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¬utmost astonishment at this new conceit, as he termed it — exclaiming, with his hands clasped together, " What must be the condition of your vulgar country — how happy was my father's escape from it into a region of higher civiliza- tion ! You should know, Sir, if you have the organs to understand me, that there is a pic- turesque in art as well as in nature — in the arti- ficial dresses of men and women, as much as in the romantic scenery of the woods; and that the flattened head-dress and torn garment, when their gay causes become manifest, are as sub- limely beautiful in the view of sublunary fashion as the rocky fragment or ruined forest in the divine eye of philosophy, when traced back to the universal confusion of the world." I was quite overpowered with this last flight — I was igno- rant of the language of Armata, and there being nothing in our own which could do justice to my unconvinced submission, I could only say, with a most profound bow, " Vous avez raison> Monsieur." ¬. . The ¬
