[Waverley, Or ’Tis Sixty Years Hence<br> Complete by Sir Walter Scott]@TWC D-Link book
Waverley, Or ’Tis Sixty Years Hence
Complete

CHAPTER V
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His Tory and High-Church principles were kept up by some occasional exercise at elections and quarter-sessions; but those respecting hereditary right were fallen into a sort of abeyance.

Yet it jarred severely upon his feelings, that his nephew should go into the army under the Brunswick dynasty; and the more so, as, independent of his high and conscientious ideas of paternal authority, it was impossible, or at least highly imprudent, to interfere authoritatively to prevent it.
This suppressed vexation gave rise to many poohs and pshaws which were placed to the account of an incipient fit of gout, until, having sent for the Army List, the worthy Baronet consoled himself with reckoning the descendants of the houses of genuine loyalty, Mordaunts, Granvilles, and Stanleys, whose names were to be found in that military record; and, calling up all his feelings of family grandeur and warlike glory, he concluded, with logic something like Falstaff's, that when war was at hand, although it were shame to be on any side but one, it were worse shame to be idle than to be on the worst side, though blacker than usurpation could make it.

As for Aunt Rachel, her scheme had not exactly terminated according to her wishes, but she was under the necessity of submitting to circumstances; and her mortification was diverted by the employment she found in fitting out her nephew for the campaign, and greatly consoled by the prospect of beholding him blaze in complete uniform.

Edward Waverley himself received with animated and undefined surprise this most unexpected intelligence.

It was, as a fine old poem expresses it, 'like a fire to heather set,' that covers a solitary hill with smoke, and illumines it at the same time with dusky fire.


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