Oliver Twist-CHAPTER XVII Đây là một tác phẩm anh ngữ dành cho trẻ em nổi tiếng của nhà văn Charles Dicken với những từ vựng quen thuộc. Nhằm giúp các em và các bạn yêu thich tiếng anh luyện tập và củng cố thêm kỹ năng đọc tiếng anh | Oliver Twist Charles Dickens CHAPTER XVII OLIVER S DESTINY CONTINUING UNPROPITIOUS BRINGS A GREAT MAN TO LONDON TO INJURE HIS REPUTATION It is the custom on the stage in all good murderous melodramas to present the tragic and the comic scenes in as regular alternation as the layers of red Pand white in a side of streaky bacon. The hero sinks upon his straw bed weighed down by fetters and misfortunes in the next scene his faithful but unconscious squire regales the audience with a comic song. We behold with throbbing bosoms the heroine in the grasp of a proud and ruthless baron her virtue and her life alike in danger drawing forth her dagger to preserve the one at the cost of the other and just as our expectations are wrought up to the highest pitch a whistle is heard and we are straightway transported to the great hall of the castle where a grey-headed seneschal sings a funny chorus with a funnier body of vassals who are free of all sorts of places from church vaults to palaces and roam about in company carolling perpetually. Such changes appear absurd but they are not so unnatural as they would seem at first sight. The transitions in real life from well-spread boards to death-beds and from mourning-weeds to holiday garments are not a whit less startling only there we are busy actors instead of passive lookers-on which makes a vast difference. The actors in the mimic life of the theatre are blind to violent transitions and abrupt impulses of passion or feeling which presented before the eyes of mere spectators are at once condemned as outrageous and preposterous. As sudden shiftings of the scene and rapid changes of time and place are not only sanctioned in books by long usage but are by many considered as the great art of authorship an author s skill in his craft being by such critics chiefly estimated with relation to the dilemmas in which he leaves his characters at the end of every chapter this brief introduction to the present one may perhaps be deemed .
