Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 1, 2025
In a word, then, the whole question as to Luke's authority as a writer, as an eye-witness of many things, and as the relator of many others with regard to which he had obtained the testimony of eye-witnesses is fully vindicated. Twenty years ago many scholars were prone to doubt this whole question.
Niebuhr's estimate of his character is so just and free from prejudice, and proceeds from a mind which, in itself, was so pure and wholesome, that I will quote it: "All great dramatic poets are endowed with the power of creating beings who seem to act and speak with perfect independence, so that the poet is nothing more than the relator of what takes place.
You would smile to see with what anxious credulity intelligence of this sort is propagated: we stop each other on the stairs and listen while our palled dinner, just arrived from the traiteur, is cooling; and the bucket of the draw-well hangs suspended while a history is finished, of which the relator knows as little as the hearer, and which, after all, proves to have originated in some ambiguous phrase of our keeper, uttered in a good-humoured paroxysm while receiving a douceur.
The private character of the relator, Samuel Absalom, is not before the reader; nor is it to be expected that he will care to turn his eye upon it for a moment.
According to the veracious relator his head had been so soft and mushy that the goat had "pulled the bristles out by the roots 'n they wa'nt annythin' left fer a starter."
It is chiefly in the form of letters, often containing such a mixture of rumors, conjectures, and suspicions as renders it difficult to sift out the real facts and unadvisable to hazard more than general outlines, strengthened by concurrent information or the particular credibility of the relator.
The real facts in that mountain courtship are known to but two, and even now are as carefully guarded as tho the romance had not become a reality and culminated happily. But the neighbors have fragments out of which they build a story, and it varies with the imagination of the relator.
But to return to our Pygmies; tho' most of the great and learned Men would seem to decry this Story as a Fiction and mere Fable, yet there is something of Truth, they think, must have given the first rise to it, and that it was not wholly the product of Phancy, but had some real foundation, tho' disguised, according to the different Imagination and Genius of the Relator: 'Tis this that has incited them to give their several Conjectures about it.
If we may credit the embarras de mensonges which has been dignified by the name of Barras' "Memoirs," Josephine once fled to his house and flung herself at his knees, begging to be taken away from her husband; but the story is exploded by the moral which the relator clumsily tacks on, as to the good advice which he gave her.
That they were false, the general had learnt from the very person who had suggested them, from Thorpe himself, whom he had chanced to meet again in town, and who, under the influence of exactly opposite feelings, irritated by Catherine's refusal, and yet more by the failure of a very recent endeavour to accomplish a reconciliation between Morland and Isabella, convinced that they were separated forever, and spurning a friendship which could be no longer serviceable, hastened to contradict all that he had said before to the advantage of the Morlands confessed himself to have been totally mistaken in his opinion of their circumstances and character, misled by the rhodomontade of his friend to believe his father a man of substance and credit, whereas the transactions of the two or three last weeks proved him to be neither; for after coming eagerly forward on the first overture of a marriage between the families, with the most liberal proposals, he had, on being brought to the point by the shrewdness of the relator, been constrained to acknowledge himself incapable of giving the young people even a decent support.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking