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Updated: June 9, 2025
Terror inspired by the perils of the deep was only surpassed by intense grief excited by her compulsory banishment to a land where, she imagined, the invading feet of modiste and mantua-maker had not trodden out all resemblance to the original Eden; a land where the women probably attired themselves with a leaning to antediluvian simplicity, or in accordance with strong-minded proclivities, and the men were, doubtless, too much engrossed by politics and business to be capable of appreciating the most elaborate toilet that could be fashioned to captivate their eyes; a land, in short, where taste was yet unborn, and where it was ignorantly believed that the chief object of apparel was to perform, on a more extensive scale, the use of primitive fig-leaves and furs.
These latter words are spoken, not to persuade us that men can hide themselves from God, but that Adam and those that are his by nature will seek to do it, because they do not know him aright. These words therefore further show us what a bitter thing sin is to the soul; it is only for hiding-work, sometimes under its fig-leaves, sometimes among the trees of the garden.
"'I am the author, said I, coldly, 'of Culled Cowslips, but Faded Fig-Leaves was an earlier work, which I no longer recognize, and I should be grateful to you if you would be kind enough to deny that I ever imitated Maeterlinck. Possibly, I added, 'he imitates me. "She was very quiet, and I saw she was sorry.
Bewildered, like Lear, amid the social storm, they had determined, like him, to become "unsophisticated," "to owe the worm no silk, the cat no perfume" seeing, indeed, that if they had, they could not have paid for them; so they tore off, of their own will, the peacock's feathers of gentility, the sheep's clothing of moderation, even the fig-leaves of decent reticence, and became just what they really were just what hundreds more would become, who now sit in the high places of the earth, if it paid them as well to be unrespectable as it does to be respectable; if the selfishness and covetousness, bigotry and ferocity, which are in them, and more or less in every man, had happened to enlist them against existing evils, instead of for them.
His death caused infinite grief to his country, which recognized and esteemed him much more when dead than it had done when he was alive; and he was buried with the most honourable obsequies and distinctions in S. Maria del Fiore, although his burial-place was in S. Marco, under the pulpit opposite to the door, where there is a coat of arms with two fig-leaves and certain green waves on a field of gold, because his family came from the district of Ferrara, that is, from Ficaruolo, a township on the Po, as it is shown by the leaves, which denote the place, and by the waves, which signify the river.
Napoleon Buonaparte sat in his garden at St. Helena, in the shadow of a fig-tree. Before him stood a little table, and upon the table stood a glass of sangaree. The day was hot and drowsy; the sea boomed monotonously on the rocks; the broad fig-leaves stirred not; great flies buzzed heavily in the sultry air.
One of the first steps in the making of a garden should be to determine what to hide and how most gracefully to hide it. A garden is a house's garments, its fig-leaves, as we may say, and the garden's concealments, like its revelations, ought always to be in the interest of comfort, dignity, and charm. We once had a very bumptious member on our board of judges.
The cherry-trees and peach-trees were in blossom lovely showers of white and deep rose-colour among the trembling delicacy of the olives; the fig-leaves were just big enough to smell of figs, the vine-buds were only beginning to show.
Therefore count this an act of love, in the height of love; love in a great degree. "I heard thy voice in the garden." Gen. 3: 10. It is a word from without that does it. While Adam listened to his own heart, he thought fig-leaves a sufficient remedy; but the voice that walked in the garden shook him out of all such fancies.
The quantity of fig-leaves required in some of these trials was enormous; and, despite all precautions, some details which escaped into the press might well bring a blush to the most hardened American offender. It was both vexatious and comical to see the smug, Pharisaical way in which many journals ignored all these things, and held up their hands in horror at American shortcomings.
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