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It excited one observation which I have since frequently made that the French, with all their parade of science and ostentation of institutions, are still a century behind England in real practical knowledge. My Tour in France has at least taught me one lesson never to be deceived by high-sounding names and pompous designations. I have not visited their schools for nothing.
They are too sharp to be taken in by these swindlers in misery. Still they put their hands into their pockets; some from weakness or humanity, some from ostentation, some to gain Paradise. If you doubt my assertion, try an experiment which I once did, with considerable success. One night, between nine and ten o'clock, I begged all along the Corso. I was not disguised as a beggar.
Those princes, whom the ostentation of gratitude or generosity permitted for a while to hold a precarious sceptre, were dismissed from their thrones, as soon as they had per formed their appointed task of fashioning to the yoke the vanquished nations. The free states and cities which had embraced the cause of Rome were rewarded with a nominal alliance, and insensibly sunk into real servitude.
And then Schliemann went on to outline some of the wastes of competition: the losses of industrial warfare; the ceaseless worry and friction; the vices such as drink, for instance, the use of which had nearly doubled in twenty years, as a consequence of the intensification of the economic struggle; the idle and unproductive members of the community, the frivolous rich and the pauperized poor; the law and the whole machinery of repression; the wastes of social ostentation, the milliners and tailors, the hairdressers, dancing masters, chefs and lackeys.
It was twenty-four miles long, but he regarded it with an affection only second to his love for his hardware store and he dealt with it as an indulgent parent.... Pliny Pickett once stage driver, was now conductor, and wore with ostentation a uniform suitable to the dignity, speaking of "my railroad" largely. "Hear Ovid Nixon's sick down to town" said Pliny. "Sich a rumor's come to me."
It is next to impossible that any parish or congregation should sincerely agree in their opinion of a clergyman. What one man likes in such cases, another man detests. Mr A., with an ardent nature, and something of a histrionic turn, doats upon a fine rhetorical display. Mr B., with more simplicity of taste, pronounces this little better than theatrical ostentation.
They remarked and ridiculed the ostentation with which he displayed every luxury in his house; his habit of naming the price of every thing, to enforce its claim to admiration; his affected contempt for economy; his anxiety to connect himself with persons of rank, joined to his ignorance of the genealogy of nobility, and the strange mistakes he made between old and new titles.
The arms he hugged to himself, partly because, not having paid for them, he thought it would look ostentatious to put them on his carriage, and he hated ostentation, and partly because he, like any practical man all over the country, had a secret dislike and contempt for things he could not understand he found it hard, as anyone might, to swallow 'three dexter buckles on a sable ground gules.
I am aware, however, those who differ from me in political sentiments may, perhaps, remark, I am stepping out of the proper line of my duty; and they may possibly ascribe to arrogance or ostentation, what I know alone is the result of the purest intention.
He had expected to find himself in a palace of gilt, to find the prevailing note of the place an unrestrained and inartistic gorgeousness. He found instead that the decorations everywhere were of spotless white, the whole effect one of cultivated and restful harmony. The glass and linen on the table were perfect. There was nowhere the slightest evidence of any ostentation.
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