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Updated: June 13, 2025
The nineteenth-century Briton face to face with the conditions of primitive man is a spectacle fine in the general, but often ludicrous or piteous in the particular. The loneliness, the coarseness, the everlasting insistence of the pettiest and most troublesome wants and difficulties, harden and brace many minds, but narrow most and torment some.
This is the pettiest Low-borne Lasse, that ever, Ran on the greene-sord: Nothing she do's or seemes," where "seems" is changed to "says," by striking out all but the first and last letters, and writing ay in the margin. In a passage given from "Troilus and Cressida," Act V. Sc. 2, we have this line: "Good traders in the flesh, set this in your painted cloathes,"
You may have sincerity, but you have no modesty; out of the pettiest vanity you expose your sincerity to publicity and ignominy. You doubtlessly mean to say something, but hide your last word through fear, because you have not the resolution to utter it, and only have a cowardly impudence.
Unprincipled, crafty, hypocritical, even base when it suited his purpose; secretly sneering at the dupes he made, and knowing no code save that of interest and ambition; viewing men only as machines, and opinions only as ladders, there was yet a tone of powerful feeling sometimes elicited from a heart that could at the same moment have sacrificed a whole people to the pettiest personal object: and sometimes with Lucy the eloquence or irony of his conversation deepened into a melancholy, a half-suppressed gentleness of sentiment, that accorded with the state of her own mind and interested her kind feelings powerfully in his.
"No one shall be put in prison," says the Portuguese code, "except under special circumstances"; but when the exceptions are considered, they are found to cover nearly every abuse of authority on the part of the pettiest official which can be conceived.
It was enough for him to ponder wearily over schemes which he was supposed to dictate, and to give himself the appearance of supervising what he scarcely comprehended. And his work of supervision was often confined to pettiest details. The handwriting of Spain and Italy at that day was beautiful, and in our modern eyes seems neither antiquated nor ungraceful.
A man rightly mated feels it an absolute delight to confide the innermost secrets of life to his wife; and the woman would feel almost criminal if she kept the pettiest of petty secrets from her partner. They are friends, gloriously mated, and all the glories of birth and state ever imagined cannot equal their simple but perfect joy.
Was Jackson any the less for being the right arm to deal, as only he could, the crushing blows planned by the great strategist? But is not man to be independent and free? Certainly. But he gains freedom from the petty tyranny of robber-baron or boss, and from the very pettiest tyranny of all, the service of self, only as he finds and enlists under the king.
The word debt grated so harshly on Burns's ears that he could not be at peace with himself so long as the pettiest account remained unpaid; and if he had no ready money in his hands to meet it, he must e'en borrow from a friend. His income, when he settled in Dumfries, was 'down money £70 per annum, and there were perquisites which must have raised it to eighty or ninety.
This had he come from Paris to tell this was the news that Richard Gessner heard with less apparent emotion than though one had told him of the pettiest event of a common day. "The matter has been very badly bungled," he said. "I shall write to General Trepoff and complain of it. Do you not see how inconvenient this is?
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