Pieter Bruegel the Elder

“ Sculptor, born in Leyden, Mass., and died in Newburgh, N. Y. He studied painting under Chester Harding, of Boston, and then took up sculpture, executing portrait busts in Albany. He executed many statues of notable persons for various states.
John Brueghel (1568-1625) .
Born at Brussels, the son of Peter Brueghel the elder. He commenced miniature painting, but afterwards studied oil painting under Peter Goekint.
Charles Le Brun (1619-1690) .
A Parisian painter, son of a sculptor. He was placed in the school of Simon Vouet, and went to Italy, where he was assisted in his studies by N. Poussin. ”

“ The remembrance of their youth remains green in the heart of old men; they love the places where they lived; and the persons with whom they then began an acquaintance are dear to them; they still affect certain words in use when they first began to speak; they prefer the ancient style of singing and dancing; and boast of the old fashions in dress, furnishing, and carriages; they cannot bring themselves to disapprove of those things which served their passions, and are always recalling them. ”

“ When he, with the others of our friends, went to Leyden, Master Brewster was chosen as assistant to our preacher Robinson, and was made an elder.
It is not seemly that a child so young as I should speak even in praise of what my elders have done; but surely a girl can realize when a man is watchful for the comfort of others, heeding not his own troubles or pains, so that those around him may be soothed, and, next to Captain Standish, Elder Brewster was the one to whom we children could go for advice or assistance. ”

“ Life is a kind of sleep; old men have slept longer than others, and only begin to wake again when they are to die. If, then, they take a retrospect of the whole course of their lives, they frequently discover neither virtues nor commendable actions to distinguish one year from another ”

“ A man is thirty years old before he thinks of making his fortune, but it is not completed at fifty; he begins to build in his old age, and dies by the time his house is in a condition to be painted and glazed. ”

“ But the waving of no bunting before it can hide out the spectacle which is turning the national triumph to eclipse before the elder woman’s vision.
“I suppose that I ought not to have told even you,” she continues, resisting with mild doggedness her young friend’s attempt to distract her thoughts, even momentarily, from her woes—not having, indeed, a mind hospitable enough often to admit two ideas abreast within its narrow portals. “No ”

“ I thought that we," she says, her lips beginning to quiver piteously, and her faithful thoughts, that never wander far from it, straying back to the new bare grave, where one half of that "we" lies sleeping—"I thought that we should have lived to be old together: most people live to be old!" ”

“ There is another painter, or rather there are two others who worked all their lives in a neighbouring country as real descendants of the seventeenth century, robust and delicate, artists and observers, painters of still-life and painters of manners, combining the palette of a Brouwer with a structure of line not unlike that of the classic Degas, while either their own nature or their long residence in Brussels caused them to couple the copiousness of a Jordaens with Adriaan Brouwer's greater delicacy. ”

“ These thoughts naturally engrossed his mind to the exclusion of all imaginative whisperings, and therefore was it that he drew back the bolt of a door which closed the passage, without any of those peculiar feelings that at a less anxious time might have possessed him; for souls less gifted than that of Nigel Bruce can seldom enter a spot hallowed by tradition without the electric thrill which so strangely unites the present with the past. ”

“ Thus they, after manifold temptations and trials of their faith, were, by the blinded, God-opposing papists, put to death, not on account of any evil deed, but only for the obedience of the truth of Jesus Christ. Michiel van Bruyssel was burned in the Friday Market, and Barberken his wife was beheaded with the sword, in the count’s castle. And thus they remained faithful unto death to their Redeemer and Savior; hence they shall receive an eternal and glorious kingdom, and a beautiful crown, from the hand of the Lord, which no one shall be able to take away from them. ”

“ Forsaken and forgotten, thy children owe thee no duty, no obedience; thou canst bring forward no plea to persecute thy child. In life and in death she is mine, mine alone; the power and [Pg 308] authority thou hast spurned so long can no longer be assumed; the love, the obedience thou didst never heed, nay, trampled on, hath been transferred to one who glories in them both. She is in safety—slay, torture as thou wilt, I tell thee no more." Fettered, unarmed, firm, undauntedly erect, stood Nigel Bruce, gazing with curling lip and flashing eyes upon his foe. ”

“ It is only of late years that this fact has been discovered, and there are still immense blanks in the life of La Bruyère during which he disappears from us altogether, engulfed in the lanes of the Cité, not because of any adventurous mystery, but simply because of his total lack of adventure. There has scarcely lived a great man of letters in comparatively recent times about whose life there is so little to relate as about that of La Bruyère. ”

“ It is not the dread of one day wanting money which renders old men avaricious, for some of them have such a large quantity of it that this cannot make them uneasy; besides, how can the fear disturb them of being in want of the common necessities of life when they are old, since by their own free will they deprive themselves of these to satisfy their avarice. ”

“ An old man who is careless in his dress, or else overdressed, increases his wrinkles, and looks as senile as he really is.
(117.) An old man is proud, disdainful, and unsociable if he is not very intelligent. ”

“ In the weak superstition of his age, Nigel Bruce had never shared, but firmly and steadfastly he believed, even in his calm and unexcited moments, that there was a link between the living and the dead; that the freed spirits of the one were permitted to hold commune with the other, not in visible shape, but in those thrilling whispers which the spirit knows, while yet it would deny them even to itself. ”

“ The next morning, therefore, when Broussel made his entrance into Paris in a large carriage, having his son Louvieres at his side and Friquet behind the vehicle, the people threw themselves in his way and cries of "Long live Broussel!" "Long live our father!" resounded from all parts and was death to Mazarin's ears; and the cardinal's spies brought bad news from every direction, which greatly agitated the minister, but was calmly received by the queen. ”

“ What La Bruyère saw with the spiritual gaze of a moralist rushed upon the vision of Saint-Simon in all the colour, the detail, the intensity, the frenzy, of actual fact. He makes no comments, no reflections—or, if he does, they are ridiculous; he only sees and feels. Thus, though in the profundity of his judgement he falls so infinitely below La Bruyère, in his character-drawing he soars as high above him. His innumerable portraits are unsurpassed in literature. They spring into his pages bursting with life—individual, convincing, complete, and as various as humanity itself. ”

“ They call it 'Bruges la Morte,' and at every turn there is something to remind us of the deadly blight which fell upon the city when its trade was lost. The faded colours, the timeworn brickwork, the indescribable look of decay which, even on the brightest morning, throws a shade of melancholy over the whole place, lead one to think of some aged dame, who has 'come down in the world,' wearing out the finery of better days. ”

“ If you will needs say I am an old man, you should give me rest. I would to God, my name were not so terrible to the enemy as it is: I were better to be eaten to death with rust, than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion. ”

“ La Bruyère points out on the one side a man recognised by the world at large as a master-mind, honoured and sought after by eager admirers, but at home, of no account at all; petit dans son domestique et aux yeux de ses proches: on the other hand, a man who is a prophet in his own house and country, who enjoys a vogue that is confined to his immediate surroundings, and who s’applaudit d’un mérite rare et singulier qui lui est accordé par la famille dont il est l’idole. But exceptions to a rule are commonly taken in confirmation of it ”

“ Broeckhuizen opened the meeting with a short prayer. A verbatim report of this prayer appeared in the Dutch papers as follows: "Lord, we thank Thee that Thou rulest our nation through these dark days and stormy circumstances. We have buried our hero and have gathered to speak in his spirit. We thank Thee for such a man as General Beyers, beside whom his friend was shot. We thank Thee also for General De Wet and General Kemp, and that Thou hast given us such men to lead us. We stand for our people. Help us, O Lord, towards the salvation of our people and the salvation of our fatherland. ”

“ No one but La Bruyère seems, in that day, to have noticed the "swarthy livid animal, crouched over the soil, which he digs and turns with invincible obstinacy, but who, when he rises to his feet, shows a human countenance"— certainly he could not be visible, toiling so far below, from that proud terrace of the Adhémar which makes the church its footstool. ”

“ Without doubt his harangues fatigue him as much as they do those who listen to him; he does not spare himself, bawling and gesticulating without any regard to his own person; he bends and twists himself like a posture master; he dances and leaps with his words; he perspires and grows heated, but he leaves the hearer cold; his is not the eloquence which inflames the blood.
I would censure Lord Brougham more severely as a writer than as a speaker; for Lord Brougham is also a writer, and a good deal too much of one. ”

“ No feeling in life was more deeply rooted in the heart of Lord Brougham than his intense affection and veneration for his admirable mother. He repaid her early care and judicious guidance by the most ardent and unvarying demotion. He will ingly laid all the triumphs of his career at her feet ; and she lived to see him attain the proudest heights of fame and power. ”

“ Brabant has more sun, more comfort and a higher type of humanity; Teniers, in consequence, is silvery and sparkling; the people he paints are fair specimens of a well built race. Holland, in the vicinity of Haarlem seems to have suffered much from war; the air is moist and hazy, and the people, as depicted by Ostade, are short, ill-favoured and marked with the stamp of adversity on their features and dress. Brouwer, who painted the Dutch boor in his frolics and passion, imported more of the spirit of Frans Hals into his delineations than his colleague; but the type is the same as Ostade’s. ”

“ This by no means, however, coincided with Bruce’s views. That restlessness which the man who has once conceived the idea of travelling ever after feels, unfitted him in reality for all quiet employment. He felt himself goaded on by the desire of fame; to be in motion seemed to be on the way to acquire it. He therefore proceeded across the Pyrenees into France, and thence, through Germany and Holland, to England, where he arrived in July, 1758.
He had learned at Rotterdam the death of his father, by which he succeeded to the family estate at Kinnaird. ”

“ They do their best to win a little friendliness from the Belgians. But in vain. At the restaurants they always pay for their food. They also make a point of sometimes ostentatiously dropping money into the boxes for collecting funds for the Belgians. But the Bruxellois never for one moment let down the barriers between themselves and "les Allemands," although they do occasionally allow themselves the joy of "getting a rise" out of the Landsturm when possible,—an amusement which the Germans apparently find it impolite to resent! ”

“ It is this discrepitude which makes old age so hateful. All desire to be old, said Cicero; and when they are old, they say that old age has come quicker than they expected. [Pg 348] La Bruyère expresses it in an apothegm, “We want to grow old, and we fear old age.” One would like longevity without old age. ”

“ You somehow felt that the calm of his sturdy 170 personality was the peace that comes when mighty forces have been vanquished, and fierce storms stilled. I had heard it whispered that in the early colonial days—the days of his youth—Bruce had chafed under the restraints of home and had for some years gone his own way; but except that I fancied that I saw a look of pain in his face when he first directed my attention to the framed portraits of his parents as they hung on either side of the fireplace at Otokia, he had given me no hint of anything of the kind. ”

“ It was next rumoured that the gentle Bragela, heart-broken and deserted, had, with her little babe and an old and faithful attendant, one-eyed Donald, taken up her abode in the lonely Castle Brochel. Here she reared her son, within whose infant mind the powers of good and evil seemed to struggle with unwonted energy. ”

“ Nigel, he cannot love my mother! he is a foe to Bruce, a friend of the slaughtered Comyn, and will he not demand a stern account of the deed that she hath done? will he not seek vengeance? and oh, will he not, may he not in wrath part thee and me, and thus thy bodings be fulfilled?"
"Agnes, never! The mandate of man shall never part us; the power of man, unless my limbs be chained, shall never sever thee and me. He that hath never acted a father's part, can have no power on his child. Thou art mine, my beloved!—mine with thy mother's blessing ”