mutility

Updated: May 23, 2025

"Such a man," he says, in a concluding burst of eloquence, "if his establishment in horses and servants is not immoderate, although he surrounds himself with all that art can offer to render life beautiful and elegant though he gathers round him the best productions of the intellect of all countries and ages, though his gardens and his park are models of curiosity and beauty, though he lets his ancestral trees rot in their picturesque mutility instead of converting them into profitable timber, and disregards the fact that his park would be more productive if cut up into potato plots though, in fine he lives in the very height of elegant, refined and tasteful luxury I should hesitate to denounce as consuming on himself the incomes of countless labouring families, and I should imagine that he might lead his life of temperate and thoughtful joy quietly conscious that his liberal expenditure enabled scores of these families as well as artists and others to exist in comfort and without either brain or heart giving way under the burdensome reflection."

Goldwin Smith - Lectures and Essays