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We should have smiled assent, but we had just arrived at a spot that overshadowed every countenance with ten-fold seriousness! This was no moment for gratuitous triflings.
Again, after telling a strange story of a boy who beheld the image of a thief in the neck of a phial, and of some incantations of Josephus Niger, he concludes: "Nevertheless I am of opinion that all these things were fables, and that no one could have had any real knowledge thereof, seeing that they were nothing else than vain triflings."
Give me rugged toils, fierce disputation, wrangling controversy, harassing research, give me anything that calls forth the energies of the mind; but for Heaven's sake shield me from those calms, those tranquil slumberings, those enervating triflings, those siren blandishments, that I have for some time indulged in, which lull the mind into complete inaction, which benumb its powers, and cost it such painful and humiliating struggles to regain its activity and independence!"
With the solemn triflings of the Congress we need not concern ourselves. The French plenipotentiaries saw clearly that their master "would allow of no peace but that which he should himself dictate with his foot on the enemy's neck."
It would seem somewhat of a paradox that a sombre and earnest nature like Cardan's should find so great pleasure in reading the elegant poco curante triflings of the Augustan singer, were it not a recognized fact that Horace has always been a greater favourite with serious practical Englishmen than with the descendants of those for whom he wrote his verses.
These triflings with pearls and parrakeets, these al fresco luncheons off yams and bananas there was no "making of history" about them, I resolved that without further dallying I would turn to and capture the French frigate, according to the original programme. So we upped anchor with the morning tide, and set all sail for San Salvador. Of course I had no idea where San Salvador really was.
As he had never once approached the limits of the serious, or had occasion to ask himself what might be the end of any of these pleasant triflings into which his own temperament, seconding the plots of his friends, carried him lightly, all had gone quite well and easily, as Dick loved the things about him to go.
Aimlessly yielding to your artistic whims, crotchets, and triflings, you make "interesting works of art" out of your own immaturity, you are satisfied with an audience composed of an infinitesimal fraction of our people, a fraction, moreover, which, things being as they are, consists chiefly of the parvenus residing in Berlin W. This is the public which more is the pity dominates the picture galleries, the concert halls, and the theatres of Berlin, and from Berlin affects to set the standard of taste for the empire so far, it must be added, as the empire at large concerns itself at all with this meticulous literature.
With the solemn triflings of the Congress we need not concern ourselves. The French plenipotentiaries saw clearly that their master "would allow of no peace but that which he should himself dictate with his foot on the enemy's neck."
His Courtier's Triflings, suggested by John of Salisbury's Polycraticus, is the only book which actually bears his name, and with its gossip, its odd accumulations of learning, its fragments of ancient history, its outbursts of moral earnestness, its philosophy, brings back to us the very temper of the court and the stir and quickening of men's minds a stir which found expression in other works of bitter satire, in the lampoon of Ralph Niger, and in the violent attacks on the monks by Nigellus.
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