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Browsing named entities in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life.

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July 1st (search for this): chapter 29
In the narrative written, apparently by one of the corps, in a Boston newspaper, her Majesty the Queen was described as a pleasant-faced old lady, who received them very cordially. This seems rather to recall the descriptions given of dignitaries by Major Jack Downing, in the last generation, who was habitually on easy terms with them, and yet would hardly have regarded it as an act of homage even when he pulled off General Jackson's boots. Yet we are distinctly assured by the Spectator (July 1), which is on the whole the most reasonable of the great London weeklies, that it was no small honor [for the Queen] to receive thus the homage of New England, and to feel that she was greeted not merely as the Queen of England, but of the English race. It is worth while to know at last what was the equivalent supposed to be given for all these receptions at Windsor Castle, these reviews at Aldershot. The Americans were supposed to bring homage from a once rebellious colony, now grown to a
July 4th (search for this): chapter 6
uld of Madrid — in fact, of Philadelphia or Chicago. He rejoiced to meet old neighbors, to pick up old threads; and began immediately to accumulate new anecdotes about the old Cambridge. He delighted to tell how, on the day before the last Fourth of July, an early contemporary, in somewhat humbler life, had come to him to appeal for still another comrade who had habitually drifted into evil ways and was lodged in the East Cambridge jail. Now, Mr. Lowell, I know you wouldn't want that boy, that Cambridge boy, to spend Independence Day in jail! I know you'll just bail him out. Lowell promptly did so, though knowing well that his beneficiary would devote the Fourth of July to qualifying himself for returning to jail again, which was precisely what happened. So, in other forms more satisfying, he took up the dropped threads of his life, receiving the Dante Club and the Modern Language Association as if each were the Royal Society. In looking back on London, too, he was able to see
December 25th (search for this): chapter 14
Chapter 14: a disturbed christmas Once more this last Christmas-day the choirs sang of peace on earth and good — will to men. Then the guests at the Christmas dinner discussed with various. opinions the possibilities and the ethics of war. Even now it seems we are not ready to give ourselves wholly to the works of peace. How dependent is our action, and even our moral standard, upon the circumstances of the time! All agree in denouncing the Sultan and his Kurds and Bashi-Bazouks, but we forget that these hardened offenders do nothing more than was habitually done, less than two centuries ago, by the foremost religious order of all Christendom — the Knights of St. John, first consecrated at Jerusalem to charity, humility, and chastity. Through the whole of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the city of Valetta, on the island of Malta, was a mere slave-mart, supplied by the plundering war-ships of the knights with Turkish slaves --men, women, and children. They attacked
1000 AD (search for this): chapter 27
itish House of Lords, but in the House of Commons. John Bright said at Birmingham, thirty years ago (1867): I am not able to say what it has cost to seat those 658 members in that House, but if I said that it has cost them and their friends a million of money [pounds], I should say a long way below the mark. I believe it has cost more to seat those 658 men there than to seat all the other representative and legislative assemblies in the world.... There are many members who pay always from £1000 to £15,000 for their election. This vast expenditure has been much diminished by the present admirable English laws against bribery, but enough remains, especially when we consider that English legislators are not, like ours, salaried, and must therefore either be taken wholly from a very well-provided class or else kept in public life, like the Radical and Irish members, by special contribution. It is really a very simple matter, though it puzzled Matthew Arnold, that men and women who tak
1313 AD (search for this): chapter 26
Chapter 26: summer people and county people In that very interesting book The English Peasant, by Richard Heath, the author chooses as his starting-point the fourteenth century, and calls his second chapter In worse than Egyptian bondage. He selects, as the crowning instance of the social extremes of that period, the account given by the old historian Holinshed of the Earl of Leicester's expenses in 1313. This earl, it seems, spent on his family and people an amount equal to the wages of 1825 laborers. But in a newspaper statement about an American multimillionaire, lately dead, it is said that he spent on his family and people about $2000 a day, which is more than would be earned in many branches of industry by 1825 laborers. If this be an illustration, it would appear that all the science and art of five centuries have not essentially diminished the disproportion which Mr. Heath calls Egyptian bondage. Yet there has been a period between the two dates when no such extreme
1561 AD (search for this): chapter 1
ut granting these simple conditions fulfilled, the writer of fiction should surely be allowed henceforth to wind up his story in his own way, without formal proclamation of his moral; or, better still, to leave the tale without technical and elaborate winding up, as nature leaves her stories. His work is a great one, to bring comedy and even tragedy down from the old traditions of kingliness to the vaster and more complex currents of modern democratic life. When the elder Scaliger wrote, in 1561, that work on Poetry which so long ruled the traditions of European literature, he defined the difference between tragedy and comedy to consist largely in this — that tragedy concerned itself only with kings, princes, cities, citadels, and camps; in tragoedia reges, principles, ex urbibus, arcibus, castris. All these things are now changed. Kings, princes, camps, citadels are passing away, and the cities that will soon alone survive them are filled with a democratic world, which awaits its c
1586 AD (search for this): chapter 18
sicians were all equally considered as profligate vagrants. Thus various are the habits of nations. With Americans, again, the brewer sinks in comparative standing, and the musician rises. Once accept the fiction of hereditary nobility, and it leads you to extend its traditions over all your circle. The first effort of acquired wealth is to supply itself with a coat of arms — to sail, that is, under the flag of the old families. A Scotch antiquarian, Ferne, writing The Blaen of Gentry in 1586, carrying the process a little further, affirms that the Twelve Apostles of Christianity, although apparently humble fishermen, were undoubtedly gentlemen of high blood, in temporary poverty, but entitled to bear coat armour. Many of them, he is satisfied, were descended from that worthy conqueror Judas Maccabaeus. But the truth is that the distinction between a newly enriched family and a family descended even from Judas Maccabaeus is a mere matter of a century or two. Every family has
1620 AD (search for this): chapter 22
we see in New York city a group of stolid Russian Jews just landed, or notice a newly arrived party of gayly attired Italian women who are being conducted behind a shed by their friends that they may exchange their picturesque attire for second-hand American gowns, we are apt to be thankful that we are not such as they. Or when we hear of an arrival of Finnish stone-cutters at Gloucester, Massachusetts, or of Armenian iron-workers at Worcester, we reflect that the landing of the Pilgrims of 1620 was not just like theirs. But, after all, the Pilgrims landed; that is the essential point. They were not the indigenous race. They were poor; they were sometimes ignorant; some of their women could only make their mark instead of signing their names. At the best it is not very long since they landed, for what is two or three centuries in the history of the human race? Tried by the standard of ancient races, we are all new-comers together; we are still pilgrims and sojourners, as our fa
1803 AD (search for this): chapter 9
kind with that which dethroned the Anglo-Saxon k. It is only that, as it happens to have made more headway in this country, it is called an American innovation. The delightful English Roman Catholic author Digby wrote, fifty years ago, that the moderns had found out a new way to spell honor, but no new mode of practising it; and this furnishes a date for this particular reform, although it really dates back much earlier, being mentioned with approval in Pegge's Anecdotes, first published in 1803. In the books of a hundred years ago one might find, without question or misgiving, authour, errour, inferiour, humour, and honour. The last two still hold their own in English books, but not in American; the others have given way in England also. The only word of the kind still retaining the u in most American books is the word Saviour, and this is obviously from a feeling of reverence, like that which leads many excellent persons to pronounce God Gawd, just as Kipling's soldiers pronounc
1812 AD (search for this): chapter 16
r? Why is it that our naval officers tell us that they fraternize more cordially in foreign ports with French or Russian naval officers than with English? Why is it that if sane Americans could soberly contemplate the prospect of a war with any nation on earth, there is no question that a war with England would be more popular than any other, in almost all parts of the United States? Undoubtedly there are many causes. There are the long traditions of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, and the instinctive dislikes towards England of Republican protectionists and of Irish-American Democrats. But it would seem as if, in spite of all these things, blood must be thicker than water, and that even those who are not linked with the mother-country by blood must recognize some tie of language, at least at a time when it looks as if that great empire, so aggressive and yet so beneficent, were about to be left to fight its battles single-handed. Possibly it would be so when it cam
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