Читать книгу Cherry & Violet: A Tale of the Great Plague онлайн

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This spot we stand on is a Paradise

Where dead have come to life and lost been found,

Where faith has triumphed, martyrdom been crowned,

Where fools have foiled the wisdom of the wise;

From this same spot the dust of saints may rise,

And the King’s prisoners come to light unbound.”

So when she turns to the sixteenth century, with its sordid materialism and its coarse handling of things most sacred, not merely does she recognise, as an Englishwoman, the grandeur of its struggles, but she sees its best embodiment in the tragedy of an almost perfect life. As she seeks refuge in that time of stress with the Household of Sir Thomas More, so in the next century she turns aside from the pettiness of Pepys or the realism of Defoe to the life of a simple girl born and nurtured on the great bridge that spans the Thames.

“Quali colombe dal disio chiamante

Con l’ali aperte e ferme al dolce nido

Volan per l’aer dal voler portate.”

With “The Household of Sir Thomas More” we walked in the dangerous days when the Lion found his strength. With “Cherry and Violet” we are in the still more alarming atmosphere of the Commonwealth and the Restoration. Year by year, as old houses open their chests, and scholars hunt among their yellow papers, we learn more of the reign of terror which marked the closing years of the Protectorate. We see one Verney living a “lude life” with “my lord Claypoll” and other “my lords” the kindred of the Protector; while another, the honest Sir Ralph, stoutest of Parliamentarians, is clapped in prison, no man knows why; and at the same time John Howe, pious Puritan preacher (whom Mistress Cherry herself knew of), is confessing how impossible it is to win the family which reigns at Whitehall to think of the welfare of their souls. Yet all the while there hangs over the land the outer gloom of an enforced conformity, which Miss Manning so happily describes. When we find ourselves in the heyday of the Restoration, or when we watch the splendours and the scandals of the Court of Charles II., we learn from the scandalous Pepys—now so much more than ever since Mr. H. B. Wheatley has given us all that it was possible to print of the wonderful Diary as Pepys really wrote it—how utterly rotten was the social life of the age, even among those, too often, who might seem to sit sedately above its more flagrant iniquities.