Lawrence wrote a number of crude, defiant, and theatrical romances of contemporary life, proclaiming his gospel of victorious manhood. His physical force doctrine was called by detractors the creed of "Muscular Blackguardism." Guy is his representative hero, a Byronic, arrogant, aristocratic, young man of prodigious bodily strength and implacable temper--a Berserk out of his element in an age of peace and civilization, who discharges his pent up energies in libertine amours and physical sports, in the lack of more serious fields for his prowess. His fellows, including the old crony who writes the memoir, love him in spite of his cruelty and egoism. The supposed biographer introduces congenial anecdotes such as the defence of a house against Irish moonlighters by a handful of gentlemen, with tremendous carnage. Brilliantly satirized in Bret Harte's Condensed Novels.the other end of the table--a lamentable instance of prostrated ecclesiastical dignity. His disgust, however, was far exceeded by the horror of one of the party, a meek, cadaverous-looking boy, whose parents lived in the town, and who was wont to regard the head master as the vicegerent of all powers, civil and sacerdotal--I am not sure he did not include military as well. I caught him looking several times at the door and the ceiling with a pale, guilty face, as if he expected some immediate visitation to punish the sacrilege. However, heaven, which did not interrupt the feast of Atreus or of Tereus (till the dessert), allowed us to finish our dinner in peace. During the interval when we sat alone over his claret, our host revived a little; but utterly relapsed in the drawing-room, where things went on worse than ever. Guy leaned over the fair Penelope (such was her classical and not inappropriate name) while she was singing, and over her sofa afterward, evidently considering himself her legitimate proprieto
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