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When everything seems to foretell a quiet life, a pigmy among pigmies appears, charged with the express duty of exterminating an insect which is protected first by the casket of the berry and next by the shell, the underground work of the grub. To eat the Twelve-spotted Crioceris is its mission in life, its special function. When and how does it deliver its attack? I do not know.
These are the ones who fatten on the estimates, the root of the evil lying concealed under the snugly-cushioned fauteuils of cabinet ministers and their pampered placeholders and hunters not, beneath the straight-backed horsehair chairs of miserable clerks. It is unmanly thus for giants to gird at pigmies!
Here I was, a giant among pigmies, a man among children, a master intelligence among intellectual moles: by all rational measurement the one and only actually great man in that whole British world; and yet there and then, just as in the remote England of my birth-time, the sheep-witted earl who could claim long descent from a king's leman, acquired at second-hand from the slums of London, was a better man than I was.
Tragedy, comedy, chivalry, philosophy will be mine. I shall listen to their music perpetually and their colours will dance before my eyes. I shall soar from terraces of stone upon dragons with shining wings and make war upon Olympus. From the peaks of hills I shall swoop into recondite valleys and drive the pigmies, shrieking little curses, to their caverns.
"It should be known," says the veracious old Venetian, "that what is reported respecting the dead bodies of diminutive human creatures or pigmies, brought from India, is an idle tale; such pretended men being manufactured in the island of Basman in the following manner. The country produces a species of monkey of a tolerable size, and having a countenance resembling that of a man.
He had expected to turn a corner and see before him, immense and wonderful, the great church, rich in tradition and dignity, rearing itself high above the houses like a strong man rising up from the midst of pigmies ... and he had turned a corner and seen only a grimy, blackened thing, huddled into a corner ... jostled almost ... by greedy shopkeepers and warehousemen.
How now! said Panurge, are your farts so fertile and fruitful? By G , here be brave farted men and fisgued women; let them be married together; they will beget fine hornets and dorflies. So did Pantagruel, and called them pigmies. Those he sent to live in an island thereby, where since that time they are increased mightily.
Pigmy, so proud of commanding pigmies! Have they then assured thee that thou art a god? Have they flattered thee that thou art something supernatural? Know there is nothing superior to myself. Contemplate thine own insignificance, acknowledge thine impotence against the slightest of my blows.
Her delicate perception made her feel what trenchant discord her appearance offered to all that surrounded her, and the discord pained her; for she could not conceal from herself that misery and external meanness were here entitled to give the key-note and that her magnificence derived no especial grandeur from contrast with all these modest accessories, amid dust, gloom, and suffering, but rather became disproportionate and hideous, like a giant among pigmies.
I still seem to see it, the huge grim thing; many of the others were large, strikingly so, and appeared fully to justify the old man's conclusion that their owners must have been strange fellows; but, compared with this mighty mass of bone, they looked small and diminutive like those of pigmies; it must have belonged to a giant, one of those red- haired warriors of whose strength and stature such wondrous tales are told in the ancient chronicles of the north, and whose grave-hills, when ransacked, occasionally reveal secrets which fill the minds of puny moderns with astonishment and awe.
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