United States or Bouvet Island ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Cardinal Richelieu, that great and wise Statesman, said, That there was no surer Testimony to be given of the flourishing Greatness of a State, than publick Pleasures and Divertisements for they are, says he the Schools of Vertue, where Vice is always either punish't, or disdain'd. They are secret Instructions to the People, in things that 'tis impossible to insinuate into them any other Way.
He played with the incommunicable, the inconceivable, the absolute, the antinomies, as he would have played with a bundle of jack-straws. "Brahma," the poem which so mystified the readers of the "Atlantic Monthly," was one of his spiritual divertisements. To the average Western mind it is the nearest approach to a Torricellian vacuum of intelligibility that language can pump out of itself.
The Fourth Voyage of Sindbad the Sailor. The pleasure, says he, and the divertisements I took after my third voyage, had not charms enough to divert me from another. I was again prevailed upon by my passion for traffic, and curiosity to see new things. I therefore put my affairs in order, and having provided a stock of goods fit for the places I designed to trade, I set out on my journey.
There was an exchange of Italian between the young lady and the maid, after which the latter turned, and with a busy, delighted effect about the rear view of her walked back across the bridge to spend her gift of an hour in what divertisements we shall never know. The church was closed. Gerald pulled the bell-handle of the next door.
It was probably Charles, Duke of Bolton (1698-1722), who was at one time Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and who in the beginning of his ducal career, at all events, resided in St. James's Street, that possessed successively as head-cooks John Nott and John Middleton. To each of these artists we owe a volume of considerable pretensions, and the "Cook's and Confectioner's Dictionary," 1723, by the former, is positively a very entertaining and cyclopedic publication. Nott inscribes his book "To all Good Housewives," and declares that he placed an Introduction before it merely because fashion had made it as strange for a book to appear without one as for a man to be seen in church without a neckcloth or a lady without a hoop-petticoat. He congratulates himself and his readers on living in a land flowing with milk and honey, quotes the saw about God sending meat and somebody else sending cooks, and accounts for his omission of pigments by saying, like a gallant man, that his countrywomen little needed such things. Nott opens with Some Divertisements in Cookery, us'd at Festival-Times, as Twelfth-Day, etc., which are highly curious, and his dictionary itself presents the novelty of being arranged, lexicon-wise, alphabetically. He seems to have been a fairly-read and intelligent man, and cites, in the course of his work, many celebrated names and receipts. Thus we have: To brew ale Sir Jonas Moore's way; to make Dr. Butler's purging ale; ale of health and strength, by the Viscount St. Albans; almond butter the Cambridge way; to dress a leg of mutton
By the splendor of God! what is this?" He drew near Ben-Hur with a finger pointing on the face of the notice. "Read," said Ben-Hur. "No; better thou." Ben-Hur took the paper, which, signed by the prefect of the province as editor, performed the office of a modern programme, giving particularly the several divertisements provided for the occasion.
I know not the reason for their Performing this ceremony, which they call Heiva, a name they give to most of their divertisements. They compute time by the Moon, which they call Malama, reckoning 30 days to each moon, 2 of which they say the moon is Mattee, that is, dead, and this is at the time of the new moon, when she cannot be seen.
The King of Armenia, who had long mourned his daughter as lost to him for ever, was so grateful to the French Knight that he at once promised her to him in marriage, and entertained him with the most sumptuous banquets and balls, and other pleasant divertisements which his court could produce.
Word Of The Day