Various

“ But vain are the hopes of men. We read in no long time in all men’s looks the fate we were condemned to; for it seemed as if a great cloud, filled with God’s wrath, was spread out over this realm of England, and the faces of all men grew dark. We heard the name of Jeffreys whispered in corners, and trembled as if it had been a witch’s spell to make our blood into water. The great lady kept herself much in solitude in the ancient Court, and saw not even her favourite companion, my daughter Waller, for many months ”

“ Time soon brings the demon of discontent to our society. The city and its inhabitants appear changed—rarely for the better, always less to our taste. Ameliorations and improvements seem to us positive evils; we sigh for the good old times, for the dirty streets of Paris, the villanous odours of Rome, the banditti of Naples, the obsequiousness of Greece, and the contempt, with the casual satisfaction of being spit upon, of Turkey. ”

“ Fellows and provosts of Eton might seem to others the “magnificoes” of mankind—the colossal figures which overtopped the age by their elevation, or eclipsed it by their splendour—the “dii majorum gentium,” who sat on the pinnacle of the modern Olympus; but Brummell saw nothing great but his tailor—nothing worthy of respect among the human arts but the art of cutting out a coat—and nothing fit to ensure human fame with posterity but the power to create and to bequeath a new fashion. ”

“ If France was aimed at, how does it happen that the literature of its golden age is the subject of attack, and a perverted and fantastic style of writing assigned to an epoch remarkable for the severity and precision of its taste? If Spain is meant, the attack is perfectly intelligible, as the epoch is exactly that when Spanish taste began to degenerate, and the style of Spanish writers to become vicious, inflated, and fantastic, in imitation of Gongora, who did so much to ruin the literature of his country ”

“ In the end my enquiries were successful, and their result seemed miraculous. To my utter astonishment I learned that Michael had become a monk, and dwelt in the monastery of Pentelicus; but I could obtain no explanation of the mystery. His relations referred me to the monk himself—strangers had never heard of his existence. How often does a revolution like that of Greece, when the very organization of society is shaken, compress the progress of a century within a few years! ”

“ The flame of beauism was expiring; but it flamed in its socket brighter than ever, and Beau Brummell made a more conspicuous figure in the supreme bon-ton of elegant absurdity, than any or all his predecessors. The only permanent beau on earth is the American savage. The Indians, who have been lately exhibiting their back-wood deformities in our island at shilling a-head, were prodigious dressers; Greek taste might probably have dissented from their principles of costume, but there could be no doubt of the study of their decoration. ”

“ Under such circumstances, the real question to be solved is—Shall Great Britain secure and keep, as she may do, the superiority in Tropical cultivation, commerce, and influence? or, Shall foreign countries be suffered to acquire this supremacy, not only as regards themselves specifically, but even to the extent of supplying British markets with the produce of their fields, their labour, and their capital, to the abandonment and destruction of her own? ”

“ The Prince, walking down St James’s Street with Lord Moira, and seeing Brummell approaching arm-in-arm with a man of rank, determined to show the openness of the quarrel, stopped and spoke to the noble lord with an apparent unconsciousness of ever having seen the Beau before. The moment he was turning away, Brummell asked, in his most distinct voice, “Pray, who is your fat friend?” Nothing could be more dexterously impudent; for it repaid the Prince’s pretended want of recognition precisely in his own coin, and besides stung him in the very spot where he was known to be most thin-skinned. ”

“ We believe that no two governments ever acted more disinterestedly to a third than Great Britain end France have lately done to Greece, and that no ministers ever acted more fairly, in any international question, than Lord Aberdeen and M. Guizot have done on the subject of the Greek revolution; but for this very reason we feel inclined to warn our countrymen against the leaven of old principles, which still exists in the palace at Athens. Let us judge of the new government of Greece by its acts, and let Great Britain and France remember that they are not looked on without some suspicion. ”

“ It was for all the world as if a fairy was going through the place, when Maud, early in the morning, strolled along the banks of the murmuring stream on her road to a wealthy weaver’s. The young fellows saluted the fair one as they greeted no other. No one ventured, however, to accost her with unseemly speeches—a kind of thing, by the way, that young men at all times are very prone to. Maud was treated by every one like a saint. ”

“ Lord Palmerston cares no more about a constitution, nor about economy, than Queen Victoria, or you and I. When the Duc de Broglie, who has really more conscience than our friend the Viscount, proposed that Greece should be pestered with a constitution and such stuff, Palmerston answered very judiciously, ‘Greece—bah!—Greece is not fit for a constitution, nor indeed for any other government but that of my nabob!’ Now, my dear prince, Queen Victoria can never mean to offend me, the sovereign of Greece, when the Ottoman empire is so evidently on the eve of dismemberment ”

“ In short, we feel the want of our youth every where.
I enjoyed all the delights and regrets which mere local associations can call up, a few months ago, on revisiting Athens after many years’ absence. On the 6th of May 1827, I had witnessed the complete defeat of the Greek army. I had beheld the delhis of Kutayia sabring the flying troops of Lord Cochrane and General Church, and seen 1500 men slain by the sword in less than half an hour, amidst the roll of an ill-sustained and scattered fire of musketry. ”

“ Brummell was a dandy by instinct, a good dresser by the force of original genius; a first-rate tyer of cravats on the involuntary principle. When a boy at Eton, in 1790, he acquired his first distinction not by “longs and shorts,” but by the singular nicety of his stock with a gold buckle, the smart cut of his coat, and his finished study of manners. Others might see glory only through hexameters and pentameters; renown might await others only through boating or cricket ”

“ The geographical position of Africa is peculiarly favourable for commerce with all other countries, and especially with Great Britain and her vast and varied possessions. Africa, or rather Tropical Africa, is equally distant from America, and Europe, and the most civilized parts of Asia, besides her proximity to Arabia, and, by means of the Red Sea, with Egypt and the Mediterranean. Africa, whether we look to the Cape of Good Hope or the Red Sea, is the impregnable halfway house to India—the quarter to make good the loss of an Indian empire. ”

“ The difference between Dr Sangrado and our hydropathists is merely that between hot and cold water, by no means excluding an allusion to the latter, under the veil, as M. Neufchateau has it, of Spanish manners. Would it be quite impossible to find in St James’s Street, or in certain buildings at no great distance from the Thames, the exact counterparts of Don Matthias de Silva and his companions? Gongora, indeed, in spite of his detestable taste, was a man of genius ”

“ THE FAIRIES’ SABBATH.
“Children born of a Sunday, and bastards, inherit the gift, denied to other human beings, of beholding spirits, of talking with them, and, if opportunity befriend, of right intimately communing with them. This was a truth experienced by pretty Maud, the stone-mason’s only daughter, who, a hundred years ago or so, led, at the foot of the mountain-ridge yonder, a quiet home-loving life. Maud was born, of all days in the year, upon Easter Sunday, which is said to be a truly lucky day for a mortal not otherwise heavily burdened with earthly blessings. ”

“ It is the cause, the safety, the improvement, and the salvation of a large portion of the human race; it is the cause of our country, the cause of our colonies, the cause of truth, the cause of justice, the cause of Christianity, the cause and the pleading of a Christian nation—and a cause like this cannot plead in vain. ”

“ Mr Brummell has told me,” continued the professor, “that to enter a coach was torture to him. ‘Conceive,’ said he, ‘the horror of sitting in a carriage with an iron apparatus, afflicted with the dreadful thought, the cruel apprehension, of having one’s leg crushed by the machinery. Why are not the steps made to fold outside? The only detraction from the luxury of a vis à vis, is the double distress! for both legs—excruciating idea!’”
Brummell’s first reform was the neckcloth. ”

“ During the fearful struggle of a quarter of a century, for her existence as a nation, against the power and resources of Europe, directed by the most intelligent but remorseless military ambition against her, the command of the productions of the torrid zone, and the advantageous commerce which that afforded, gave to Great Britain the power and the resources which enabled her to meet, to combat, and to overcome, her numerous and reckless enemies in every battle-field, whether by sea or by land, throughout the world. ”

“ Such a man would appeal to the whole history of Terence; he would show that he was a diligent translator of the Greek writers of the middle comedy, that his language in every other line betrayed a Grecian origin, that the plot was not Roman, that the scene was not Roman, that the customs were not Roman; he would say, if he had patience to reason with his antagonist, that a fashionable rake, a grasping father, an indulgent uncle, a knavish servant, an impudent ruffian, and a timid clown, were the same at Rome, at Thebes, and at Athens, in London, Paris, or Madrid. ”

“ A scarcely less formidable evil arose in his quarreling with Brummell. In the course of hostilities, the Prince pronounced the beau a tailor’s block, fit for nothing but to hang clothes on; while the retaliation came in the shape of a caricature, in which a pair of leather breeches is exhibited lashed up between the bed-posts, and an enormously fat man, lifted up to them, is making a desperate struggle to get his limbs properly seated in their capacity: another operation of a still more difficult nature, the making the waistband meet, still threatening to defy all exertion. ”

“ The system of selling the tenths must be abolished; for a government so inefficient as to be unable to collect them by its own officers, is incompetent to perform the functions for which it was created, and ought to be destroyed. The owners of the land must be rendered the real masters of their property. They must be allowed to reap their crops when they are ripe, and to thresh their grain when and where they please. Until this is the case, we can assure the Three Protecting Powers, they count without the people if they suppose that they have established a permanent monarchy in Greece. ”

“ Are our employés less pompous and empty than Gil Blas and his companions? our squires less absurd and ignorant than the hidalgoes of Valencia? Let any one read some of the pamphlets on Archbishop Whately’s Logic, or attend an examination in the schools at Oxford, and then say if the race of those who plume themselves on the discovery, that Greek children cried when they were whipped is extinct? To be sure, as the purseproud insolence of a nouveau riche, and indeed of parvenus generally, is quite unknown among us, nobody could rely on those points of resemblance. ”

“ Yet Brummell, though he adhered to the happy medium, and was moderate in his starch, was rigorous in his tie. If his cravat did not correspond to his wishes in its first arrangement, it was instantly cast aside. His valet was seen one morning leaving his chamber with an armful of tumbled cravats, and on being asked the cause, solemnly replied, “These are our failures.”
Perfection is slow in all instances; but talent and diligence are sure to advance. Brummell’s “tie” became speedily the admiration of the beau monde. ”

“ What a generous sample of humanity it is that a well filled diligence carries out of the gates of Paris! The mountain of luggage upon the roof, consisting of boxes of all shapes and sizes, does not contain in its numerous strata of stuffs, and implements, and garments, rags and fine linen, a greater variety of dead material, than does the threefold interior, with its complement of human beings, of living character and sentiment. ”