The King's Men: A Tale of To-morrow

The King's Men: A Tale of To-morrow

There are few Americans who went to England before the late wars but will remember Ripon House. The curious student of historya study, perhaps, too little in vogue with uscould find no better example of the palace of an old feudal lord. Dating almost from the time of the first Georgeand some even say it was built by the same Wren who designed that St. Paul's Cathedral whose ruins we may still see to the east of Londonit frowned upon the miles of private park surrounding it, a marble memorial of feudal monopoly and man's selfish greed. The very land about it, to an extent of almost half a county, was owned by the owners of the castle, and by them rented out upon an annual payment to such farmers as they chose to favor with a chance to earn their bread. In an ancient room of a still older house which stands some two miles from the castle, and had formerly been merely the gatekeeper's lodge (though large enough for[Pg 2] several families), a young man was sitting, one late afternoon in early November. The room was warmed by a fire, in the old fashion; and the young man was gloomily plunging the poker into the coals, breaking them into oily flakes which sent out fierce flickerings as they burned away. He was dressed in a rough shooting suit of blue velveteen, and his heavy American shoes were crusted with mud. His handsome, boyish face wore an expression of deep anxiety; and his hands seemed to minister to the troubles of his meditation by tumbling his hair about the contracted forehead, while his lips closed about a short brier-wood pipe of a kind only used by men. The pipe had gone out, unnoticed by the smoker; and he did not seem to mind the fierce heat thrown out by the broken coals. Above the mantel was the portrait of a gentleman in the quaint costume of the latter Victorian age; the absurd starched collar and shirt, the insignificant cravat, the trousers reaching to the ankles, and the coat and waistcoat of black cloth and fantastic cut, familiar to the readers of the London Punch. This antedated worthy looked out from the canvas upon the room as if he owned it; and the mullioned windows and carved oak wainscoting justified his claim, even to the very books in the bookcases, which showed an antiquarian taste. Here were the strange old-fashioned satires of Thackeray and the more modern romances of the humorist Dickens; the crude speculations of the philosopher Spencer, and the one-sided, aristocratic economies of Malthus and Mill; with the feeble rhymes of Lord Tennyson d'Eyncourt, which men, in a time-serving age, called poetry. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 18960
Author: Grant, Robert
Release Date: Aug 1, 2006
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Contributor (Author): O'Reilly, John Boyle, 1844-1890, Stimson, Frederic Jesup, 1855-1943, Wheelwright, John T. (John Tyler), 1856-1925