Scenes And Thoughts in Europe
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Leamington ? Aristocracy ? C Arlyle. TOWARDS the middle of August, we left Lon- -- don for Leamington in Warwickshire, where we remained for a month. There are times when one can neither write nor even read. I begin to fear that I shall not have many moods for work in Europe. To say nothing of health, one's mind is constantly heset by superficial temptations. All kinds of trifling novelties importune the attention. And even when settled for weeks in the same lodging, one is ever possessed by the feeling of instability. My reading at Leamington has been chiefly of newspapers. From them, however, something may be learnt by a stranger. They reflect the surface of society; and as surfaces mostly take their shape and hue from depths beneath them, one may read in newspapers somewhat more than they are paid for p
...rinting. Even the London " Satirist," that rankest sewer of licentiousness, has a social and political significance. It could only live in the shade of an Aristocracy. The stomach of omnivorous scandal were alone insuflicient to digestits gross facts and fabrications. The peer is dragged through a horse-pond for the sport of the plebeian. The artisan chuckles to see princes and nobles wallowing in dirt, in print. The high are brought so low that the lowest can laugh at them : the proud, who live on contempt, are pulled down to where themselves can be scorned by the basest. The wit consists chiefly in the contrast between the elevation of the game and the filthiness of the ammunition wherewith it is assailed, between the brilliancy of the mark and the obscurity of the marksman. A register is kept of bishops, peeresses, dukes, ambassadors, charged with being swindlers, adulterers, buffoons, panders, sycophants ; and this is one way of keeping Englishmen in mind that all men a...
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