United States or Ethiopia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The people of the town, constantly in presence of the upper classes, and therefore sooner or later aware of what was or was not in fashion, did not care long for the sentimental daintiness of mediæval poetry; besides, satire and scurrility are as inevitable in a town as are dogs in gutters and cats on roofs; and the townsfolk soon set their own buffoonish or satirical ideas to whatever remained of the music of mediæval poetry: already early in the fifteenth century the sonnet had become for the Florentine artizans a mere scurrilous epigram.
Class C consists of 75,000, or 8 per cent., subsisting on intermittent earnings of from 18s. to 21s. for a moderate- sized family. Low-skilled labourers, poorer artizans, street-sellers, small shopkeepers, largely constitute this class, the curse of whose life is not so much low wages as irregularity of employment, and the moral and physical degradation caused thereby.
On the 13th of June its gates were flung open by the poorer artizans within the city, and the stately palace of John of Gaunt at the Savoy, the new inn of the lawyers at the Temple, the houses of the foreign merchants, were soon in a blaze.
Thus, at the very time that all these classes of operative manufacturers, artizans, mechanics, and labourers, consisting of three-fourths of the population of the kingdom; at the very time, in 1816, when almost the whole of these persons had become united in one object, and had held meetings all over the kingdom, and upwards of a million and a half of them had signed petitions to be presented to Parliament, demanding universal suffrage; at this very juncture, which was immediately after the first meeting held in Spa-fields, lo and behold, Sir Francis Burdett, hitherto our great leader in the cause of public liberty, DECLARED OFF and deserted us, by avowing himself the enemy of universal suffrage, and declaring that he would not support any reform that had for its object to extend the suffrage beyond house holders; thus, at one sweeping blow, blasting the hopes, and driving out of the pale of the constitution, at least two-thirds of the population; and that part, too, the most useful and most industrious, and therefore the most beneficial to the nation!
Those I saw had much the air of intelligent and respectable artizans; for I believe it is this class that are now bearing the brunt of the papal tyranny. The higher classes were swept off before, and the rage of the Government is now venting itself in a lower and wider sphere.
The king had four thousand men-at-arms at his back, of whom no less than four hundred were knights. In addition his ships contained vast stores of provisions, a variety of war devices never before seen in Ireland, artizans for building bridges and making roads a whole war train, in short. Such a display of force was felt to be irresistible.
The different materials used, such as stone, brass, ivory, gold, ebony, cypress-wood, and so forth, would require special artizans for each, such as carpenters, modellers, smiths, stone masons, dyers, melters and moulders of gold, and ivory painters, embroiderers, workers in relief; and also men to bring them to the city, such as sailors and captains of ships and pilots for such as came by sea; and, for those who came by land, carriage builders, horse breeders, drivers, rope makers, linen manufacturers, shoemakers, road menders, and miners.
Their unions were not recognized: a fact which reminds us of the distinction among the Romans between connubium and contubernium; and the children of a slave-mother by a free father remained slaves.* In the seventh century, however, private slaves were declared state-property, and great numbers were then emancipated, including nearly all probably all who were artizans or followed useful callings.
He was the leader of the nobles of Gascony, and Dauphins, and Guienne, in their mountain fastnesses, of the weavers, cutlers, and artizans, in their thriving manufacturing and trading towns. It was not Spanish gold, but carbines and cutlasses, bows and bills, which could bring him to the throne of his ancestors.
The inconveniences attached to the inferior sedentary labourers are participated in by men of genius; the analogy is obvious, and their fate is common. Literary men may be included in Ramazzini's "Treatise on the Diseases of Artizans."
Word Of The Day