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Nothing could well resemble less a typical English street than the interminable avenue, rich in incongruities, through which our two travelers advanced looking out on each side of them at the comfortable animation of the sidewalks, the high-colored, heterogeneous architecture, the huge white marble facades glittering in the strong, crude light, and bedizened with gilded lettering, the multifarious awnings, banners, and streamers, the extraordinary number of omnibuses, horsecars, and other democratic vehicles, the vendors of cooling fluids, the white trousers and big straw hats of the policemen, the tripping gait of the modish young persons on the pavement, the general brightness, newness, juvenility, both of people and things.

Some might hold a battalion, some were so minute they could scarce receive a pair of lovers; only in the playroom, when the toys are mingled, do we meet such incongruities of scale. Many were open sheds; some took the form of roofed stages; others were walled and the walls pierced with little windows.

He comprehended the incongruities which characterized that great party better than its professed leaders, and foresaw the futility of any effort on its part, at that time and in its then temper, to the early establishment of any coherent or successful method of restoration.

The everlasting incongruities of such a relation he sixty and she nineteen soon led to another divorce. He expected his young wife to mourn with him the loss of his daughter Tullia. She expected that her society and charms would be a compensation for all that he had lost; yea, more, enough to make him the most fortunate and happy of mortals.

Whatever its deficiencies, literary and religious, may be; if we find incongruities in the narrative, and are not insensible to some grave theological deficiencies; if we are unable without qualification to accept Coleridge's dictum that it is "incomparably the best 'Summa Theologiae Evangelicae' ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired;" even if, with Hallam, we consider its "excellencies great indeed, but not of the highest order," and deem it "a little over-praised," the fact of its universal popularity with readers of all classes and of all orders of intellect remains, and gives this book a unique distinction.

"Still," said Uncle John cautiously, "this is merely surmise on our part, and before accepting it we must reconcile it with the incongruities in the case. It is possible that the elder Jones owned an interest in the Continental and bequeathed it to his son. But is it probable? Remember, he was an islander, and a recluse."

John's College, Cambridge, towards the repair of the fabric, was probably intended to help this work. The new tower was professedly a careful reproduction of the old, but its incongruities have formed one of the reasons for the recent thorough renovation, instead of mere repairing, of the west front.

Like De la Riviere, she perceived a strange combination of the gentleman and something else; but, unlike him, she saw also a light in the face and eyes that might be genius, poetry, adventure. For the incongruities, what did they matter to her?

In this view every critical historian can concur, no matter what his tastes or where his home. But it is less easy for an English, French, or Italian critic than a German to pardon the incongruities, incoherences, and silly buffooneries which mar the opera. Some of the disturbing elements are dear to the Teutonic heart. Kasperl is, indeed, directly responsible for "Die Zauberflote."

"The lovers delight in endearments, in avowals of love, in comparisons of their regards.... The soul which is in the soul of each, craving a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects, and disproportion in the behavior of the other. Hence arise surprise, expostulation, and pain.