Thread:FreeSpirit98/@comment-27014070-20190609011954/@comment-27014070-20190615221239

The slightest matters have their vulgarity fumigated out of them by the same elevated style. Commonplace people would say that a copy of Shakspeare lay on a drawing-room table; but the authoress of "The Enigma," bent on edifying periphrasis, tells you that there lay on the table, "that fund of human thought and feeling, which teaches the heart through the little name, 'Shakspeare.'" A watchman sees a light burning in an upper window rather longer than usual, and thinks that people are foolish to sit up late when they have an opportunity of going to bed; but, lest this fact should seem too low and common, it is presented to us in the following striking and metaphysical manner: "He marvelled–as man will think for others in a necessarily separate personality, consequently (though disallowing it) in false mental premise,–how differently he should act, how gladly he should prize the rest so lightly held of within." A footman–an ordinary Jeames, with large calves and aspirated vowels–answers the door-bell, and the opportunity is seized to tell you that he was a "type of the large class of pampered menials, who follow the curse of Cain–'vagabonds' on the face of the earth, and whose estimate of the human class varies in the graduated scale of money and expenditure…. These, and such as these, O England, be the false lights of thy morbid civilization!" We have heard of various "false lights," from Dr. Cumming to Robert Owen, from Dr. Pusey to the Spirit-rappers, but we never before heard of the false light that emanates from plush and powder.