United States or Papua New Guinea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


It may perhaps be paralleled with the love of the Roman for processions, e.g. the lustrations of farm, city, and army, and with his instinctive desire for aid and counsel in all important matters both of public and private life, shown in the consilium of the paterfamilias and of the magistrate.

We say awkward, for it is not more certain that Sarah Gamp liked her beer drawn mild, than it is that your Englishman likes his poetry cut short; and so, accordingly, it often happens that some estimable paterfamilias takes up an odd volume of Browning his volatile son or moonstruck daughter has left lying about, pishes and pshaws! and then, with an air of much condescension and amazing candour, remarks that he will give the fellow another chance, and not condemn him unread.

On your breakfast-table, good Paterfamilias, there lies, every morning, a newspaper, and on Saturday perhaps there are two or three. When you go out in the street, you are pestered to buy half a score more of them. In your club reading-room there are a hundred different journals. When you travel by the railway you see at every station a provincial newspaper of more or less extensive circulation.

Olivo, too, whom he had known in old days as a lean and eager student, was now a portly, countrified paterfamilias. The proposed visit did not offer sufficient attractions to induce Casanova to abandon a journey that was to bring him thirty or forty miles nearer to Venice. Olivo, however, was disinclined to take no for an answer.

I will not now detain you longer on the subject of the extent and working of coal, lest I should tire your patience; but before concluding I should wish to give some account of the uses to which this most valuable product is applied. The main use of coal, as we all know, is to produce heat, without which many a paterfamilias would grumble when the dinner-hour came and he had nothing hot to eat.

Had he been thy neighbour, thou well-to-do reader, with a house in the country, would he not have been welcome to thy table? Wouldst thou have avoided him at his club, thou reader from the West-end? Has he not settled himself respectably, thou grey-haired, novel-reading paterfamilias, thou materfamilias, with daughters of thine own to be married?

Our weak and imperfect conception of God as a God with a long beard and a voice of thunder, of a God who promulgates laws and pronounces dooms, of a God who is the Master of a household, a Roman Paterfamilias, required counterpoise and complement, and since fundamentally we are unable to conceive of the personal and living God as exalted above human and even masculine characteristics, and still less as a neutral or hermaphrodite God, we have recourse to providing Him with a feminine God, and by the side of the God-Father we have placed the Goddess-Mother, she who always forgives, because, since she sees with love-blind eyes, she sees always the hidden cause of the fault and in that hidden cause the only justice of forgiveness ..."

Its purveyors do not pretend to have filled his stomach, but only to have put him in the way of filling it for himself, whereas, unhappily, Paterfamilias discovers that that is the very thing that they have not done. His young Hopeful at twenty-one is almost as unable to run alone as when he first entered the nursery.

His best scenes interest us more for their good sense than for any more stirring qualities. His nearest approach to a strong character is the paterfamilias himself, who is certainly much less "woolly and mawkish" than his pendant in Diderot. Next one may place the artist Wehrmann.

A young man who was not in some way engaged in increasing his income was looked upon as a very undesirable member of society, and sure, sooner or later, to come to harm. Millionaires declined to send their sons to college, saying they would get ideas there that would unfit them for business, to Paterfamilias the one object of life.