Shrewsbury: A Romance

That the untimely death at the age of fifty-eight of that great prince, Charles, Duke of Shrewsbury, my most noble and generous patron, has afflicted me with a sorrow which I ma...

To begin, Mrs. D----, my master's better-half, though she seldom condescended to our house, and when engaged in her kitchen premises affected to ignore the proximity of ours, en...

Doubtless there have been men able to boast, and with truth, that they carried to their first assignation with a woman an even pulse. But as I do not presume to rank myself amon...

At that I remember that I cried out in overwhelming excitement and amazement; cried out that I knew the man and his story, and the place whence she had been taken; that I had he...

She spoke confidently and with a grand air, knowing that I had brought a guinea with me; so that I had neither the heart to shame her, nor the courage to displease her. Though i...

But I was going to cry and did, breaking down like a child; and that not so much at the thought of the desperate strait to which she had brought me--though this was no other tha...

How long I hung at the window, at one time stunned and stricken down by the catastrophe that had befallen me, and at another feeling frantically for the ladder which I had over...

That saying, though a small thing, and a foolish one, brought my state home to me; and, moreover, filled me with so grisly a foreboding of the gibbet, that henceforth I gave my...

I know now that there never was a man in whom the natural propensity to side with the weaker party was by custom and exercise more highly developed than in my late lord, in whos...

At this point, it becomes me to pause. I set out, the reader will remember, to furnish such a narrative of the events attending my first meeting with my honoured patron, as take...

In a word, my master was a writer of Newsletters, and in that capacity possessed of so excellent a style and so great a connection in the Western Counties that, as he was wont t...

I suppose that there never was an abrupt change in the government of a nation more quietly, successfully, and bloodlessly carried through than our great Revolution. But it is th...

Such was the man I saw before me; on whose face, as if heaven purposed to warn his fellows against him, malignant passion and an insane vanity were so plainly stamped that party...

Alas, the secret subjection into which I fell from that day onwards, to a man who knew neither pity nor scruple--and wielded his power with the greater enjoyment and the less re...

It must be confessed that after that it was with a sore shrinking and foreboding of punishment I prepared to obey Mr. Ferguson's summons, and at the hour he had fixed knocked at...

The first to enter, and prepared for many things--among which the gloomy surroundings of an ascetic, devoted to the dark usages of the old faith, held the first place in probabi...

Truth to tell, I desired nothing so much as to be gone and be out of this imbroglio; and the woman, whom madam had called Monterey, twitching my sleeve and whispering me, I foll...

But as the spoken word has sometimes the permanence which proverbs attach to the _Littera scripta_, and is only confirmed by bungling essays to erase it, so it was in this case;...

It was no small thing could enlighten that brain clouded by the fumes of drink and conceit; but the silence, perfect and clothing panic--a silence that had set in with his first...

The clocks had gone midnight, when I parted from Mary at the door of the house and groped my way upstairs to my room; where, throwing off my clothes I lay down, not to sleep, bu...

It cannot at this time of day be needful for me to describe in detail the aspect of those features which the action disclosed, since they are as well remembered by many still li...

"It is this way, my lord," he continued after a pause. "Lord Middleton said some things over there in your Grace's name--that would be four years back; but you never acted on th...

My lord, I found, had a coach, without arms or insignia, waiting for him at the Great Turnstile in Holborn; where, if persons recognised him as he alighted, he would be taken to...

Apprised by what I heard, not only that I stood in the Gallery of Kensington Court--a mansion which His Majesty had lately bought from Lord Nottingham, and made his favourite re...

The odd and unexpected glimpse of generosity which the King had allowed to escape him, in his interview with the Duke, somewhat lessened the fears I must otherwise have entertai...

If, a few minutes before, I had thought myself the most unlucky of men and placed by that which had already happened beyond fear or misfortune, I knew better when I saw that sig...

The terror that had gripped me on their first entrance, and driving all the blood in my body to my heart had there set it bounding madly--this terror I should vainly try to desc...

I believe that it is one thing to confront with calmness a death that is known to be inevitable, and quite another and a far more difficult thing to assume the same brow where h...

What the girl answered I did not catch, for as she raised her head again to reply, my ear caught the sound of rising danger. Ferguson was speaking, his words, no longer coherent...

Few men are condemned to such an ordeal as that through which I had passed; and though some who read this, and are as remote from death as the wife, that may be any day, and mus...

What was preparing, or what my lord intended by conduct so extraordinary I had no time to consider. For though I got Cassel into the hall again undetected--which was of itself a...

With the least inclination towards merriment I must have laughed at the face of horror with which Mr. Martin, when he went a few minutes later, to expel the last stragglers, cam...

I think that I had spent a week, or it might be more, in this situation of mingled ease and torment, when on coming down one morning after a hag-ridden night I heard a stir in t...

The state in which I crawled back to the house after this encounter maybe conceived but not described. From an exaltation of mind to which the epithet delirious might be applied...

Rightly has the Latin poet sung of the _dura ilia_ of the Fates, who either resistless rout all human resolutions, or, where the mind has been hardened to meet the attack, turn...

It wanted two hours of midnight on a fine night when we two rode over London Bridge, and through a gap in the houses saw the river flowing below, a ripple of silver framed in bl...

Such a night ride as I have described, would have been impossible, or at least outrageously dangerous, a year or two later; when a horde of disbanded soldiers, dismissed from th...

And doubtless it was this outbreak, or rather the suspicion of me which it sowed in Smith's mind, that occasioned the sequel of our adventure; for when he had cursed me for a fo...

I should have been less than a man had I not thanked God for my escape. But it is in the sap of a tree to run upward in the spring, and in the blood of a man to live in the pres...

When I recovered my senses I was on my back in one of eighteen beds, in a long white-walled room, having barred windows, and a vaulted ceiling. A woman, garbed strangely in blac...

That the arrest of Sir John Fenwick, reported in London on the 13th of June, was regarded by all parties as an event of the first magnitude, scarce exceeded in importance by a v...

I have commonly reckoned it among my lord's greatest misfortunes that in a crisis of his affairs which demanded all the assistance that friendship, the closest and most intimate...

My lord persisted in his design of retiring to Eyford; nor could all the persuasions of his friends, and of some who were less his friends than their own, induce him to attend e...

About ten on the morning of the 3rd of November of that year eight gentlemen of the first rank in England were assembled in the gallery at Kensington, awaiting a summons to the...

That the villain expected nothing so little as to see the man he was preparing to ruin, I can well believe; and equally that the ordeal, sudden and unforeseen, tried even his ir...

That was a great day for my lord, but it was also, I truly believe, one of the saddest of a not unhappy life. He had gained the battle, but at a cost known only to himself, thou...