10 mins - 7 questions
The excerpt is taken from a novel. Mr. Harding, now an old man, has lost his position as the Warden of a hospital for old men. He has just come from an unsuccessful interview with Mr. Slope concerning his reappointment to the position.
Mr. Harding was not a happy man as he walked down the palace pathway, and stepped out into the close. His position and pleasant house were a second time gone from him; but that he could endure. He had been 5 schooled and insulted by a man young enough to be his son; but that he could put up with. He could even draw from the very injuries which had been inflicted on him some of that consolation which, we may believe, martyrs always receive from the injustice of 10 their own sufferings. He had admitted to his daughter that he wanted the comfort of his old home, and yet he could have returned to his lodgings in the High Street, if not with exultation, at least with satisfaction, had that been all. But the venom of the chaplains15 harangue had worked into his blood, and sapped the life of his sweet contentment.
New men are carrying out new measures, and are carting away the useless rubbish of past centuries! What cruel words these had been- and how often are20 they now used with all the heartless cruelty of a Slope! A man is sufficiently condemned if it can only be shown that either in politics or religion he does not belong to some new school established within the last score of years. He may then regard himself as rubbish25 and expect to be carted away. A man is nothing now unless he has within him a full appreciation of the new era; an era in which it would seem that neither honesty nor truth is very desirable, but in which success is the only touchstone of merit. We must30 laugh at everything that is established. Let the joke be ever so bad, ever so untrue to the real principles of
joking; nevertheless we must laugh - or else beware the cart. We must talk, think, and live up to the spirit of the times, or else we are nought. New men and new35 measures, long credit and few scruples, great success or wonderful ruin, such are now the tastes of Englishmen who know how to live! Alas, alas! Under such circumstances Mr. Harding could not but feel that he was an Englishman who did not know how to 40 live. This new doctrine of Mr. Slope and the rubbish cart sadly disturbed his equanimity.
The same thing is going on throughout the whole country! Work is now required from every man who receives wages! And had he been living all 45 his life receiving wages, and doing no work? Had he in truth so lived as to be now in his old age justly reckoned as rubbish fit only to be hidden away in some huge dust-hole? The school of men to whom he professes to belong, the Grantlys, the Gwynnes, are 50 afflicted with no such self-accusations as these which troubled Mr. Harding. They, as a rule, are as satisfied with the wisdom and propriety of their own conduct as can be any Mr. Slope, or any Bishop with his own. But, unfortunately for himself, Mr. Harding had little55 of this self-reliance. When he heard himself designated as rubbish by the Slopes of the world, he had no other resource than to make inquiry within his own bosom as to the truth of the designation. Alas, alas! the evidence seemed generally to go against him.
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