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Updated: May 5, 2025
The lively old woman was sitting close against her bit of fire, on her left a small deal table which held her cold potatoes and cold bacon; on her right a tiny window and window-sill whereon lay her coil of "plait" and the simple straw-splitting machine she had just been working.
And then the affectations and conceits of that elegant circle, the sonnets and madrigals, the "bouts-rimes," the practical jokes, the logic-chopping and straw-splitting of those ultra-fine intellects, the romances where the personages of the day masqueraded under Greek or Roman or Oriental aliases, books written in a flowery language which the Cavalier did not understand, and full of allusions that were dark to him; while not to know and appreciate those master-works placed him outside the pale.
No knowledge can come out of this straw-splitting in vacuo; and certainly no art out of this indecent pedant's symbolism: all things are turned to dusty, dirty lumber. As with the intellectual, so also, in large degree, with the moral: a splendid will to do right is applied, in its turn, to phantoms. Here again the letters of Abélard and Héloïse are extraordinarily instructive.
Ill could he tolerate the monotony and restraint of this clerkly life. In his eyes law was an instrument, not of justice, but of jugglery. Men were born, said his philosophy, rather to risk their necks than ink their fingers; and if a bold adventure puts you in a difficulty, why, then, you hire some straw-splitting attorney to show his cunning.
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