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- 11388
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- 2026-01-30T03:48:16.153Z
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- 11337
- text
- according to hallowed authority, originally created but a little lower
than the angels. Almost invariably these men have physical beauty; and
the moral charm is in keeping with that, apparently a spontaneous
emanation from it. It is as golden wine down in a golden chalice, where,
seen through the lustre suffusing the shadow, the delicious fluid looks
to be the exuded gathered sap of the precious metal.
It was of the Marquis de Grandvin that the landscape painter, B. Hobbema
Brown, an inoffensive sort of theoretical misanthrope, with a
treacherous flow of loving-kindness in him--to borrow one of his own
eccentric phrases; the same B. Hobbema who, were his significant
reticence on the point, no unwise thing in him, by the way,
conjecturally rendered into words, would seem in his own private
judgment to have been treated illiberally enough by the art-dealers,
art-critics, and academic hanging-committees, to say nothing of the art
public; well, it was of some other than the Marquis that Hobbema B.,
returning in moonlight from a choice assemblage, where he had been
introduced to him, and undergone the inevitable fascination of the
contact; it was of him that Brown enthusiastically exclaimed to his
companion: ‘What a godsend to meet such a man! He is a set-off against
the battalions of his contraries. Between you and me, mankind taken in a
lump are the gods’ job-lot; but, by heaven, the race that can produce a
Marquis de Grandvin is not promiscuously to be contemned!’
See there how the talismanic something in the sort of nature here
indicated can operate upon another nature though of a temper not
favourably disposed to receive its benign influence.
In the casual outcome of such a character, gay fancies and suggestions
without stint, sallies of wit and bonhomie, all sharing more or less in
a certain lyric glow; herein the spiritual bounty to us would seem to be
an unconsciousness in the almoner, involving, too, an indifference or
unconcern as to who may appropriate, or as to what purpose the
appropriation may be applied. In this particular, what recks the Marquis
de Grandvin, for example? He is the ripe peach-tree shedding its
abundance, careless of the garner; he is the Prince of Golconda at the
ball, some of whose innumerable diamond buttons drop from his raiment
unheeded by him in the chance fleeting rubs and collisions of the dance.
But how transitory these prodigal improvident ones can prove!--and once
gone, how soon all but good as forgotten! True, were an example here
demanded, one adapted for popular illustration, not readily could it be
supplied. Literature will not furnish it, since these natures, never
directly expressing themselves in literature, have no memorial place in
its records. Neither are they Alexanders and Napoleons that the fame
which is all but independent of literature should trumpet them.
Nevertheless, in local tradition, and comparatively recent, I do find a
citable instance which, though below the grade, say, of a de Grandvin,
and but in a minor way to the purpose, may perhaps for these reasons
serve the better to actualise the general truth, in a measure bring it
home.
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