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Updated: May 12, 2025
One or two English travellers at the same time were making amusingly stupid notices of America in some of the second-rate monthlies; and Maxwell, a bustling Irishman, who owns Temple Bar, the Saint James, and Sixpenny Magazine, and some half dozen other serials, was employing a man to invent all varieties of rubbish upon a country which he had never beheld nor comprehended.
"I like Boileau," replied the prince, "as a necessary scourge, which one can pit against the bad taste of second-rate authors. His satires, of too personal, a nature, and consequently iniquitous, do not please me. He knows it, and, despite himself, he will amend this. He is at work upon an 'Ars Poetica, after the manner of Horace.
My happiest thoughts are approved by myself alone, and so I'll keep 'em to myself. My second-rate thoughts are for others, over the heads of whom they will not pass." "Dagaeoga is in a good humor this morning." "It is because I slept so well last night. Now, having had a sufficiency of the deer I shall seek a brook. I'm pretty sure to find one in the low ground over there."
It is also highly probable that the second-rate theatrical dialogue which the Jesuit historian, writing from Spinola's private papers, has preserved for posterity, was rather what seemed to his imagination appropriate for the occasion than a faithful shorthand report of anything really uttered.
After years of muddy inefficiency, of contentedness with the second-rate and the dishonest, that flame astoundingly bursts forth, from a hidden, unheeded spark that none had ever thought to blow upon. It bursts forth out of a damp jungle of careless habits and negligence that could not possibly have fed it. There is little to encourage it.
The work and others of its author's, such as Theron and Aspasio, may still be met with occasionally on old-fashioned bookshelves, or on the second-hand stalls; and they forcibly remind us of the style of second-rate reflection which, in a different dress, is still dear to the average sober-minded individual.
I have no talent as a sculptor or painter; and as lawyer, preacher, doctor, or actor, scores of second-rate men can do as well as I, or better. I am not even a diplomatist: I can only play my trump card of force. What I can do is to organize war. Look at me! I seem a man like other men, because nine-tenths of me is common humanity.
And what was it? It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period, with all the painter's worst faults exaggerated and over- emphasised. Of course, I am quite ready to admit that Life very often commits the same error. She produces her false Renes and her sham Vautrins, just as Nature gives us, on one day a doubtful Cuyp, and on another a more than questionable Rousseau.
Mary was indeed lovely, her disposition naturally good and gentle, but her education worse than neglected. To the frivolities and meannesses of a second-rate fashion, inculcated into her till her father's death, had now succeeded the quackeries, the slavish subservience, the intolerant bigotries, of a transcendental superstition.
The salient features wore a resemblance. Prosperity and heartiness; a ready hand on, and over, a full purse; a recognised ability of the second-rate order; a stout hold of patent principles; inherited and embraced, to make the day secure and supply a somniferous pillow for the night; occasional fits of anxiety about affairs, followed by an illuminating conviction that the world is a changing one and our construction not of granite, nevertheless that a justifiable faith in the ship, joined to a constant study of the chart, will pull us through, as it has done before, despite all assaults and underminings of the common enemy and the particular; these, with the humorous indifference of familiarity and constitutional annoyances, excepting when they grew acute and called for drugs, and with friendliness to the race of man of both colours, in the belief that our Creator originally composed in black and white, together with a liking for matters on their present footing in slow motion, partly under his conductorship, were the prominent characteristics of the grandson of the founder of the house, who had built it from a spade.
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