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Knipp again, but whatever hindered I know not, but no company come, which vexed me because it disappointed me of the glut of mirthe I hoped for. However, good discourse with my Lord and merry, with Mrs. Williams's descants upon Sir J. Minnes's and Mrs. Turner's not coming. So home and to bed. 5th. I with my Lord Bruncker and Mrs.
Without saying that he has ever reached quite to the level of some lyrical and apocalyptic descants that we may find in Carlyle and in Ruskin, Thackeray has never fallen into the faults of violence and turgidity which their warmest admirers are bound to confess in many a passage from these our two prose-poets.
Justice Tonson, the good Lady Jones, and the two virtuous gentlewomen her daughters, nay the great Sir Thomas Truby, knight and baronet, and my young master the Squire who shall one day be lord of this manor. With what magisterial gravity he descants of whipping out the dogs, 'except the sober lap-dog of the good widow Howard, tearing away the children's half-eaten apples, smoothing the dog's ears of the great Bible!
Some of the shops are very fair; but the goods all partake too largely of the flash order, for the purpose of suiting the tastes of successful diggers, their wives and families; it is ludicrous to see them in the shops men who, before the gold-mines were discovered, toiled hard for their daily bread, taking off half-a-dozen thick gold rings from their fingers, and trying to pull on to their rough, well-hardened hands the best white kids, to be worn at some wedding party; whilst the wife, proud of the novel ornament, descants on the folly of hiding them beneath such useless articles as gloves.
He takes them up in his unwashed fingers, turns them oh, profanation! round and round, in order to display their various merits, descants on the delicacy of the workmanship, the sharpness of the chiseling, the pure water of the brilliants, and the fine taste displayed in the form; tells a hundred lies about the sum he gave for them, the offers he has refused, the persons to whom they once belonged, and those who wish to purchase them!
Of these, one of the most prominent was Professor H. Brugsch, secretary of the Prussian embassy to Persia in 1860, who in his book of travels thus descants on his futile efforts: "No one could inform us where the last earthly remains of a certain Mirza-Schaffy were laid to rest.
He next adverts to the influence of the Imagination on Happiness. On this, he has in view the addition made to our enjoyments or our sufferings by the respective predominance of hope or of fear in the mind. Allowing for constitutional bias, he recognizes, as the two great sources of a desponding imagination, Superstition and Scepticism, whose evils he descants upon at length.
Whereupon the little Portuguese Commandant struck his sword firm down on the pavement of the ramparts, looked very big, and then ordered them to prison for further examination. As every one descants upon the want of comfort in a prison, it is to be presumed that there are no very comfortable ones.
If all the world loves a lover, certainly no considerable part of it cares to pay strict attention while he descants at length upon the singular and altogether transcendent charms of the loved one; and when Barton got fairly started I had time to consider another matter which was of far greater importance to me.
He descants perpetually on virtue, religion, “the good man,” life, death, immortality, eternity—subjects which are apt to give a factitious grandeur to empty wordiness. When a poet floats in the empyrean, and only takes a bird’s-eye view of the earth, some people accept the mere fact of his soaring for sublimity, and mistake his dim vision of earth for proximity to heaven.
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