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We have seen how, more than once, love, however self-restrained, had induced Alfieri to put aside all his Republican sternness and truthfulness, and to cringe before people whom he thoroughly despised; we cannot easily forget that ignominious stroking of the Brutus poet's cheek by Pope Pius VI. We shall now see how this peculiar sort of Roman and stoical virtue, cultivated by Alfieri in himself and in his beloved as the one admirable thing in the world, a strange exotic in this eighteenth-century baseness, had nevertheless withered in several of its branches, beaten by the wind of illegitimate passion, and dried up by the callousness of an immoral state of society: an exotic, or rather a precocious moral variety, come before its season, and bleached and warped like a winter flower.
Behind the mountains was the wilderness, haunted, as old John Lederer said a century earlier, by monsters, and inhabited, as the eighteenth-century Virginians very well knew, by savages and wild beasts, much more real and dangerous than the hobgoblins of their ancestors. The population, in proportion to its numbers, was very widely distributed.
At the foot of the steps he caught sight of the two women in the doorway; removed his wonderful headgear with an eighteenth-century gesture; ducked his head in a twentieth-century bow; and smiled. Claire stepped quickly out on the veranda. "Oh, Mr. Smythe!" she cried gaily. "I'm so glad to see you. Come in!"
He has an extraordinary knowledge of eighteenth-century literature, and he reproduces its style in detail, going so far as to insert in his narrative an alleged essay from the Tatler. And so perfectly is it done that it is impossible to say wherein it differs from the style of Addison and Steele.
He was chatting with the whole group one night, and merely happened to address himself first to J.W., Jr. Your great namesake, J.W., was so much a part of his day that he believed with most other great religious thinkers of his time that play was a device of the devil. His belief belonged to eighteenth-century theology and psychology.
In spite of its costly luxury, and its wonderful beauty of decoration, an exquisite Nattier was let into a panel above the fireplace, and a row of eighteenth-century pastels hung on the light grey walls, the octagon apartment lacked the restful charm which belongs to many a shabby little sitting-room.
The gem of the collection was an eighteenth-century porcelain of a youth and a maid sitting on opposite sides of a curved bench over whose center rose a blossoming bush. The youth, dressed in black, and wearing yellow stockings, looked with an amorous smile at the girl in her gorgeous dress of flowering brocade.
Paul's, the authorities substituted imitation marble, and fluted pilasters painted with ultramarine and veined with gold . The Vicar of Leeds, writing to Ralph Thoresby in 1723, tells him that a pleasing surprise awaits his return, 'Our altar-piece is further adorned, since you went, with three flower-pots upon three pedestals upon the wainscot, gilt, and a hovering dove upon the middle one; three cherubs over the middle panel, the middle one gilt, a piece of open carved work beneath, going down towards the middle of the velvet. If, however, the reader cannot altogether admire the picture thus summoned before his eyes, he will at all events agree with the words that follow: 'But the greatest ornament is a choir well filled with devout communicants . The painted 'crimson curtains' at the east end of Battersea Church, 'trimmed with amber, and held up by gold cord with heavy gold tassels, may serve as another representative example of the kind of 'altar-piece' which commended itself to eighteenth-century Churchmen.
If the route proved to be half as vague as my good lady's account of it had sounded, I should probably never find the mill; but the walk would be pleasant, and that, after all, was the principal consideration, especially to a man who just then cared more, or thought he did, for a new bird or a new song than for an indefinite number of eighteenth-century relics.
His lips curled, and he waved a hand towards a grimly uncomfortable-looking chair with insecure legs and a good deal of gold paint about it. "Gentlemen! Ladies and gentlemen! You are not here to waste my time; I am not here to waste yours. Am I seriously offered nineteen dollars for this eighteenth-century chair, acknowledged to be the finest piece sold in New York for months and months?
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