Page:A note on Charlotte Brontë (IA note00swinoncharlottebrich).pdf/53

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CHARLOTTE BRONTË.
39

the forest of Arden, of Claudio's sister but as she first was enrolled among the votarists of St. Clare.

Far otherwise it is with the poor noble heroine so strangely disgraced and discrowned of natural honour by the strong and cruel hand which created her; and which could not redeem or raise her again, even by the fittest and noblest of all deaths conceivable, from the mire of ignominy into which it had been pleased to cast her down or bid her slip at the beck and call of a counter-jumping Antinous, a Lauzun of the counting-house, as vulgar as Vivien and as mean as the fellow who could gloat on the prospective degradation and anticipated unhappiness of a woman he forsooth had loved,