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Directly afterwards Lady Harrington took me apart, and gave me a lesson which I deem worthy of record. "You paid in gold," said she; "I suppose you had no bank notes about you?" "Yes, my lady, I have notes for fifty and a hundred pounds." "Then you must change one of them or wait till another time to play, for in England to pay in gold is a solecism only pardonable in a stranger.
She knew little of the fashions of the day, and, like many modest young people, was afraid she might be guilty of some solecism which would make her appear ill-bred, or at least awkward. Since her mother left her, she had become aware of a timidity to which she had hitherto been a stranger. 'Ah! she said to herself, 'if only my mother were with me!
There is many a man, moving in good society, who would rather be guilty of, and even detected in, an act of unkindness or mendacity, than be seen in an unfashionable dress or commit a grammatical solecism or a broach of social etiquette. Vulgarity to such men is a worse reproach than hardness of heart or indifferent morality.
Then they were all at dinner the bride in the place of honor running the gauntlet of all those eyes on the alert for any solecism of good manners. She went through it all, her cheeks flushing, her eyes kindling with excitement growing prettier every moment. Her spirits rose she would let these peoples and Inez Catheron see, she was their equal in all things save birth.
"If Counsellor Crossmyloof used the dative for the nominative, I would have crossed his loof with a tight leathern strap, Mr. Saddletree; there is not a boy on the booby form but should have been scourged for such a solecism in grammar." "I speak Latin like a lawyer, Mr. Butler, and not like a schoolmaster," retorted Saddletree. "Scarce like a schoolboy, I think," rejoined Butler.
I am aware that high authority might easily be found in this country to sanction the custom of giving the hand upon a first meeting, but it is undoubtedly a solecism in manners. The habit has been adopted by us, with some improvement for the worse, from France. When two Frenchmen are presented to one another, each presses the other's hand with delicate affection.
Captain Calder felt very much as he did, for he was even still less accustomed to ball-rooms, though his true gentlemanly feelings and innate sense of propriety prevented him from committing any solecism in good manners. Sims and Dicky Glover stood together.
Edinburgh is ours, though the Castle holds out; surrenders only on December 19, on most honourable terms. But what to do with Scotland, with its covenanted king, a solecism incarnate?
I must tell you, though, that the blacks, when drinking at a river or water-hole, invariably scoop up the water with their hands, and never put their mouths right down close to the surface of the water. Well, one day I was guilty of this solecism. I had been out on a hunting expedition, and reached the water-hole with an intense burning thirst. My mentor was not with me.
The most exacting literalist can hardly accuse them of solecism in their rendering of nature, true as it is that their decorative sense is so strong as to lead them to impose on nature their own sentiment instead of yielding themselves to absorption in hers, and thus, in harmonious and sympathetic concert with her, like Claude and Corot, Rousseau and Daubigny, interpreting her subtle and supreme significance.
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