and Trollope[1] in conventional imitation of the old school speak of castigating vice, but they also in other places join the universal chorus against folly, and folly as an impostor.
Disraeli[2] comes in on this:
"Teach us that pretension is a bore. * * * Catch the
fleeting colors of that sly chameleon, Cant, and show what
excessive trouble we are ever taking to make ourselves miserable
and silly."
Reade[3] adds a word:
"Self-deception will probably cease with the first blast of the
archangel's trumpet; but what human heart will part with it
till then?"
- [Footnote: *talists, political economists, theorists in all sciences, projectors in all arts,
morbid visionaries, romantic enthusiasts, lovers of music, lovers of the picturesque, and lovers of good dinners, march, and will march forever, pari passu, with the march of mechanics which some facetiously call the march of intellect.
- * * The array of false pretensions, moral, political, and literary, is as
imposing as ever; * * * and political mountebanks continue, and will continue, to puff nostrums and practice legerdemain under the eyes of the multitude; following * * * a course as tortuous as that of a river, but in a reverse process: beginning by being dark and deep, and ending by being transparent." 46-7.
His motto for Crochet Castle is:
"De monde est plein de fous, et qui n'en veut pas voir,
Doit se tenir tout seul, et casser son miroir."
]
- ↑ "And as I had ventured to take the whip of the satirist in my hand, I went beyond the iniquities of the great speculator who robs everybody, and made an onslaught also on other vices—on the intrigues of girls who want to get married, on the luxury of young men who prefer to remain single, and on the puffing propensities of authors who desire to cheat the public into buying their volumes." Autobiography, speaking of The Way We Live Now. Of Framley Parsonage: "The story was thoroughly English. There was a little fox-hunting and a little tuft-hunting; some Christian virtue and some Christian cant. There was no heroism and no villainy." Autobiography, 129.
- ↑ The Young Duke, 173.
- ↑ Never Too Late to Mend, 216.
