Novels and tales - 1900 Author:Benjamin Disraeli 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: pledge their troth, and take the sacred oaths of allegiance and supremacy. Allegiance to one who rules over the land that the great Macedonian could not conqu... more »er; and over a continent of which even Columbus never dreamed: to the Queen of every sea, and of nations in every zone. It is not of these that I would speak; but of a nation nearer her footstool, and which at this moment looks to her with anxiety, with affection, perhaps with hope. Fair and serene, she has the blood and beauty of the Saxon. Will it be her proud destiny at length to bear relief to suffering millions, and, with that soft hand which might inspire troubadours and guerdon knights, break the last links in the chain of Saxon thraldom ? END OF THE FIRST BOOŁ. chapter{Section 4BOOK IL CHAPTER I. - Thb building which was still called Marnet Abbet, though remote from tho site of the ancient monastery, was an extensive structure raised at the latter end of the reign of James I., and in the stately and picturesque style of that age. Placed on a noblo elevation in the centre of an extensive and well-wooded park, it presented a front with two projecting wings of equal dimensions with the centre, so that the form of the building was that of a quadrangle, less one of its sides. Ita ancient lattices had been removed, and the present windows, though convenient, accorded little with the structure; the old entrance door in the centre of the building, however, still remained, a wondrous specimen of fantastic carving: Ionic columns of black oak, with a profusion of fruits nnd flowers, and heads of stags, and sylvans. The whole of tho building was crowned with a considerable pediment of what seemed at the first glanco fanciful open work, but which, examined more nearly, offered in gigantic letters the motto of the...« less