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I could, indeed, have triumphed over these physical sufferings however cruel they might have been, but in the frightful complications of my position I was reduced to a condition of idiocy; I saw nothing of what was around me; I heard nothing of what was said; and after this statement the reader will surely not expect that I shall have anything to say about the farewell of the Emperor to his old and faithful guard, an account of which, moreover, has been often enough published for the facts to be well known concerning this event, which, besides, took place in public.
No thoughts of idiocy crossed the minds of any of the camping party during their first breakfast under the great oak-tree.
The immensity of it, the terror of it, the idiocy of it, the splendour of it, its unique grandeur as an illustration of human nature, thrilled the spectator in him. He had little fear for the result. The nations had measured themselves; the factors of the equation were known. Britain conceivably might not win, but she could never lose.
She was pale, emaciated, and her countenance, on which care and confinement had imprinted the wrinkles of premature old age, was sad and dejected even to idiocy. I could have wished that madame de Pompadour, by way of punishment for her cruelty, could but have seen the object of her relentless persecution. I think she would have blushed for herself.
Viewing the Roman celebrities, we find that Numa, to whom was given the surname Pompilius, had a nose which measured six inches. Plutarch, Lyourgus, and Solon had a similar enlargement, as had all the kings of Italy except Tarquin the Superb. This man expired as he had lived, in a condition of mind best described as the most abject idiocy.
He was sure any such policy would ruin the paper as soon as it became generally known that the editor was trying to do everything by such an absurd moral standard. What would become of business if this standard was adopted? It would upset every custom and introduce endless confusion. It was simply foolishness. It was downright idiocy.
What office do you hold? What authority have you? With what right do you come rushing into the four walls of my home? Do you perhaps imagine that your artistic skill invests you with special privileges? I don’t give a tinker’s damn for your art. The whole rubbish is hardly worth spitting on. Music? Idiocy. Who needs it?
Elsmere's father and his going to college, we had, let me see, the spare room curtains, the making of them and the cleaning of them, Sarah's idiocy in sticking to her black sheep of a young man, the price of tea when she married, Mr. Thornburgh's singular preference of boiled mutton to roast, the poems she had written to her when she was eighteen, and I can't tell you what else besides.
But among this grim and earthy crew there was one exception, a 'hop out of kin, of whom all the rest made sport. This was the second son, Richard, who showed such a persistent tendency to 'book-larnin', and such a persistent idiocy in all matters pertaining to the land, that nothing was left to the father at last but to send him with many oaths to the grammar school at Whinborough.
Equally inadequate is it to relate in full how he became so confused among the wax-works that he pinched the solemnest showman's legs to see if he was real, and perplexed the beautiful Circassian to the verge of idiocy by telling her he had read all about the way they sold girls like her in his geography.
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