Sublime

Apart from his dinners and his coursing, Mr Vincy, blustering as he was, had as little of his own way as if he had been a prime minister: the force of circumstances was easily too much for him, as it is for most pleasure-loving florid men; and the circumstance called Rosamond was particularly forcible by means of that mild persistence which, as we

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

live upon their wits (or not so much, perhaps, upon the presence of their own wits as upon the absence of wits in other people)

There was the madness of pride in every word he uttered.

“The best lack all conviction,” he thought, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

“Words are like leaves and where they most abound, Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.” Alexander Pope.