Views and Opinions

Minor errors, attributable to the printer, have been corrected. Please see the transcriber’s note at the end of this text for details regarding the handling of any textual issue...

‘Ses divertissements sont infiniments moins raisonnables que ses ennuis,’ says Pascal of the society of his day, and the statement stands good of our own. Society has no pleasur...

Old men and women, with grandchildren by the hundred, and offspring of fifty years old, should have perception enough of the ridiculous not to speak of a union which has so many...

Lord Wolseley seems to imagine that where conscription exists every man serves. In no country does every man serve. Even in Germany a very large proportion escape through physiq...

In a recent monograph upon his friend Meissonier, Alexandre Dumas has quoted some petulant and childish sayings of the great painter which would have been better left in oblivio...

The psychologist Lombroso, in a recent essay, which must fill the _bourgeois_ breast with exultation, finding that it is not possible for him to deny the mental fecundity of gen...

_O Beati Insipientes!_ You know not what safety, what peace, what comfort are gained for you by your mantle of obscurity. You know not, and you would not believe though angels a...

I am aware that it is useless to protest against these things. The soul in the country is withered up by small greeds. All these irreparable injuries are done that municipal cou...

As it was in the Venice of the middle ages, so has it been and is wherever Christianity is nominally dominant. The cross is embroidered on banners and its psalter is carried to...

For thrice a thousand years, to our knowledge, that divine music, the sweetest of any music upon earth, has been eloquent in the woods and the gardens of every springtime, renew...

To all conversant with the true state and real needs of the country ever since the death of Victor Emmanuel, the language of the German and English press and Parliaments has see...

On this unfortunate flight of Palla in 1527, the populace broke into the gardens, and destroyed the statues, obelisks and temples which ornamented them, but the woods and orchar...

Along those famous hillsides, which rise above Careggi, there was, until a few months ago, a landmark dear to all the countryside, a line of colossal cypresses which had been pl...

Let the English people picture to themselves what would have been the verdict of Europe if England had dealt with Ireland as Sicily has been dealt with; let them imagine Lord Wo...

It can scarcely be disputed, I think, that in the English language there are conspicuous at the present moment two words which designate two unmitigated bores: The Workingman an...

Everything which tends to obliterate the contrast of the sexes, like the mixture of boys and girls in American common schools, tends also to destroy the charm of intercourse, th...

‘Despite the horror of his disease, I stooped over him and stroked him, and, always caressing him, I induced him to lie still, and to bury his little nose in the cone of cardboa...

Even the marvellous sagacity, docility and kindness of the elephant do not protect him from being slain in tens of thousands, either for the mere value of his tusks, or for the...

In politics, had he lived now, he would certainly have fared much better; in moral liberty also he would, I think, have found more freedom. Though the old hypocrisy clings still...

What may be termed the material side of the intellect receives assistance in England, that is to say, in the aristocratic and political world of England; wit and perception and...

The President of the British Association seems to expect that all men whom machines ‘set free’ from the drudgery of their daily calling, will, all at once, do something infinite...

Rationally, logically, political power ought to be alloted in proportion to the stake which each voter possesses in the country. But this sound principle has been totally disreg...

It has been passed, like many another fallacy, from generation to generation, and the enormous power of evil which lies in the female sex has been underestimated or conventional...

Essayists have often attempted to define high breeding; but it remains indefinable. Its incomparable charm, its perfect ease, its dignity which is never asserted, yet which the...

Books, in which the most trivial and personal details are published in print by those who should veil their faces like the Latin in sorrow and veil them in their purples, could...

From a military, as from a financial, point of view this result is of advantage to the government, whether it be imperial or republican; but it is hostile to the character of a...

The instant that any man or woman accomplishes anything which is in any way remarkable, the curiosity of the public is roused and fastens on his or her private life to the negle...

There is no exact equivalent in English for _domicilio coatto_; it means the right of Government to send anyone it pleases to reside in any district it selects, for as long a pe...