"Now, Robert, none of your ridiculousness," his wife warned him.
"There, that will do, I guess," Uncle Robert said as he took his hand away.
For years they never knew what it was to have meat for dinner, yet when Robert was thirteen his father managed to send him and Gilbert week about to a school two or three miles away.
Thus the years passed, as Burns himself says, in the "cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing toil of a galley-slave." Then when Robert was about nineteen his father made another move to the farm of Lochlea, about ten miles off.
Briefly, Robert Elsmere, a priest of the Anglican Church, marries a very religious woman; there is the perfection of "mutual love"; at length he has doubts about "historic Christianity"; he gives up his orders; carries his learning, his fine intellect, his goodness, nay, his saintliness, into a kind of Unitarianism; the wife becomes more intolerant than ever; there is a long and faithful effort on both sides, eventually successful, on the part of these mentally [66] divided people, to hold together; ending with the hero's death, the genuine piety and resignation of which is the crowning touch in the author's able, learned, and thoroughly sincere apology for Robert Elsmere's position.
For good or evil, the sort of doubts which troubled Robert Elsmere are no novelty in literature, and we think the main issue of the "religious question" is not precisely where Mrs.
With that splendid ability which has made his fame, Maitre Robert took advantage of the incident, and tried to show that it brought out in noble relief his client's character; for only heroic natures could remain silent for moral reasons in face of such a danger.
When the trial was resumed, Maitre Henri Robert questioned Daddy Mathieu as to his complicity in the death of the keeper.
"She will be more hurt by it, for Robert always was her favourite.--She will be more hurt by it, and on the same principle will forgive him much sooner."
Ferrars's flattering language as only a lesser evil than his chusing Lucy Steele, she feared that Robert's offence would serve no other purpose than to enrich Fanny.
He could no more box the compass than I could mix drinks like Roberts here.
"I'll wager the wine you don't," Roberts challenged.