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Updated: May 31, 2025
The joy of the real eagle-eating biographer is to do what Tennyson bluntly described as ripping up people like pigs, and violating not privacy but decency; sweeping together odious little anecdotes, recording meannesses and weaknesses and sillinesses, all the things of which the subject himself was no doubt heartily ashamed and discarded as eagerly as possible.
I don't suppose they were any sillier than the rest of us; but when our silliness is mixed in with housekeeping and sewing and teaching and returning visits, it passes off harmless. When it is stripped of all these modifiers, however, and goes off exposed to Saratoga, and melts in with a hundred other sillinesses, it makes a great show. No, I don't like Saratoga. I don't think it is wholesome.
The young man called attention to the remarks of Thuillier and his sister with the servility of a parasite; when he played whist he justified the blunders of his dear, good friend, and he kept upon his countenance a smile, fixed and benign, like that of Madame Thuillier, ready to bestow upon all the bourgeois sillinesses of the brother and sister.
They asked him whither he meant to direct his steps. He replied, to Saragossa, to take part in the harness jousts which were held in that city every year. Don Juan told him that the new history described how Don Quixote, let him be who he might, took part there in a tilting at the ring, utterly devoid of invention, poor in mottoes, very poor in costume, though rich in sillinesses.
Of man's selfishness and badness she knew enough; but of women's small sillinesses, narrow formalities, and petty unkindnesses, she was utterly ignorant till now. "How shall I bear them? Let Dr. Grey be ever so good to me, still, how shall I bear them?"
Her deep responses spoke a faith and surety that swallowed for the moment all her little sillinesses and obstinacies. The solemn words grew in intensity, the candles flickered audibly in the sacred hush. The clergyman moved toward the bed, and they heard Caddy's breath draw out in a deep, shuddering sob; her teeth chattered against the cup. Belden set his jaw; it was cruel, brutal!
Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.
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