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Updated: May 27, 2025
Great stress was laid on the instability of pleasure, and the constant liability to accidents; whence we should always be anticipating and adapting ourselves to the worst that could happen, so as never to be in a state where anything could ruffle the mind.
Usually, however, teaching is an injury to a writer, because of the need of constantly adapting one's self to inferior minds. There are few women who can devote themselves to pure literature, and few of these can earn a living by it; so, delightful as it is, it can hardly be counted among the bread-winning occupations.
Later critics, while unable to deny the feature of his style which so looks like affectation, have explained it to such good effect as to make it appear a beauty; they have asked us to regard it as the happy result of a sympathetic mind adapting itself to the object of its address. This looks very like blaming Burns's correspondents for the badness of his style.
Awkward he still was, and lacking in many graces that education and good society can alone confer; but he was trying hard to be, as he confided to old Uncle John, "like other people," and succeeded in adapting himself very well to his new circumstances.
This is remote from the Arthur of the oldest Celtic legends, but justifies the poet in adapting Arthur to the ideal hero of the Idylls:
I entered the city of Belfast, seventeen miles distant, and became coachman and groom to a man who, by the selling of clothes, had reached the economic status of owning a horse. In adapting himself to this new condition, he dressed me in livery, and, after I had taught him to drive, I sat beside him in the buggy with folded arms, arrayed in a tall hat with a cockade.
They become simply useless, obstructive, and corrupt; and though by mere passive resistance they may continue to exist long after they have ceased to serve any good purpose, they will at last be undermined by their own abuses. Other institutions, on the other hand, show the true characteristic of vitality the power of adapting themselves to changed conditions and new utilities.
Sally, in spite of her eagerness, was adapting her pace to the limitations of Uncle Timothy, who at sixty could hardly be expected to walk in competition with nineteen. "Pine groves are worth something these days," said Max, eyeing the thick tops critically.
It is this putting of old words in a new light, and to a new use, though that will be often the oldest of all, on which Horace sets so high a store: Dixeris egregie, notum si callida verbum Reddiderit junctura novum; and not less Montaigne: 'The handling and utterance of fine wits is that which sets off a language; not so much by innovating it, as by putting it to more vigorous and various service, and by straining, bending, and adapting it to this.
He himself, from the beginning, was shrewd, clever, and intelligent, and possessed the power, in a singular degree, of adapting himself to his society, whenever he felt it his interest to do so. He could, indeed, raise or depress his manners in a very surprising degree, and with an effort that often occasioned astonishment.
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