United States or Greece ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It must be remembered, however, that I had been rallied very much concerning him of late by Monsieur Gironac, and I could scarcely avoid perceiving that this exceeding assiduity in doing the honours to Auguste could not but be attributed to some more potent cause than mere civility to a fellow-countryman.
To him was attributed a miraculous birth as the Son of God; and in the opinion of his followers he was soon considered, not only the Son of God, but God Himself incarnated bodily in the son. In other words, that God Himself came down from heaven in the form of human flesh, to save the world by making an atoning sacrifice of Himself for the sins of humanity.
The effects of that agitating interview between father and daughter had been visible to Ferdinand; but he attributed it, very naturally, to the cause privately assigned for it by his kinsman Marie's first conviction that her father's days were numbered.
This mystic belief in the absolute power of royalty was shattered only when repeated experience proved that the power attributed to the adored being was fictitious. He then lost his prestige. Now, when prestige is lost the crowd will not forgive the fallen idol for deluding them, and seek anew the idol without which they cannot exist.
But in carrying out his determination, he exhibited a strange forgetfulness, not only of the respect due to his royal master as king, but also of all the ordinary rules of propriety; for he did not resign his office into the hands of the sovereign from whom he had received it, but he announced his retirement to the Assembly, sending the president of the week a letter in which he attributed his reasons for the step partly to his health, which he described as weak, and partly to the "mortal anxieties of his wife, as virtuous as she was dear to his heart."
All this time the crew was very sickly, scarcely a day passing in which one or more did not die, which was generally attributed to the want of something comfortable to drink in this rigorous climate, all the liquors intended for the voyage having been left in the Speedwell.
It becomes, therefore, of interest to inquire whether this failure can be attributed to any oversight or mistake in the arrangements made for forcing the passage in the tactical dispositions, to use the technical phrase. In this, as in every case, those dispositions should be conformed to the object to be attained and to the obstacles which must be overcome.
With that impartial superciliousness to all foreign achievement which not seldom characterizes the British mind, the credit of all the results of observation and experiment on the glaciers was attributed to Professor Forbes, who seems to have accepted it with delightful complacency. But presently doubt, then unbelief, and at last downright opposition began to show themselves.
Adolphine, then eighteen, who for the last seven years had sewed at the side of her grandmother in that cold household of monotonous and methodical customs, had undertaken her neuvaine all the more willingly because she hoped to inspire some feeling in Joseph Bridau, in whom she took the deepest interest because of the monstrosities which her grandfather attributed in her hearing to the young Parisian.
We must not, however, be satisfied with this form of criticism, and we must not abuse it. We must not abuse it. The extreme of distrust, in these matters, is almost as mischievous as the extreme of credulity. Père Hardouin, who attributed the works of Vergil and Horace to mediæval monks, was every whit as ridiculous as the victim of Vrain-Lucas.
Word Of The Day