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Languidly, critically, as he would have observed at the "zoo" an animal with whose habits he was unacquainted, he had watched this rather curious under-man in his foolish, or worse than foolish, endeavor to find amusement or oblivion.

It is said that he actually laughed himself to death from amusement at one of his own pictures, which represented an old woman. Zeuxis had a rival in the painter Parrhasius, and their names are often associated. On one occasion they made trial of their artistic skill. Zeuxis painted a bunch of grapes so naturally that the birds came to peck at them.

He perfectly conceived the situation, and got an amusement from it that I could get only through sympathy with him. But I thought it a favorable moment to propose myself as the assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, which I had the belief I could very well become, with advantage to myself if not to the magazine.

The dinner, however, was not less gay than usual, thanks to Mesdames Bacquiere and Van-Cuyp, and to their husbands, who had arrived from Paris to pass Sunday with them. To celebrate this happy meeting, they drank very freely of champagne, talked slang, and imitated actors, causing much amusement to the servants.

He had not yet entered the business for which nature had designed him. There was only a prospect of his going on from this to that, as his father had done before him, trying many callings but succeeding in none. He had not yet discovered that love of amusement is one of the strongest passions of the human heart.

When we leave an agreeable company, and, after a brilliant entertainment, step into the lighted theatre, how can it be expected that we should interest ourselves in the variety of wretchedness and pitiful distress that is here served up for our amusement?

Those who claim that we might as well let the libraries down to the level of the poorest books, because unformed and ignorant minds are capable of nothing better, should be told that people are never raised by giving them nothing to look up to. To devour infinite trash is not the road to learn wisdom, or virtue, or even to attain genuine amusement.

The negro servants seemed so queer and funny to her that she found them a great source of amusement, and her Aunt Allison planned so many pleasant occupations outside of school-hours that she scarcely had time to get lonesome.

She now saw that they could be kind and helpful, and the doctrine that there was a loving God in Heaven who cared for all men as his children appealed to her soul; but that we ought to forgive our enemies, to remember our sins, and to repent of them, and to regard all the pleasure and amusement which the gay city of Alexandria could offer as base and worthless this was absurd and foolish.

Nothing but the incredible acuteness and vivacity of the Athenian intellect could make it conceivable that these comedies which, with all their farcical drolleries, do, nevertheless, all the while bear upon the most grave interests of human life, could ever have formed a source of popular amusement.