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The other three were copied for me from the 1670 original by Miss Elsie Hitchcock, I have slightly modernised a few spellings in them. "The Father" of something is an expression in the history of literature which has become, more justly than some other traditional expressions, rather odious to the modern mind.
One of whom, having never before understood that Thornton was so soon and so completely to be his home, was pondering with downcast eyes on what it would be not to see Edmund every day; and the other, startled from the agreeable fancies she had been previously indulging on the strength of her brother's description, no longer able, in the picture she had been forming of a future Thornton, to shut out the church, sink the clergyman, and see only the respectable, elegant, modernised, and occasional residence of a man of independent fortune, was considering Sir Thomas, with decided ill-will, as the destroyer of all this, and suffering the more from that involuntary forbearance which his character and manner commanded, and from not daring to relieve herself by a single attempt at throwing ridicule on his cause.
The Chinaman is at present content to supply labour, but whether in time he will be capable of also supplying the versatile, directing brain is a moot question. Anyhow, it will not be for long years and until he has lived under a modernised Government for several generations.
Huge mimosas and sycamores fill up the centre of the square with domes of foliage so intensely green that it looks almost black. On the left rises a row of houses, among which are to be seen, side by side with the newer buildings, old Arab dwellings more or less modernised. A great number of moucharabiehs had disappeared.
But in private life the demeanour of the highest had its amiable relaxation; and even to-day, with some hopelessly modernised exceptions, the noble, the judge, the high priest, the august minister, the military officer, will resume at home, in the intervals of duty, the charming habits of the antique courtesy.
In front of the town-hall is a good statue of Blake, the famous Cromwellian admiral, whose birthplace, much modernised, will be found in Blake Street. An arched doorway in Silver Street is said to have been the gateway of a college of Grey Friars. A house E. of the churchyard has a fine panelled ceiling.
It had been clearer for none, I recover, than for Couture's Romains de la Décadence, recently acclaimed, at that time, as the last word of the grand manner, but of the grand manner modernised, humanised, philosophised, redeemed from academic death; so that it was to this master's school that the young American contemporary flutter taught its wings to fly straightest, and that I could never, in the long aftertime, face his masterpiece and all its old meanings and marvels without a rush of memories and a stir of ghosts.
What future miracles may justly be expected from the amazing power of purpose such a fact reveals! But it is true that as yet the results of the higher training have not been altogether happy. Among the Japanese of the old regime one encounters a courtesy, an unselfishness, a grace of pure goodness, impossible to overpraise. Among the modernised of the new generation these have almost disappeared.
In the German Nibelungenlied all is modernised; the characters are Christian, the manners are chivalrous, and Marchen older than Homer are forced into a wandering mediaeval chronicle-poem. The Germans, in short, had no early poet of genius, and therefore could not produce a true parallel to ILIAD or Odyssey.
Then he compared her with the other cities which are jealous of her; first Florence, which, however, has become so indifferent and so sceptical, impregnated with a happy heedlessness which seems inexplicable when one remembers the frantic passions, and the torrents of blood rolling through her history; next Naples, which yet remains content with her bright sun, and whose childish people enjoy their ignorance and wretchedness so indolently that one knows not whether one ought to pity them; next Venice, which has resigned herself to remaining a marvel of ancient art, which one ought to put under glass so as to preserve her intact, slumbering amid the sovereign pomp of her annals; next Genoa, which is absorbed in trade, still active and bustling, one of the last queens of that Mediterranean, that insignificant lake which was once the opulent central sea, whose waters carried the wealth of the world; and then particularly Turin and Milan, those industrial and commercial centres, which are so full of life and so modernised that tourists disdain them as not being "Italian" cities, both of them having saved themselves from ruin by entering into that Western evolution which is preparing the next century.
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