It did not merely do things because they do not bear talking about as it does now. It was then, to the eternal glory of our country, a great "talking-shop," not a mere buying and selling shop for financial tips and official places. And as with any other artist, the care the eighteenth-century man expended on oratory is a proof of his sincerity, not a disproof of it.
I believe that for many years after I had left the national talking-shop, I was credited with having been one of the lamest shorthand writers who ever sat there, and in my anxiety and with the certainty of failure before my eyes, I fell into such a state of agitation that my hand perspired so that my pencil would not mark a line upon the paper.
These are, perhaps, fantasies of decay: but fundamentally they answer a masculine appetite. Men feel that rules, even if irrational, are universal; men feel that law is equal, even when it is not equitable. There is a wild fairness in the thing as there is in tossing up. They denounce the House as the Talking-Shop, and complain that it wastes time in wordy mazes.
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