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The doublet did not reach to the waistband of the trunkhose, while those nether garments stopped short of his knees; the whole attire belonging to a smaller man than the unfortunate statesman. His delicate white hands, much exposed by the shortness of the sleeves, looked very unlike those of a day-labourer, and altogether the new mason presented a somewhat incongruous and wobegone aspect.
To be an agricultural day-labourer at less than a beggar's wage could hardly be a tempting pursuit for a proud and indolent race.
In the meantime, while faring more frugally than a day-labourer, he yet surrounded himself with a show of royal state, had his servants armed with gilt helmets, and gathered around him a body-guard of Suliotes. These wild mercenaries becoming turbulent, he was obliged to despatch them to Mesolonghi, then threatened with siege by the Turks and anxiously waiting relief.
Lenny would learn to be fit for more than a day-labourer; he would learn gardening, in all its branches, rise some day to be a head gardener. "And," said Riccabocca, "I will take care of his book-learning, and teach him whatever he has a head for." "He has a head for everything," said the widow. "Then," said the wise man, "everything shall go into it."
We Londoners are not accustomed from our youth to the poems of a great democratic genius, as the Scotchmen are to their glorious Burns. We have no chance of such an early acquaintance with poetic art as that which enabled John Bethune, one of the great unrepresented the starving Scotch day-labourer, breaking stones upon the parish roads, to write at the age of seventeen such words as these:
With remunerative employment at his command he stooped to accept the charity of friends; and, notwithstanding his lofty ideas of philosophy, he condescended to humiliations from which many a day-labourer would have shrunk.
My daughter was particularly directed to watch her declining sister's health; my wife was to attend me; my little boys were to read to me: 'And as for you, my son, continued I, 'it is by the labour of your hands we must all hope to be supported. Your wages, as a day-labourer, will be full sufficient, with proper frugality, to maintain us all, and comfortably too.
Lower says the fourth in descent from this person kept the turnpike-gate at Wadhurst, and that the last of the family, a day-labourer, emigrated to America in 1839, carrying with him, as the sole relic of his family greatness, the royal grant of free warren given to his ancestor.
We find it in the course of creating a classical literature, and a higher instruction of its own; and, though in comparison with the Hellenic classics and Hellenic culture we may feel ourselves tempted to attach little value to the feeble hothouse products of Italy, yet, so far as its historical development was primarily concerned, the quality of the Latin classical literature and the Latin culture was of far less moment than the fact that they subsisted side by side with the Greek; and, sunken as were the contemporary Hellenes in a literary point of view, one might well apply in this case also the saying of the poet, that the living day-labourer is better than the dead Achilles.
"This is why you are no longer considered a factor in civilisation, save as a sort of police-guard upon the very ignorant. And you are losing this prestige. Even the credulous day-labourer has come to weigh you and find you wanting is thrilling with his own God-assurance and stepping forth to save himself as best he can.
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