The modern race
of the Howards and the Cliffords, the Talbots, the Arundels, and the
Jerninghams, were not unworthy of their proud progenitors. Miss Dacre
observed with respect, and assuredly with sympathy, the mild
dignity, the noble patience, the proud humility, the calm hope, the
uncompromising courage, with which her father and his friends sustained
their oppression and lived as proscribed in the realm which they had
created. Yet her lively fancy and gay spirit found less to admire in the
feelings which influenced these families in their intercourse with the
world, which induced them to foster but slight intimacies out of the
pale of the proscribed, and which tinged their domestic life with
that formal and gloomy colouring which ever accompanies a monotonous
existence. Her disposition told her that all this affected
non-interference with the business of society might be politic, but
assuredly was not pleasant; her quick sense whispered to her it was
unwise, and that it retarded, not advanced, the great result in which
her sanguine temper dared often to indulge. Under any circumstances,
it did not appear to her to be wisdom to second the efforts of their
oppressors for their degradation or their misery, and to seek no
consolation in the amiable feelings of their fellow-creatures for the
stern rigour of their unsocial government.
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