The Stooping Lady Author:Maurice Henry Hewlett Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III IN WHICH, IF YOU PLEASE, YOU MAY CONTEMPLATE HER FAMILY It is possible that the annals of politicians may enshrine the person of a stauncher W... more »hig than that of Jane (born Botetort) Countess of Morfa, but if they do I have never heard of it. It is highly improbable. She was not only all that a Whig should be, she was all that he could ever be and remain a man. She was a Whig of the Whigs, dotting all the i's in the sacred words British Constitution ; she was Whiggism incarnate, for she added character to principle, and what she professed, that she was. Where Mr. Fox had doubted, she had affirmed ; where Lord Crow- land shook his head, she shook her fist; where my Lord Grey was tempted to inquire, she held her nose. Thus she was the sublimity of the Whig position, which was not one of compromise, but of despair. For the Whigs took kings into favour, not because they were estimable, but because without them the families could not govern; andthough many of them may have believed it, and some may have said it, I know of none to whom it was so much bone of the bone as to Lady Morfa, of none who said it so stoutly and lived it so hard as she did. She divided mankind, for all purposes, into two classes. Either you were Family, or you were a person. Collectively, you were still Family, unless you were the Mob. It's true she allowed, for convenience, of a third possible class in which either of the categories might be temporarily embraced. If, being Family, you happened to earn your living by sword or pen, she might, in her gentler moments, refer to you as of the Executive ; if, being of the Mob, you should raise your head by such means into her notice, she would undoubtedly—for she was as incisive as she was frank—call you a Hireling. Here, then, was a sort of limbo fo...« less