United States or Democratic Republic of the Congo ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
A witty carpenter once termed these middle men journeymen gentlemen. This part of the history of the Rackrent family can scarcely be thought credible; but in justice to honest Thady, it is hoped the reader will recollect the history of the celebrated Lady Cathcart's conjugal imprisonment.
Johnson, the bookseller, who was then imprisoned in the King's Bench for a publication which was considered to be treasonable, and they probably then and there arranged with him for the publication of CASTLE RACKRENT, for in January 1800, writing to her cousin, Miss Ruxton, Maria says, 'Will you tell me what means you have of getting parcels from London to Arundel, because I wish to send my aunt a few popular tales. . . . We have begged Johnson to send CASTLE RACKRENT, and hope it has reached you.
Rackrent speedily promulgated in the burgh the purport of his mission, and ostentatiously performed his task of shutting up the chapel putting the key in his pocket.
If you want to know any more, I'm not very well able to tell you; but my Lady Rackrent did not die, as was expected of her, but was only disfigured in the face ever after by the fall and bruises she got; and she and Jason, immediately after my poor master's death, set about going to law about that jointure; the memorandum not being on stamped paper, some say it is worth nothing, others again it may do; others say Jason won't have the lands at any rate; many wishes it so.
John's Eve, says I, 'for we have scarce been upon speaking terms of late. But what is it your honour means of a secret? 'Why, the secret of the little keepsake I gave my Lady Rackrent the morning she left us, that she might not go back empty-handed to her friends.
Castle Rackrent is a masterpiece; and had Miss Edgeworth been constant to the dramatic method which she then struck out for herself, with all the fine reticences that it involved, her name might have stood high in literature.
"But it's not a matter of certainty that my Lady Rackrent won't recover," says Jason. "Very true, sir," says my master. "It's a fair speculation, then, for you to consider what the chance of the jointure on those lands, when out of custodiam, will be to you." "Just five hundred a-year, I take it, without any speculation at all," said Sir Condy.
Unhappily, her too exemplary father repressed the artist in her, fostered the pedagogue, and in her later books she commits herself to an attitude in which she can moralise explicitly upon the ethical and social bearings of every word and action. The fine humour in Ormond is obscured by its setting; in Castle Rackrent the humour shines.
'How is it, says I, being a little merry at the time 'how is it but just as you see the ducks in the chicken-yard, just after their heads are cut off by the cook, running round and round faster than when alive? At which conceit he fell a-laughing, and remarked he had never had the happiness yet to see the chicken-yard at Castle Rackrent.
"As to the herd of critics," Scott wrote to Miss Seward, after publishing "The Lay," "many of those gentlemen appear to me to be a set of tinkers, who, unable to make pots and pans, set up for menders of them." It is probable, therefore, that he was quite unconcerned about the few remarks which Mr. The "Quarterly" recognized "a Scotch Castle Rackrent," but in "a much higher strain."
Word Of The Day