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Hung upon the walls of the sitting-room were half a dozen old and faded engravings, and on a side-table were a sextant and chronometer case, each containing instruments so clumsy and obsolete that a modern seaman would have looked upon them as veritable curiosities.
The old English authors, Burton, Fuller, Coryate, Sir Thomas Browne, are a kind of mediators between us and the more eccentric and whimsical modern, reconciling us to his peculiarities. Battle's "Opinions on Whist," which is also the most free from obsolete allusions and turns of expression, "A well of native English undefiled."
He had the poet's horror of parading grief, simply because it was considered fashionable to do so. He sincerely believed that outward mourning was obsolete, a custom of the Middle Ages. "Ha!" ejaculated the senator. "Good morning. How goes the fight?" "Fine, my boy; I'll land you there next week; you see if I don't. The main obstacle is the curious attitude of the press.
The partitions between the several walls were simply skirtings of planking covered with gold-leaf. The whole palace seemed an armoury. Some ten or twelve thousand stand of obsolete muskets were ranged along these partitions and crammed into the anteroom of the throne-room proper.
It was in the gloaming when we got the anchor, and night when we stood out between the dismantled old fort and the obsolete new one at the harbour's mouth, and got into open water.
And as the young men of his own years glided by him, or as their talk reached his ears, he became aware that from top to toe, within and without, he was old-fashioned, obsolete, not of his race, not of his day. His rank itself seemed to him a waste-paper title-deed to a heritage long lapsed. Not thus the princely seigneurs of Rochebriant made their 'debut' at the capital of their nation.
The baron had seemed to refer to an explanation of what he darkly hinted at in the letter of Dorilaus, but that he found rather more obsolete: he could imagine nothing farther than that Dorilaus having resolved to make him his heir, as he remembered some people said before he left England, on the knowledge of that intelligence the baron de Palfoy had consented to his marriage with mademoiselle Charlotta, and this, her being permitted to write to him confirmed.
He who gave forgiveness to all men, provided they loved him, could find nothing congenial in vain disputations and obsolete sacrifices, and apparently he brought from Jerusalem one idea thenceforth rooted in his mind that there was no understanding possible between him and the ancient Jewish religion. He no longer took his stand as a Jewish reformer, but as a destroyer of Judaism.
The study of Greek is no longer an exercise in the study of linguistics or the inspection of specimens of an obsolete literature, but the acquaintance with historic thought, habits, and polity, with a portion of the continuous history of the human mind, which has a vital relation to our own life.
Third, we now stand in the vestibule of a vast new technological age-one that, despite its capacity for human destruction, has an equal capacity to make poverty and human misery obsolete.
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