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As we read the sad history of his failure, we feel that in his hands the regeneration of Mexico was hopeless. Men like John or Henry Lawrence, heroes of the Indian Mutiny, accustomed to deal with semi-savages, might perhaps have succeeded; but Maximilian was the product of an advanced civilization, and all his sentiments were of a super-refined character.
The reader may like it or dislike, but his reaction, especially if he is English, seems to be so intense that it absorbs his whole psychic activity. And this reaction is by no means limited to ignorant and unintelligent readers; it affects ordinary people, it affects highly intelligent and super-refined people, it may even affect eminent literary personages.
"Helplessness" is a curious term to use for a mysteriously concentrated or super-refined form of strength. "Whose action is no stronger than a flower." But is the action of a flower any less strong because it is not the action of a fist? As a motive force a flower may be, and indeed has time and again been, stronger than a thousand fists.
While he was lying in Newgate prior to his departure, with other convicts, to New South Wales, where he died, Dickens went with a former acquaintance of the prisoner to see him. They found him still possessed with a morbid self-esteem and a poor and empty vanity. To the last this super-refined creature seemed undisturbed by remorse.
Beauty and dash and a knowledge of how to seat a table seem to have been the lady's chief characteristics; the only daughter of a carefully dressed and carefully, preserved widower, likewise a linguist, whose super-refined tastes and the limited straits to which he, the remaining scion of an old Southern family, had been reduced by a gentlemanly contempt for money, led him 'to choose Paris rather than New York as a place of residence.
Super-refined, man-directed hell was making sportive chaos in the village which it hid with its steaming breath cut by columns of black smoke from the H.E.'s and crowned with flashes of shrapnel; and under the sun's rays the gases from the powder made prismatic splendor in flurries and billows shot with the tints of the rainbow.
Beauty and dash and a knowledge of how to seat a table seem to have been the lady's chief characteristics; the only daughter of a carefully dressed and carefully, preserved widower, likewise a linguist, whose super-refined tastes and the limited straits to which he, the remaining scion of an old Southern family, had been reduced by a gentlemanly contempt for money, led him 'to choose Paris rather than New York as a place of residence.
A Bee, the queen of all the hives, ascended to Olympus with a present of some super-refined honey for Jupiter. The god was delighted with the honey, and in return offered to grant any request the Bee might make. "Give to me, I pray, O Lord of the Heavens! a sting, that, small and weak as I am, I may not be defenceless against my enemies."
At one moment he was dismissing the idea of such delicateness, such super-refined super-sensitiveness being taken with a man of his imperfect bringing-up and humble origin.
Beauty and dash and a knowledge of how to seat a table seem to have been the lady's chief characteristics; the only daughter of a carefully dressed and carefully, preserved widower, likewise a linguist, whose super-refined tastes and the limited straits to which he, the remaining scion of an old Southern family, had been reduced by a gentlemanly contempt for money, led him 'to choose Paris rather than New York as a place of residence.
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