[The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens]@TWC D-Link bookThe Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby CHAPTER 18 1/12
Miss Knag, after doting on Kate Nickleby for three whole Days, makes up her Mind to hate her for evermore.
The Causes which led Miss Knag to form this Resolution There are many lives of much pain, hardship, and suffering, which, having no stirring interest for any but those who lead them, are disregarded by persons who do not want thought or feeling, but who pamper their compassion and need high stimulants to rouse it. There are not a few among the disciples of charity who require, in their vocation, scarcely less excitement than the votaries of pleasure in theirs; and hence it is that diseased sympathy and compassion are every day expended on out-of-the-way objects, when only too many demands upon the legitimate exercise of the same virtues in a healthy state, are constantly within the sight and hearing of the most unobservant person alive.
In short, charity must have its romance, as the novelist or playwright must have his.
A thief in fustian is a vulgar character, scarcely to be thought of by persons of refinement; but dress him in green velvet, with a high-crowned hat, and change the scene of his operations, from a thickly-peopled city, to a mountain road, and you shall find in him the very soul of poetry and adventure.
So it is with the one great cardinal virtue, which, properly nourished and exercised, leads to, if it does not necessarily include, all the others.
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