United States or Netherlands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
After so much waste and folly as had marked the conduct of the war in Europe, it is good to hear the tale of the capture of Louisburg. It was an adventure which gave the colonists merited confidence in themselves, and the character of the little army, and the management of the campaign, were an excellent and suggestive dress rehearsal of the great drama of thirty years later.
When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know. For now, after so many ages of experience, what do we know of nature, or of ourselves? Not one step has man taken toward the solution of the problem of his destiny. In one condemnation of folly stand the whole universe of men.
Furthermore, he had written at length, in the De Consolatione, on the folly which parents for the most part display in the education of their children. "They show their affection in such foolish wise, that it would be nearer the mark to say they hate, rather than love, their offspring.
It was a reprisal not more delicate than the spirit with which subjects too sacred to have been named in the same breath with Folly, the very words of our Lord Himself, had been dragged into such company. But though it, too, was a joke, this little slap of wounded amour propre has found writers to draw from it an entire theory that Holbein led a life of debauchery!
To such a pitch had things now come, said the Chief Secretary, entirely owing to the folly of the Opposition, that the business of the kingdom was almost at a standstill. Meantime the country was in danger of an invasion by the Blefuscans, who were now fitting out a great fleet, which was almost ready to sail to attack Lilliput.
It was folly, it was madness, to linger a moment in hopes of the fire being subdued. I looked toward the entrance it was not far from us; a few people were going quickly out. I was stronger than her brother; I could fight my way through any crowd with that slight form held in one arm. "Fire!" I dallied with fate no longer.
The miserable king was softened to tears, acknowledged his folly; and as soon as he was escorted back to his palace, he shut himself up, remaining forty days, unseen, prostrating himself in shame and repentance. After that he recovered his spirits, and resumed the administration of affairs with his former liberality, clemency, and justice, almost rivalling the glory of Feridún and Jemshíd.
In what a slough of despond had he come to wallow in consequence of his folly on that night at Gatherum Castle! He had then done a silly thing, and was he now to rue it by almost total ruin? He was sickened also with all these lies. His very soul was dismayed by the dirt through which he was forced to wade.
Religion was vanishing from the life of the people; politics were a petty question of party jealousy; literary taste was falling to the level of alehouse wit and backstairs scandal; the youth of the nation were completing their education, when fifteen or sixteen years old, by a course of the Town, and then qualifying for a graduate's degree in like knowledge, by a foreign tour; the 'mob' was gaining a dangerous excess of power; the leaders of society were past masters and mistresses of vice and folly; the poor in the streets were sunk in misery, or brutalised into reckless crime.
"I am always," cried he, "doomed to suffer for the offences of others; every kind of folly is made a present to me." "Have a care, monsieur l' abbe," exclaimed d'Alembert, who was among the guests, "have a care! men seldom lavish their gifts but upon those who are rich enough to return the original present in a tenfold degree."
Word Of The Day