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Updated: June 9, 2025
"Otium cum dignitate." Mixed with keen satire, the Irish often show a sort of cool good sense and dry humour, which gives not only effect, but value to their impromptus. Of this class is the observation made by the Irish hackney coachman, upon seeing a man of the ton driving four-in-hand down Bond-street. "That fellow," said our observer, "looks like a coachman, but drives like a gentleman."
And John's eyes turned fondly to his old home. "Ay, just the same. Do you know your wife was saying to me this morning, that when Guy comes back, when all the young folk are married, and you retire from business and settle into the otium cum dignitate, the learned leisure you used to plan she would like to give up Beechwood.
He had fixed upon fifty millions of livres as the maximum he should wish for, and when that sum was in his possession, he resolved to resign all pretensions to rank and employment, and to enjoy 'otium cum dignitate'. He had kept to his determination, and so regulated his income that; with the expenses, pomp, and retinue of a Prince, he is enabled to make more persons happy and comfortable than his extortions have ruined or even embarrassed.
Griffenbottom, who was smoking his midday cigar in Sir Thomas's arm-chair, while Sir Thomas was endeavouring to master the first book of Lord Verulam's later treatise "De dignitate scientiarum," seated in a cane-bottomed chair in a very small bed-room up-stairs. By consent the question of treating came next. Heaven and earth were being moved to find Glump.
He was to pay over the money on the neutral ground at the shire, receive the letters, put her aboard a train and then come back triumphantly into that interrupted otium cum dignitate of Smyrna Corner. For two days a solitary and bereaved plug hat on the emporium's platform turned its fuzzy gloss toward the bend in the road at the clump of alders.
The white and gold mouldings of the salon are so effaced that nothing remains of the gilding but reddish lines, while the white enamelling is yellow, cracked, and peeling off. Never did the Latin saying "Otium cum dignitate" have a greater commentary to the mind of a poet than in this noble building.
The greatest and most brilliant of the world's intellectual giants, in their moments of final insight, thus reach the habitual level of the humble and almost anonymous persons, cloistered from the world, who wrote The Imitation of Christ or The Letters of a Portuguese Nun. And how many others! III, "De Dignitate Animæ et Vilitate Corporis."
Enjoying the otium cum dignitate on his hereditary estate, and in his hereditary abode, Edward Effingham, with little pretensions to greatness, and with many claims to goodness, had hit the line of truth which so many of the "god-likes" of the republic, under the influence of their passions, and stimulated by the transient and fluctuating interests of the day, entirely overlooked, or which, if seeing, they recklessly disregarded.
Thus, if moved to civic indignation by pieces of orange-peel on the pavement, he styled himself 'Urban Rambler; if anxious to protest against the overcrowding of 'bus or railway-carriage, his signature was 'Otium cum Dignitate. When he took a holiday at the seaside, unwonted leisure and novel circumstances prompted him to address local editors at considerable length.
Life, when Julian died, was still capable of being a very graceful and dignified affair, outwardly, at any rate. On their great estates in Gaul, in Britain, in Italy, great and polished gentlemen still enjoyed their otium cum dignitate. The culture of the great past still maintained itself amongst them; although thought and all mental vigor were buried deep under the detritus.
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