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The slain, however, turned out to be the very things of which we were in search; old-fashioned furniture in all kinds of incongruous styles, and of all epochs Louis Quatorze cabinets in cracked tortoise-shell and blackened buhl antique carved chairs emblazoned elaborately with coats of arms, as old as the time of Albert Duerer slender-legged tables in battered marqueterie time-pieces in lack-lustre ormolu, still pointing to the hour at which they had stopped, who could tell how many years ago? bundles of moth-eaten tapestries and faded silken hangings exquisite oval mirrors framed in chipped wreaths of delicate Dresden china mouldering old portraits of dead-and-gone court beauties in powder and patches, warriors in wigs, and prelates in point-lace whole suites of furniture in old stamped leather and worm-eaten Utrecht velvet; broken toilette services in pink and blue Sevres; screens, wardrobes, cornices in short, all kinds of luxurious lumber going fast to dust, like those who once upon a time enjoyed and owned it.

I read this now dead-and-gone immortal with an ecstasy unspeakable; I raved of him by day, and dreamed of him by night; I got great lengths of his "Life-Drama" by heart; and I can still repeat several gorgeous passages from it; I would almost have been willing to take the life of the sole critic who had the sense to laugh at him, and who made his wicked fun in Graham's Magazine, an extinct periodical of the old extinct Philadelphian species.

Around one angle of the house the gale howled quite fiercely, and in the parlor, where there was an open fireplace, it came down in gusts, sighing mournfully out into the room, with its old horsehair furniture, the pictures of evidently dead-and-gone relatives, in heavy gold frames, while in other frames were fearfully and wonderfully made wreaths of flowers wax in some cases, and cloth in the remainder, being the medium in which nature was rather mocked than simulated.

alike by conquerors and conquered, to guide and aid the Nation in the difficult task of reconstruction, and of the new departure, looming up before it, with newer and broader and better political issues upon which all Patriot might safely divide, while all the old issues of States-rights, Secession, Free-Trade, and Slavery, and all the mental and moral leprosy growing out of them, should lie buried far out of sight as dead-and-gone relics of the cruel and devastating War which they alone had brought on!

I read this now dead-and-gone immortal with an ecstasy unspeakable; I raved of him by day, and dreamed of him by night; I got great lengths of his "Life-Drama" by heart; and I can still repeat several gorgeous passages from it; I would almost have been willing to take the life of the sole critic who had the sense to laugh at him, and who made his wicked fun in Graham's Magazine, an extinct periodical of the old extinct Philadelphian species.

They forgot all aboutLiberty, Fraternity, and Equality”—these egotistical, narrow-minded young people;—they also forgot the characteristic alternative to those unparalleled blessings—“Death.” But Prosper Alix did not forget any of these things; and his consternation, his provision of suffering for his beloved daughter, were terrible, when she told him, with a simple noble frankness which the grandes dames of the dead-and-gone time of great ladies had rarely had a chance of exhibiting, that she loved M. Paul de Sénanges, and intended to marry him when the better times should come.

As freedmen, the two Vettii would naturally belong to a class which was not remarkable for culture; nevertheless, they seem to have had the good sense to leave intact some of their predecessor’s most cherished works of decoration, and for this exhibition of restraint we must feel duly grateful towards our dead-and-gone hosts, the maligned Vettii.

Our farm nestled down under the steep, brown downs, just beside the Roman road to Canterbury; Stone Street the Street we called it. Ralph's land was just on the other side of the Street, and the shepherds on the downs used to see of nights a dead-and-gone Rooksby, Sir Peter that was, ride upon it past the quarry with his head under his arm.

He felt very old, as old as the dead-and-gone authors from whom he had quoted with such remarkable facility. He belonged with them; he was too old to practise his profession.

Better than by all the reading you have ever done you absorb a sense and realization of the splendor of England's past when you go to Westminster Abbey and stand figuratively with one foot on Jonson and another on Dryden; and if, overcome by the presence of so much dead-and-gone greatness, you fall in a fit you commit a trespass on the last resting-place of Macaulay or Clive, or somebody of equal consequence.