Читать книгу The Collected Novels - William Harrison Ainsworth - Страница 68

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Grimm. How gloriously the sun sets to-night.

Moor. When I was a boy, my favorite thought was, that I should live and die like yonder glorious orb. It was a boyish thought.

Grimm. True, captain.

The Robbers.

“Peace, base calumniators,” exclaimed Tom King, aroused from his toothpick reverie by these aspersions of the best part of creation. “Peace, I say. None shall dare abuse that dear devoted sex in the hearing of their champion, without pricking a lance with him in their behalf. What do you, either of you, who abuse woman in that wholesale style, know of her? Nothing — less than nothing; and yet you venture, upon your paltry experience, to lift up your voices and decry the sex. Now I do know her; and upon my own experience avouch, that, as a sex, woman, compared with man, is as an angel to a devil. As a sex, woman is faithful, loving, self-sacrificing. We ’tis that make her otherwise; we, selfish, exacting, neglectful men; we teach her indifference, and then blame her apt scholarship. We spoil our own hand, and then blame the cards. No abuse of women in my hearing. Give me a glass of grog, Dick. ‘The sex! — three times three!’— and here’s a song for you into the bargain.” Saying which, in a mellow, plaintive tone, Tom gave the following: