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It would have been an ungracious task ruthlessly to lay bare and to descant upon their weaknesses. That was done mercilessly by their contemporaries and those of the next generation. There is more need now to redress the balance by giving due weight to their many excellences.
Adela Branston had sent these things in defiance of her outraged kinswoman, Mrs. Pallinson, who was not slow to descant upon the impropriety of such a proceeding. "I wonder you can talk in such a way, when you know how friendless this poor Mr. Saltram is, and how little trouble it costs me to do as much as this for him.
Bolingbroke proceeded to descant upon the difference between friendship and love: with some vanity, and some malice, she touched upon the difference between the sorts of sentiments which different women excited. Passion, she argued, could be kept alive only by a certain happy mixture of caprice and grace, coldness and ill-humour.
The old master was all on fire at the idea. He went over and watched Pelle closely, his tongue hanging out of his mouth; he felt quite young again, and began to descant upon his own apprenticeship in Copenhagen, sixty years ago. Those were times!
There was a moment's silence, and then he went on without any change of tone: "And you are thinking, you sad-faced, downright little woman who are so afraid that I am going to make your dear Aunt Emmy unhappy, you are thinking that you did not take a precarious seat on this trunk in order to hear a possible enemy descant on the beauties of nature." I was astonished at his penetration.
He is thinking only of railroads or mechanics, of chemistry or canals, of medicine or surgery. He could descant without end on sulphuric acid or decrepitating salts, on capacity for caloric or galvanic batteries, on steam-engines and hydraulic machines, on the discoveries of Davy or the conclusions of Berzelius, of the systems of Hutton or Werner, of Liebig or Cuvier.
But the labor of striking the mine!-of' opening those musty pages falling to pieces between the fingers and leaving in the hand nothing but illegible fragments of half-blackened parchment; and the further labor of deciphering them, of discovering what they speak about, and if they are likely to prove useful to the purposes. It is needless to descant on such a theme.
I can assure you, I think myself very fortunate to have escaped the possibility of another such week of desolation, and to be peaceably roosted at Antwerp. Were I not still fatigued with my heavy progress through sands and quagmires, I should descant a little longer upon the blessings of so quiet a metropolis, but it is growing late, and I must retire to enjoy it. ANTWERP, June 23rd.
It pleased him to recall the handsome woman in her silks and laces, who had extended a patronising hand to him, now and again, on those Sunday afternoons he had spent with her husband the haughty-looking, dark-skinned, dark-eyed beauty, as he conjured her to his mind's eye and then to enter the gloomy little shop, and to see this same woman was it in truth the same? her black gown covered by a large white, bibbed apron, white sleeves to her elbows, standing behind the counter, to weigh treacle into a customer's jar, or to descant on the merits of various scrubbing soaps.
We now shall note how he proceeds to descant on slavery itself: "Slavery," says he, "was a survival from a social order which had passed away, and slavery could not be continued.
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