United States or Isle of Man ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


The first, who was the elder but survived Miss Yonge and died at a very great age quite recently, had much less talent than her junior: but undoubtedly deserves the credit of setting the style. Not that she eschews the higher middle or even the higher classes: though, on the other hand, Katharine Ashton, evidently one of her favourite heroines, is the daughter of a shopkeeper.

But her piety was one of her most marked peculiarities, and somehow or other she knew more than we can explain of Scripture heroes and heroines. One of the legends of that age and place was that the marches of Lorraine were to give birth to a maid who was to save the realm, founded on an old prophecy of Merlin.

He lived, after his misfortunes, in a comparatively small house with his two daughters, Mrs Ebag and Miss Ebag. These two ladies are the heroines of the tale. Mrs Ebag had married her cousin, who had died. She possessed about six hundred a year of her own. She was two years older than her sister, Miss Ebag, a spinster. Miss Ebag was two years younger than Mrs Ebag.

And when children of good heritage, good homes, sound bodies, bright minds, spend hours every week curled up among cushions, allowing a stream of cambric-tea literature gently to trickle over their brain surfaces, we know that though the heroes and heroines of these stories be represented as prodigies of industry and vigor, our young swallowers of the same are being reduced to a pulp of brain and will laziness that will not only make them incapable of struggling with a page of Quentin Durward, for example, but will affect their moral stamina, since fighting fiber is the price of virtue.

So she startled poor Arden almost as much as if one of his Shakespearean heroines had called him in audible voice, by saying, as he came opposite her: "Mr. Lacey, won't you come in a moment and tell me if it is time to pick my currants, and whether you think I could sell them in the village, or at the hotel?"

Percy, "you will recollect that both Sir Charles Grandison and Lovelace wore wigs; but, my dear, granting that a man cannot, in these days, be a hero in a wig, and granting that a hero cannot or should not have a sober understanding, will you give me leave to ask, whether you have positively determined that none but heroes and heroines should live, or love, or marry, or be happy in this mortal world?"

Falchion and Galt Roscoe, to think how, all through the events recorded here, and many others omitted, Justine Caron was like those devoted and, often, beautiful attendants of the heroes and heroines of tragedy, who, when all is over, close the eyes, compose the bodies, and cover the faces of the dead, pronouncing with just lips the benediction, fittest in their mouths.

The drawing of the female characters in 'Wallenstein' bears witness, like all the rest of the play, to the ripening power of the years that had intervened since the writing of 'Don Carlos'. That indefinable something that infects the earlier heroines of Schiller and gives them an air of sentimental futility, or else of schematic unnaturalness, has disappeared.

History repeated itself. To Honore d'Urfe, the author of the Astree, in the sixteenth century, while living in Piedmont, a letter came announcing that twenty-nine princesses and nineteen lords of Germany had adopted the names and characters of his heroes and heroines in the Astree, and had founded an academy of true lovers. Almost the same thing occurred to the nineteenth-century Honore de Balzac.

Witness the self-sacrificing labours of the volunteer heroes and heroines who do their work in an hospital such as this, and the generous deeds evoked from the peoples of other lands, such as the sending of two splendid and completely equipped ambulance trains of twenty-five carriages each, by the Berlin Central Committee of the International Association for the Relief of Sick and Wounded Soldiers in the field, the thousands of pounds that have been contributed by the Russians for the comfort of their sick and wounded, and the thousands contributed by England for that fund which embraces in its sympathies both Russian and Turk.