A St Luke of the Nineteenth Century Author:Russell Barrington 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 IV " He who has followed up those natural laws of aversion and desire, rendering them more and more authoritative by constant obedience so as to deriv... more »e pleasure always from that which God originally intended should give him pleasure, and who derives the greatest possible sum of pleasure from any given object, is a man of taste. The temper by which right taste is formed is characteristically patient. The pleasure which it has in things that it finds true and good is so great that it cannot possibly be led aside by any tricks of fashion, or diseases of vanity ; it cannot be cramped in its conclusions by partialities and hypocrisies; its visions and its delights are too penetrating, too living, for any white-washed object or shallow fountain long to endure or supply. It clasps all that it loves so hard that it crushes if it be hollow. —John Kuskis. Sir Harry knew little of Elaine s inner life, but she was precious to him. He traced in her an echo of the delicate strain which had charmed and fascinated him in his wife—that peculiar quality of refinement, choice and loveable, absolutely untarnished by any contact with the world, a quality unlike any that distinguished his own dominant and powerful race. Elaine and her old nurse were the sole inmates of that part of the house that had escaped the fire except when Aunt Susey paid her annual visits to Frampton Meadows (iftor she had left Sales Farm. Elaine had implored her father to let her have the upper rooms as her own after they had been given up as nurseries. It was Sir Harry's wife who had saved the old part of the house from destruction when the rest of it had been burnt down and rebuilt after another model. Uo man or woman Lavaine, a family of an ancient Norman stock, had ever settled down contentedly to ...« less