Bernard Capes

“ How he hates them all—the Duchess, the Prince, the whole world of courtly rascals who have flattered him out of his obscurity only to play with and destroy him! If he can once escape from this trap, he will show them he can bite their heels yet. But what hope is there of escaping while Ludovico holds the secret of the spring? Day after day finds him gnawing the bars, and whimpering out his spite and impotence.
He has not failed, of course, to question his landlord Narcisso, or to weep over the futile result. ”

“ Narcisso, for his part, offers himself quite submissively to the comedy; waits on him with a sniggering deference; stands while he eats; brings water, none the most fragrant, for him to dip his fingers in afterwards; dresses his hair with a broken comb, and takes his own dressing for pulling it with a grinning impassivity; lends, in short, his huge carcass in every way to be the other's butt and footstool. ”

“ Think you the other would rest on the thought of a rival, and such a rival, at large? Thy very existence would be a menace to his guilty peace. I come, indeed, as a friend to warn thee. Lie close; stir not out; the very air hath knives. Be cautious, even of thy shadow on the wall, of thy hand in the dish.'
He said it calmly and distinctly, looking towards Narcisso, who all this time had stood hunched in the background, his dull brain struggling bewildered in a maze. ”

“ Here the oligarchy of beggars has its headquarters, and composes its budgets of social taxation; and here, finally, in the particular den of one Narcisso, desperado and ladrone, hides and shivers Messer Tassino, once a Duchess's favourite.
He does not know why he is hidden here, or for what purpose Messer Ludovico beguiled and threatened him from the more sympathetic custody of his friend Jacopo, to deposit him in this foul burrow. But he feels himself in the grip of unknown forces, and he fears and shivers greatly. He is always shivering and snuffling is Messer Tassino ”

“ For the rest, civilisation—the civilisation that always encompasses without touching, without even understanding her—has made her morals a terror, and the morals of most of her comrades, male or female, of 'The Vineyard.'
It is, in fact, the sink of Milan, is this vineyard—a very low quarter indeed; and, it is to be feared, other red juice than grapes' swells the profits from its vats. ”

“ Here in Milan, 'The Vineyard' was the first to renounce its champion, when once it found itself to be intimately included in that champion's neo-Christianising scheme.
Alas, poor Parablist! Not Reason but Fanaticism is the convincing reformer! the bigot, not the saint, the effective drover of men. ”

“ Ivory and nut-brown are they all, these vintagers, with cheeks like burning leaves, and hair blue-black as grape-clusters, and eloquent animal eyes, and, in the women, copious bosoms half-veiled in tatters, like gourds swelling under dead foliage. ”

“ A barber, shaving a customer in the open street, gapes and misses his stroke, thereby adding a trickle to the sum of the red harvest. Mendicants pause and grin; oaths rise and buzz on all sides, like dung-flies momentarily disturbed. And predominant throughout, the vintagers, the true natives of the soil, swarm and lounge and discuss, under a rent canopy, the chances of the season and its likely profits. ”

“ The pruning, by its leave, shall never be among the suckers down by the root, but always among the lordly blossoms. Shall Spartacus once venture openly to stoop with his knife, he shall lose at a blow the popular suffrage. ”

“ Half-way down the street a little degraded church suddenly spouts a friar, who, punch-like, hammers out on the steps his rendering of the new nature, which is to remember its cash obligations to Christ, and so vanishes again in a clap of the door. ”

“ Here the soldier of fortune, who has gambled away, with his sword and body-armour, the chances of an engagement to cut throats honestly, festers for a midnight job, and countersigns with every vein he opens his own compact with the devil. ”

“ He is free to come and go—as he dares. His terror is held his sufficient gaoler, and it suffices. He never, in fact, puts his nose outside the door, but contents himself, like the waspish little eremite he has become, with criticising and cursing from his solitary grille the limbs and lungs and life of the f [oe] tid world in which his later fortunes seem cast. ”

“ He may be justified, of his experience, in being sceptical of the disinterestedness of spiritual emotionalism, or at least of the feminine capacity for accepting its appeal disinterestedly. But of this he is quite sure—that sanctity itself shall not propitiate, by mere virtue of its incorruptibility, the woman it has scorned ”