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Casaubon made a dignified though somewhat sad audience; bowed in the right place, and avoided looking at anything documentary as far as possible, without showing disregard or impatience; mindful that this desultoriness was associated with the institutions of the country, and that the man who took him on this severe mental scamper was not only an amiable host, but a landholder and custos rotulorum.
His forebodings would have been strengthened if he had known what was going on in the father's mind. That amount of restlessness, that desultoriness of attention, which made a small torture to Ezra, was to Lapidoth an irksome submission to restraint, only made bearable by his thinking of it as a means of by-and-by securing a well-conditioned freedom.
Whenever the chat over the tea sank into pleasant desultoriness Mr. Melbury broke in with speeches of labored precision on very remote topics, as if he feared to let Fitzpiers's mind dwell critically on the subject nearest the hearts of all. In truth a constrained manner was natural enough in Melbury just now, for the greatest interest of his life was reaching its crisis.
He was presumably a bachelor a man of family ties, however relaxed, though he might have been as often absent from home would not have been as regularly present in the same place and there was about him a boundless desultoriness which renewed Garnett's conviction that there is no one on earth as idle as an American who is not busy.
And so Paris was fortified Who dares nowadays to say, that this was not a convincing proof of the King's foresight as a ruler? Who dares to say, that if hesitation, and desultoriness, and incapacity, and evil chance, had not clung to the command of our armies in 1870, the German invasion might not have been broken up upon those ramparts?
Perhaps, indeed, their very desultoriness is the charm of his songs: "I take up one or another," he says in a letter to Thompson, "just as the bee of the moment buzzes in my bonnet-lug." It crops out a good deal in Burns's Letters, and even necessitated a certain flunkeyism on occasions, through life. Yes, there is something about Burns peculiarly acceptable to the concrete, human points of view.
Sloth is in the air, and a decorous desultoriness pervades humanity. It is as if thunder was in the social atmosphere. The repose is not quite natural. Those who are in high positions, and therefore have something to live down to, long to imitate the hapless rustic, and wander forth among the fields, sucking a straw, and putting their arm round a waist.
He remained indeed a child, with the charm, the gaiety, the simplicity of a child, but with the wilfulness, the faint-heartedness, the desultoriness of a child. And he felt that in making his choice he was indeed following the will of his Father, making the most of his single talent, instead of juggling with it to make it appear to be two or even ten.
Beside his delicacy and his cosmopolitan accomplishment, Dryden is blunt and unscholarly; beside his directness of aim, if not always of achievement, his clearness of vision, his almost business-like adjustment of effort to result, the vagueness and desultoriness of Coleridge look looser and, in the literary sense, more disreputable than ever.
Philip was impatient to tell what he had been doing, and the reasons of the whole of his conduct. Margaret's views had become his own, as to the desultoriness of the life he had hitherto led.
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