revolution, especially in matters connected with Religion and Education; and having come abroad to escape for a time from the personal frictions and agitations which his conduct had brought upon him, he had thrown himself into a passionate and most hostile study of Italy--Italy, the new country, made by revolution, fashioned, so far as laws and government can do it, by the lay modern spirit--as an object-lesson to England and the world. The book was in reality a party pamphlet, written by a man whose history and antecedents, independently of his literary ability, made his work certain of readers and of vogue. That, however, was not what Mrs. Burgoyne was thinking of.--She was anxiously debating with herself certain points of detail, points of form. These fragments of poetical prose which Manisty had interspersed amid a serious political argument--were they really an adornment of the book, or a blur upon it? He had a natural tendency towards colour and exuberance in writing; he loved to be leisurely, and a little sonorous; there was something old-fashioned and Byronic in his style and taste. His sentences, perhaps, were short; but his manner was not brief. The elliptical fashion of the day was not his. He liked to wander through his subject, dreaming, poetising, discussing at his will. It was like a return to _vetturino_ after the summary haste of the railway. And so far the public had welcomed this manner of his. His earlier book (the 'Letters from Palestine'), with its warm, over-laden pages, had found many readers and much fame. But here--in a strenuous political study, furnished with all the facts and figures that the student and the debater require--representing, |
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