Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 5, 2025
Not the utmost imaginative ingenuity of the novelist could have anticipated, as I rode along amidst the hurries and the leisures of a Parisian afternoon, that my next hour or two was about to bring into the monotony of office life an adventure as strange as any which I could have conceived as possible for any human unit of these numberless men and women.
At this rate the house with the red door may have rung with the most mundane minstrelsy; and it may have been below its roof that Villon, through a hole in the plaster, studied, as he tells us, the leisures of a rich ecclesiastic. It was, perhaps, of some moment in the poet's life that he should have inhabited the cloister of Saint Benoît.
But your worships chuse rather that I give you the length, breadth, and perpendicular height of the great parish-church, or drawing of the facade of the abbey of Saint Austreberte which has been transported from Artois hither every thing is just I suppose as the masons and carpenters left them, and if the belief in Christ continues so long, will be so these fifty years to come so your worships and reverences may all measure them at your leisures but he who measures thee, Janatone, must do it now thou carriest the principles of change within thy frame; and considering the chances of a transitory life, I would not answer for thee a moment; ere twice twelve months are passed and gone, thou mayest grow out like a pumpkin, and lose thy shapes or thou mayest go off like a flower, and lose thy beauty nay, thou mayest go off like a hussy and lose thyself.
True is it, that availing not, for the absence of my husband, to withstand the pricks of the flesh nor the might of love-liking, the which are of such potency that they have erst many a time overcome and yet all days long overcome the strongest men, to say nothing of weak women, and enjoying the commodities and the leisures wherein you see me, I have suffered myself lapse into ensuing Love his pleasures and becoming enamoured; the which, albeit, were it known, I acknowledge it would not be seemly, yet, being and abiding hidden, I hold well nigh nothing unseemly; more by token that Love hath been insomuch gracious to me that not only hath he not bereft me of due discernment in the choice of a lover, but hath lent me great plenty thereof to that end, showing me yourself worthy to be loved of a lady such as I, you whom, if my fancy beguile me not, I hold the goodliest, the most agreeable, the sprightliest and the most accomplished cavalier that may be found in all the realm of France; and even as I may say that I find myself without a husband, so likewise are you without a wife.
At this rate the house with the red door may have rung with the most mundane minstrelsy; and it may have been below its roof that Villon, through a hole in the plaster, studied, as he tells us, the leisures of a rich ecclesiastic. It was, perhaps, of some moment in the poet's life that he should have inhabited the cloister of Saint Benoit.
Before him, on that wall, beneath those beasts, the necromancy of the priesthood had projected an armless, fluidic hand that mounted, descended, tracing with a forefinger the three luminous hierograms of his doom. The story, a little drama, was, with the tale concerning Nebuchadnezzar, that of Daniel, and other novels quite as strange, evolved long later in the wide leisures of Jerusalem.
Nevertheless, the desire of the scientific mind even in the novel is for all reasonable accuracy, and to attain it I used for six years such winter leisures as the exacting duties of a busy professional life permitted, to collect notes of the dress, hours, sports, habits and talk of the various types of men and women I meant to delineate.
It cheers the invalid through years of weakness and confinement; illuminates the dreary hours of the sleepless night; stores the mind with pleasant thoughts, banishes ennui, fills up the unoccupied interstices and enforced leisures of an active life; makes men for a time at least forget their anxieties and sorrows, and if it is judiciously managed it is one of the most powerful means of training character and disciplining and elevating thought.
'Lords, said Richard, 'we await your leisures. None cared to attack: there was the fire to cross, and in that narrow entry three desperate blades. What could the old King do? Almost crying, the King turned to his followers. 'Taillefer, will you see me dishonoured? Where is Ponthieu? Where is Drago? So at last they all attacked together, coming on with their shields before them, in a phalanx.
Another defect of Macaulay is that, while he was an omnivorous reader and had a prodigious memory, he was not given to long-continued and profound reflection. He read and rehearsed his reading in memory, but he did not give himself to "deep, abstract meditation" and did not surrender himself to "the fruitful leisures of the spirit."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking