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The Dowager had subsequently done her best to further the King's suit to her son's wife, for which the Prince bitterly reproached her to her face, heaping on her epithets which she well deserved. Henry at once began to threaten a revival of the criminal suit, with a view of bastardizing him again, although the Dowager had acted on all occasions with great docility in Henry's interests.
These consist in occasional pruning where the language is redundant, compression where the style is loose, infusion of vigour where it is languid, the exchange of less forcible for more appropriate epithets slight alterations in short, like the last touches of an artist, which contribute to heighten and finish the picture, though an inexperienced eye can hardly detect in what they consist.
Gentlemen, so far as I am personally concerned in the matter, I feel no disposition to take exceptions to any epithets which you may see fit to apply to me or my writings.
Poets and writers of prose have exhausted all the epithets in their effort to describe an ungrateful child. Shakespeare's words are probably those most quoted: "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is To have a thankless child." But it is not my purpose to speak of thankless children; I shall rather make application of the rebuke to the line of work in which I have been engaged.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, remarking on this passage, said: 'No one had a greater respect than he had for his profession, but that he should never think of applying to it epithets that were appropriated merely to external rank and distinction. Madame d'Arblay, it must be owned, had cleverness enough to stock a whole family, and to set up her cousin-germans, male and female, for wits and virtuosos to the third and fourth generation.
For he had to endure on his passage atrocious insults from a populace which uttered aloud the most frightful observations, which pointed the finger at him with the coarsest epithets, and which believed it was doing him a favour in not falling upon him and tearing him to pieces! Similar circumstances took place at the funeral procession.
Kedzie was beginning to imitate the upper dialect already. She who but a twelvemonth past was dividing people into "hicks" and "swells," and whose epithets were "reub" and "classy," was now a generation advanced. Ferriday saw it and raged. One day in discussing the cast of a picture he mentioned the screen-pet Lorraine Melnotte as the man for the principal male role.
This had been a grand man, despite his calling, and in the teeth of opprobrious epithets against his craft. To be both generally blamed, and generally liked, evinces a peculiar construction of mortal. Mr. Melchisedec, whom people in private called the great Mel, had been at once the sad dog of Lymport, and the pride of the town.
It now burst upon me in a torrent of opprobrious epithets. I was a villain, a calumniator, a thief. I had lurked about the house, till those whose sex and strength enabled them to cope with me had gone. I had entered these doors by fraud. I was a wretch, guilty of the last excesses of insolence and insult. To repel these reproaches, or endure them, was equally useless.
Bence Jones for nearly forty years the people have dubbed him "tyrant" and "domineering Saxon," epithets certain to be applied to any Englishman who tries to do his own work in his own way in Ireland. Any insistance on anything being done in the master's way instead of the man's is "tyranny." Any curt command is "domineering."
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