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Updated: May 31, 2025
If certain barbarisms and superstitions disappeared earlier in New England than elsewhere, not by the decision of exceptionally enlightened or humane judges, but by force of public opinion, that is the fact that is interesting and instructive for us.
I can see her studying in his provincial dialect until she becomes the Champollion of New England or Western or Southern barbarisms. Nothing surprises her. The highest breeding, you know, comes round to the Indian standard, to take everything coolly, nil admirari, if you happen to be learned and like the Roman phrase for the same thing.
Egger had lately, under the influence of some desperate delusion, come to our hospitable clime in search of his fortune. Of languages he could not be said to know any; his French and his German were of barbarisms all compact; English as yet he could use only in a most primitive manner. He must have been the most unhappy man in all London.
He is beset by doubts which he never settles, and his poems generally express sorrow or regret or resignation. In his prose he shows the cavalier spirit, aggressive, light-hearted, self-confident. Like Carlyle, he dislikes shams, and protests against what he calls the barbarisms of society; but he writes with a light touch, using satire and banter as the better part of his argument.
But he rails against the Roman scholars who want to make us all talk Latin again: `My ears, he says, `are sufficiently flayed by the barbarisms of the learned, and if the vulgar are to talk Latin I would as soon have been in Florence the day they took to beating all the kettles in the city because the bells were not enough to stay the wrath of the saints. Ah, Messer Greco, if you want to know the flavour of our scholarship, you must frequent my shop: it is the focus of Florentine intellect, and in that sense the navel of the earth as my great predecessor, Burchiello, said of his shop, on the more frivolous pretension that his street of the Calimara was the centre of our city.
A picture in coloured glass is one of the most vulgar of barbarisms, and only fit to be ranked with the gauze transparencies and chemical illuminations of the sensational stage.
Indeed, where it is not relieved by such barbarisms as we have quoted, it purls along with a certain weak smartness which is inexpressibly tiresome. A much more tolerable book, however, would be spoiled by such arrant egotism as our author displays on every page. We are never rid of Mr. Parker for a moment. Wherever Mr. Choate is visible, Mr. Parker is strutting by his side.
Well: but is the nightly tom-tom dance so much more absurd than the nightly ball, which is now considered an integral element of white civilisation? A few centuries hence may not both of them be looked back on as equally sheer barbarisms? These tom-tom dances are not easily seen. The only glance I ever had of them was from the steep slope of once beautiful Belmont.
What a perpetual Fund would it have been of obsolete Words and Phrases, unusual Barbarisms and Rusticities, absurd Spellings and complicated Dialects? I make no question but it would have been looked upon as one of the most valuable Treasuries of the Greek Tongue.
But common sense and common humanity were unfortunately left out from their premises, and a layman had to supply them. A hundred more years and many of the barbarisms still lingering among us will, of course, have disappeared like witch-hanging. But people are sensitive now, as they were then. You will see by this extract that the Rev.
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