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Without our clothes and our pedestals we are poor things and much of a size; our dignities are not real, our pomps are shams. At our best and stateliest we are not suns, as we pretended, and teach, and believe, but only candles; and any bummer can blow us out.
In one of the stateliest mansions on the lower Hudson, near New York, old Stanford Marvin, president of the Marvin Motors Company, dozed over his papers, while Owen, his confidential secretary, eyed him across the mahogany flat-topped desk. A soft purring sound floated in the open window and half-roused the aged manufacturer.
Yet strange to say! her large lustrous eyes were not turned downwards upon that grave wherein her brightest hope lay buried but riveted in a widely different direction! The prison of the Old Republic is, I think, the stateliest building in all Venice but how could that lady gaze so fixedly upon it, when beneath her lay stifling her only child?
We see the proudest temples and palaces in stateliest attitudes, wearing their sheets of detritus as royal robes, shedding off showers of red and yellow stones like trees in autumn shedding their leaves, going to dust like beautiful days to night, proclaiming as with the tongues of angels the natural beauty of death.
They now sought to surpass each other in splendid extravagance. It was an eager competition who should build the stateliest palaces, have the greatest number of noble pages and gentlemen in waiting, the most gorgeous liveries, the most hospitable tables, the most scientific cooks. There was, also, much depravity as well as extravagance. The morals of high society were loose.
Such a one as I, Jack, needed only, till now, to shake the stateliest tree, and the mellowed fruit dropt into my mouth: always of Montaigne's taste thou knowest: thought it a glory to subdue a girl of family.
"Here," came in a deep hollow tone from the gaunt and ragged wreck of the giant who twelve months before had been the stateliest figure in the brilliant galaxy of European Royalty.
You, clever young student of eighteen years old, when you wrote your prize essay, fancied that in thought and style it was very like Macaulay, and not Macaulay in that stage of Vealy brilliancy in which he wrote his essay on Milton, not Macaulay the fairest and most promising of calves, but Macaulay the stateliest and most beautiful of oxen.
And plainly, too, they were a childlike and innocent lot; telling lies of the stateliest pattern with a most gentle and winning naivety, and ready and willing to listen to anybody else's lie, and believe it, too. It was hard to associate them with anything cruel or dreadful; and yet they dealt in tales of blood and suffering with a guileless relish that made me almost forget to shudder.
“Now,” said Mr Bunker to Welsh, “you will perhaps be kind enough to give me a precise account of your doings since the middle of November.” “I’m d——d if I do,” replied Welsh. “Sare,” interposed the Baron in his stateliest manner, “I know not now who you may be, but I see you are no gentleman. Ven you are viz gentlemen—and noblemen—you vill please to speak respectfully.”
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