Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/198

190 into their voices such an array of italics and capital letters as would be excessive and exaggerated were they asking after the condition of an invalid hovering between life and death, and whose state carried with it the welfare of more existences than his own. They mean no more than the next comer who shakes hands without torture, and speaks without emphasis, whose voice has no italics, and his words no capital letters: it is simply their way, and they emphasize by inflation, as others emphasize by adjectives and by using the largest words for the smallest events. It is very funny to listen to these emphatic people. From a distance, a stranger to their method might imagine them in deep distress, or furious wrath. They growl, they shriek, they hammer out their words, with urgent stress and swinging force; they run through their register, now high, now low, and always powerfully emphatic; but it is all nothing. They are talking about the weather, of the cattle-plague, yesterday's dinner or to-morrow's tea, and their italics are of no more value than so many painted cannon and dummy gunners, things that look formidable, but do not carry either peas or pellets.

This habit of italicizing insignificant words and unimportant phrases passes into the life as well as the voice and the handwriting of a man, and people who act in italics and Roman capitals are quite as common as those who speak and write in them. Who does not know the emphatic self-importance by which the smallest event of a man's life is as largely acted, and as much dilated on as if his whole career turned on that one pivot? Some people lose their fortunes, their best beloved, their health, and no one hears a word; others part with their cook, and the world has the fact blown through a trumpet into its ears. Every acquaintance they possess hears the whole history spoken in capital letters and italics, from the first cause of disagreement to the last of final severance; and every one is expected to find the narrative interesting, and the moral typography suitable to the occasion. To change a house with these loudly-emphasized individuals is of more importance than to others of a weaker kind is marriage or partnership; and a dinner is an event which has its array of italics, from the soup to the dessert, and from the guests to the dresses. One gets tired of all this fervour and force, this making snail-shells into pearl-oysters, and seashore pebbles into diamonds; and with so much ado about nothing one welcomes the repose of monotony itself, the rest of indifference. Colour in one's life is all very well; but it is fatiguing to see nothing but scarlet and purple before one's eyes; and even the very sky is the better for a haze as a veil and a few clouds to cast a shadow. But our emphasized friends who live in italics know nothing of haze or cloud, and the sobriety of neutral tints is a grace which they cannot compass, a beauty which they do not discern. They have no sympathy with the flowers that are born to bloom unseen, but prefer to cast their sweetness very far abroad indeed, and to make every wandering wind a messenger telling of their whereabouts and manner of being. The people who do good by stealth and blush to find it fame, are people whom they neither envy nor affect, and they not only let their left hands know all that their right do, but they let every other person's left hand know it also. Each separate act of their lives is as a new chapter, begun with a huge ornamental initial letter and ended with a tail-piece, embodying the chief incidents; while the type is printed in italics, and the substantives are made in capitals. Has my lord spoken to them civilly? No Persian manuscript is more elaborate, more ornate; no schoolgirl's letter to her bosom friend more thickly underlined and emphasized than their narration of the great event. Has a crumb fallen from the huge bakery of fortune into their laps? The world is gathered to view the fragment with a clamour to which the hen's hysterical announcement of her last-laid egg is tame and subdued. Whatever happens to them has to be announced in posters to all their friends, and if they split hairs on the one hand they make each half into ships' cables on the other.

 

compulsory transfer of property in Prince Edward Island may perhaps have alarmed nervous English landowners who have become acquainted with the transaction by occasional conversations in Parliament. The precedents of which the Irish Land Act was the first are likely to accumulate with constantly diminishing regard for rules which were once deemed immutable. Every separate act of interference with property is excused, and perhaps justified, by the special circumstances