The expression is very interesting. J.W.
Titian.
(Keeps a macaroni store in Venice, at the old family
stand.)
It is the neatest thing in still life I have seen
for years.
Rosa Bonheur.
The smile may be almost called unique. Bismarck.
I never saw such character portrayed in a picture
face before.
De Mellville.
There is a benignant simplicity about the execution
of this work which warms the heart toward it as much,
full as much, as it fascinates the eye. Landseer.
One cannot see it without longing to contemplate the
artist.
Frederick William.
Send me the entire edition—together with
the plate and the original portrait—and
name your own price. And—would you
like to come over and stay awhile with Napoleon at
Wilhelmsh:ohe? It shall not cost you a cent.
William III.
Often a quite assified remark becomes sanctified by
use and petrified by custom; it is then a permanency,
its term of activity a geologic period.
The day after the arrival of Prince Henry I met an
English friend, and he rubbed his hands and broke
out with a remark that was charged to the brim with
joy—joy that was evidently a pleasant salve
to an old sore place:
“Many a time I’ve had to listen without
retort to an old saying that is irritatingly true,
and until now seemed to offer no chance for a return
jibe: ‘An Englishman does dearly love a
lord’; but after this I shall talk back, and
say, ‘How about the Americans?’”
It is a curious thing, the currency that an idiotic
saying can get. The man that first says it thinks
he has made a discovery. The man he says it to,
thinks the same. It departs on its travels,
is received everywhere with admiring acceptance, and
not only as a piece of rare and acute observation,
but as being exhaustively true and profoundly wise;
and so it presently takes its place in the world’s
list of recognized and established wisdoms, and after
that no one thinks of examining it to see whether it
is really entitled to its high honors or not.
I call to mind instances of this in two well-established
proverbs, whose dullness is not surpassed by the one
about the Englishman and his love for a lord:
one of them records the American’s Adoration
of the Almighty Dollar, the other the American millionaire-girl’s
ambition to trade cash for a title, with a husband
thrown in.
It isn’t merely the American that adores the
Almighty Dollar, it is the human race. The human
race has always adored the hatful of shells, or the
bale of calico, or the half-bushel of brass rings,
or the handful of steel fish-hooks, or the houseful
of black wives, or the zareba full of cattle, or the
two-score camels and asses, or the factory, or the
farm, or the block of buildings, or the railroad bonds,
or the bank stock, or the hoarded cash, or —anything
that stands for wealth and consideration and independence,
and can secure to the possessor that most precious
of all things, another man’s envy. It
was a dull person that invented the idea that the
American’s devotion to the dollar is more strenuous
than another’s.
