Page:Romance & Reality 2.pdf/168

166, to give it a good character. Alas; a cruel and striking epithet is Now, really the half hour to-day was rather agreeable; we should have said "very," of any other of the forty-eight. Lord Mandeville and Mr. Morland were deciding, to their mutual satisfaction, that a neighbouring gentleman, on whom they had been calling that morning to suggest an improvement in an adjacent road, was certainly the most singular mixture of silliness and stolidity they had ever encountered. Now these qualities do not often go together—the frivolity of the one interfering with the heaviness of the other: stupidity is the masculine of silliness. But the Rev. Dr. Clarke had at once vague and stubborn ideas respecting his own dignity and his own interests; the one he supported by disdain, the other by selfishness; and in his own mind identified both with church and state. The little boy, who, in the hurry of a game of marbles, forgot to take off his ragged cap to him, he foresaw would come to the gallows; and the farmer, whom hard necessity forced to delay the payment of his tithes, he