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Instead of leaping gallantly into death while the trumpets are still blowing, nearly every civilised man deliberately plots out his existence so as to die, like Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyitch, amid the pitiful squalor of domestic indifference or solicitude. We think health universally interesting, we meditate on diet, we measure our exercise, and shun all risks more carefully than sin.
There was not, on the one hand, any charlatan assumption in his get-up, nor, on the other, was there that squalor and neglect of the decencies of life which I have heard sometimes attaches to the practitioners in occult science.
That night, as old travellers phrase it, we lay at Waverly, on the frontier of Pennsylvania, a sad, dirty little town, grotesquely belying its romantic name, and only surpassed in squalor by the classically named Athens beware, reader, of American towns named out of classical dictionaries!
No; when I think of the work which lies before us, upon which we have already entered, of the long avenues of social reconstruction and reorganisation which open out in so many directions and ever more broadly before us, of the hideous squalor and misery which darken and poison the life of Britain, of the need of earnest action, of the prospects of effective and immediate action when I dwell upon this, it is not of feelings of lassitude or exhaustion that I am conscious, but only of a vehement impulse to press onwards.
At one end is the old castle, with its towers rising above the square battlemented mass of the main fortress; and if we had not seen the dirt and squalor that dwells within this venerable outside, we should have carried away a picture of gray, grim dignity, presented by a long past age to the present one, to put its mean ways and modes to shame. sat diligently sketching, and children came about her, exceedingly unfragrant, but very courteous and gentle, looking over her shoulders, and expressing delight as they saw each familiar edifice take its place in the sketch.
It was the increased intelligence of the masses which made the difference, as the dawn reveals the squalor of surroundings which in the darkness may have seemed tolerable. The key-note of the literature of the period was one of compassion for the poor and unfortunate, and indignant outcry against the failure of the social machinery to ameliorate the miseries of men.
At length he departed. For a long time I sat plunged in reflection. Great though my distress of mind was, I soon arrived at a decision.... My friend, I am going to marry this man; I have no choice but to accept his proposal. If anyone could save me from this squalor, and restore to me my good name, and avert from me future poverty and want and misfortune, he is the man to do it.
The searcher for such regions discovers before the first day ends that there are none practically; and though now and then, as all byways are visited, one finds remnants of old Paris, and a court or narrow lane in which crime might lurk or poverty hide itself, as a whole there is hardly a spot where sunshine cannot come, and the hideous squalor of London is absolutely unknown.
Bethune Balliol, or made their bold criticism of all things both new and old, like those who flourish in Lord Cockburn's lively pages continued to live in the ancestral houses which still kept their old-fashioned perfection within, though they had to be approached through all the squalor and misery which had already found refuge outside in the desecrated Canongate; but society in the Scotch metropolis was now rapidly tending across the lately erected bridge towards the new great houses which contemplated old Edinburgh across the little valley, where the Nor' Loch glimmered no longer and where fields lay green where marsh and water had been.
Now, in the first place, peasant proprietors in many parts of France, as I have shown elsewhere, enjoy not only the comforts, but also the luxuries, of their neighbours of the towns; and in the second, the untidiness, excessive thrift, and even squalor, occasionally found in out-of-the-way places, are to be attributed to quite other causes than that of having no rent to pay.
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