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which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right; which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart; that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give – who does not often give – the warning, ‘Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!’
Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit34 has, in course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least; but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes, without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises.35 Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, without knowing how or
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there were two classes of charitable people; one, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all.
What the poor are to the poor is little known, excepting to themselves and GOD.
With a buoyancy and hopefulness and a gaiety that hardly ever flagged, Richard had a carelessness in his character that quite perplexed me – principally because he mistook it, in such a very odd way, for prudence.
A person is never known till a person is proved.’
It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postmen deliver letters, and not, to have the least idea of all that language – to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb!
even if his Rosebud were willing; so he is fain to make the best of it.
Take the case of the Slaves on American plantations. I dare say they are worked hard, I dare say they don’t altogether like it, I dare say theirs is an unpleasant experience on the whole; but, they people the landscape for me, they give it a poetry for me, and perhaps that is one of the pleasanter objects of their existence. I am very sensible of it, if it be, and I shouldn’t wonder if it were!’
I suppose there is nothing Pride can so little bear with, as Pride itself, and that she was punished for her imperious manner.
The bar of England is scattered over the face of the earth. How England can get on through four long summer months without its bar – which is its acknowledged refuge in adversity, and its only legitimate triumph in prosperity – is beside the question; assuredly that shield and buckler of Britannia are not in present wear.
He has been for some time particularly desirous to serve his country in a post of good emoluments,
Miss Wisk’s mission, my guardian said, was to show the world that woman’s mission was man’s mission; and that the only genuine mission, of both man and woman, was to be always moving declaratory resolutions about things in general at public meetings.
Mrs Pardiggle being as clear that the only one infallible course was her course of pouncing upon the poor, and applying benevolence to them like a strait-waistcoat;
None of them seemed able to talk about anything but his, or her, own one subject, and none of them seemed able to talk about even that, as part of a world in which there was anything else;
None was falling just then, however. The sky had partly cleared, but was very gloomy – even above us, where a few stars were shining. In the north and north-west, where the sun had set three hours before, there was a pale dead light both beautiful and awful; and into it long sullen lines of cloud waved up, like a sea stricken immoveable as it was heaving. Towards London, a lurid glare overhung the whole dark waste; and the contrast between these two lights, and the fancy which the redder light engendered of an unearthly fire, gleaming on all the unseen buildings of the city, and on all the
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Chancery, which knows no wisdom but in Precedent, is very rich in such Precedents; and why should one be different from ten thousand?
But injustice breeds injustice; the fighting with shadows and being defeated by them, necessitates the setting up of substances to combat; from the impalpable suit which no man alive can understand, the time for that being long gone by, it has become a gloomy relief to turn to the palpable figure of the friend who would have saved him from this ruin, and make him his enemy.
Still England has been some weeks in the dismal strait of having no pilot (as was well observed by Sir Leicester Dedlock) to weather the storm; and the marvellous part of the matter is, that England has not appeared to care very much about it, but has gone on eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage, as the old world did in the days before the flood.
‘the law is so despotic here, that it interferes to prevent any of our good English citizens from being troubled, even by a lady’s visits, against his desire.
It is all, all over. My lot has been so blest that I can relate little of myself which is not a story of goodness and generosity in others. I may well pass that little, and go on.
‘Pray, cousin John,’ said Ada, who had just joined us, and now looked over my shoulder, ‘what made him such a child?’ ‘What made him such a child?’ inquired my guardian, rubbing his head, a little at a loss. ‘Yes, cousin John.’ ‘Why,’ he slowly replied, roughening his head more and more, ‘he is all sentiment, and – and susceptibility, and – and sensibility – and – and imagination. And these qualities are not regulated in him, somehow. I suppose the people who admired him for them in his youth, attached too much importance to them, and too little to any training that would have balanced and
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You must see my daughters. I have a blue-eyed daughter who is my Beauty daughter, I have a Sentiment daughter, and I have a Comedy daughter. You must see them all. They’ll be enchanted.’
‘The dearest friend I have!’ returned Mr Skimpole, cordially. ‘I suppose he ought not to be my dearest friend, as he is not on terms with you. But he is, I can’t help it; he is full of youthful poetry, and I love him. If you don’t like it, I can’t help it. I love him.’
The engaging frankness with which he made this declaration, really had a disinterested appearance, and captivated my guardian; if not, for the moment, Ada too.
I only want to have been in the church, to have made the round of all the professions.’ ‘Richard,’ I urged, ‘it is not so hopeless as that?’
was glad to be tenderly remembered, to be gently pitied, not to be quite forgotten.
Jo is brought in. He is not one of Mrs Pardiggle’s Tockahoopo Indians; he is not one of Mrs Jellyby’s lambs, being wholly unconnected with Borrioboola-Gha; he is not softened by distance and unfamiliarity; he is not a genuine foreign-grown savage; he is the ordinary home-made article. Dirty, ugly, disagreeable to all the senses, in body a common creature of the common streets, only in soul a heathen. Homely filth begrimes him, homely parasites devour him, homely sores are in him, homely rags are on him: native ignorance, the growth of English soil and climate, sinks his immortal nature lower
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The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead! Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us, every day.
‘This woman,’ thinks Mr Tulkinghorn, standing on the hearth, again a dark object closing up her view, ‘is a study.’
There is a splendid clock upon the staircase, famous, as splendid clocks not often are, for its accuracy.
as wishful to have ’em; but no. So it is. Worldly goods are divided unequally, and man must not repine.
It was one of those colourless days when everything looks heavy and harsh. The houses frowned at us, the dust rose at us, the smoke swooped at us, nothing made any compromise about itself, or wore a softened aspect.
The Augurs1 of the Detective Temple invariably predict, that when Mr Bucket and that finger are much in conference, a terrible avenger will be heard of before long.
Whenever a person proclaims to you “In worldly matters I’m a child,” you consider that that person is only a crying off from being held accountable, and that you have got that person’s number, and it’s Number One.
I’m a practical one, and that’s my experience. So’s this rule. Fast and loose in one thing, Fast and loose in everything.
‘A person of the name of Michael Jackson, in a blue welveteen waistcoat with a double row of mother of pearl buttons,’ Mr Bucket immediately answered.
and that the unreal things were more substantial than the real.
‘Ah, Dame Trot, Dame Trot!’ returned my guardian, ‘what shall we find reasonable in Jarndyce and Jarndyce! Unreason and injustice at the top, unreason and injustice at the heart and at the bottom, unreason and injustice from beginning to end – if it ever has an end – how should poor Rick, always hovering near it, pluck reason out of it? He no more gathers grapes from thorns,1 or figs from thistles, than older men did, in old times.’ His
‘There is not much to see here,’ said I. ‘Nor to hear, miss,’ returned Mr Vholes. ‘A little music does occasionally stray in; but we are not musical in the law, and soon eject it.
cannot use the expression that he looked old. There is a ruin of youth which is not like age; and into such a ruin, Richard’s youth and youthful beauty had all fallen away.
I know that from the beds of those who were past recovery, thanks have often, often gone up, in the last hour, for his patient ministration. Is not this to be rich?
