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Captain Brisac had no more knowledge of sword-play than he had of flying, a circumstance which often proved exceedingly embarrassing to his adversaries, for he had a rough-and-ready way of handling his weapon which, if not so scientific, was equally as effective as the utmost refinements of the thoroughly accomplished swordsman.
It is with the detail and qualification of a tradition as with the inflexions of a language; when another people takes it over the refinements disappear. But there are other forces of modification at work upon the American tradition of an altogether more hopeful kind. It has entered upon a constructive phase. Were it not so, then the American social outlook would, indeed, be hopeless.
Place her in my charge for two years I am solitary and very rich she shall see the world and its wonders; I will have her educated, bestow on her all the refinements that great wealth can command. Nature has given her a glorious voice, Art shall make her a great singer. Forego your present happiness for her future good and your gipsy maid shall become a great lady and a peerless woman.
The reason that this isnt as clear to other workmen who come among them as it is to me is that most workmen share their ignorance of the things they affect superiority in. Poor Jackson, whom you all call the Yankee cad, and who is not a cad at all in his proper place among the engineers at our works, believes in the sham refinements he sees around him at the at-homes he is so fond of.
The good minister feelingly expatiated upon the bitterness of the heiress' lot, brought up as she had been amid all the refinements of polished society, whose sensibilities were rendered doubly acute by nature and the circumstances which environed her, to be thus degraded into the condition of a base-born, despised being, to be so suddenly hurled from honor and opulence, it was a dreadful blow!
Perceiving that nature had been lavish in the bestowal of timber and bountiful in stores of building material, they treated this like careful nurses, and thus developing the refinements of life, embellished them with luxuries. Therefore I shall now treat, to the best of my ability, of the things which are suitable to be used in buildings, showing their qualities and their excellencies.
I am not a realist, but I would not exchange that homely toothbrush in the Confederate's buttonhole for the most angelic smile that Rothermel's brush could have conjured up. But a soldier must be clad even to sixty rounds of ball cartridge. Small wonder is it then, if only the lightest toothbrush drawn through the buttonhole of his blouse must suffice as an epitome of the refinements of life.
But if religion, as now understood among men, be the latest evolutionary form of a series of mistakes, fallacies, and illusions, if its germ be a blunder, and its present form only the result of progressive but unessential refinements on that blunder, the inference that religion is untrue that nothing actual corresponds to its hypothesis is very easily drawn.
She reciprocally looked down upon them, and made no secret of her contempt for their small refinements and fancies. She affected only the society of men, and even treated them with a familiarity that was both fearless and scornful.
The orator was a follower of Plato, and a teacher of his philosophy. His aim seemed to be to darken the minds of his hearers by unintelligible refinements, at least such I thought the effect must be.
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