Word: 18th
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Visitors stumbled from the wild visions of the Apocalypse into a wonderland of lions, unicorns and delicate ladies in heavy gowns. From that high point of fantasy, the art gradually declined to the 18th Century confections of pastoral sex and sweetness designed by Boucher and Oudry. To imitate such painted designs, painstaking weavers had used as many as 30,000 different shades of thread...
Mesmer & Magnetism. Hypnotism has been inspiring public interest and noisy argument ever since the days, in 18th Century Paris, when Franz Anton Mesmer developed his controversial technique. It was first called mesmerism and then hypnotism (from a Greek word meaning sleep). In Mesmer's day, "magnetism" was the scientific catchword that "atomic" is today. Mesmer had already been kicked out of his native Vienna for acting on his belief that people got sick when they ran short of "magnetic fluid." He was out to show Paris that he could relieve the shortage. The Mesmer clinics are described...
...idea that The Machine is pure evil, and should be destroyed. (This idea was first expressed by a village idiot, Ned Ludd, who stalked around Nottingham, England, in the late 18th Century, smashing stocking frames...
Bing Crosby, in a sloppy orange sweater, stepped jauntily from tee to green. He was shooting good golf ("Something around 80," he guessed). On the 18th hole, his ball plopped within five feet of the pin (applause) and then he sank the putt (more applause). Bing looked reproachfully over his shoulder and husked: "What did ya expect...
...some 250,000 miles, most of it on horseback over miserable roads, often braving angry mobs, to "preach the Gospel to the poor." Wesley's Journal, sixth of the writings selected by Professor McNeill, is a detailed and vivid record of the rough, violent, unequal world which was 18th Century England to all but the privileged few. It is also, says Author McNeill, "the book of a saint, whose devotion was not the less complete for lack of protracted contemplation. He was often in prayer; but the impression conveyed by this record is that of a sustained spiritual exhilaration...