Word: elegist
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...position of a minor writer will have to be convinced in the long run, by the vitality of his message and the elegance of his technique. So far Waugh has been damned for his virtues and praised for his faults. Primarily, it seems to me, he was an elegist and not a black comedian. But perhaps only an unforeseeable change in our society would allow us to read him without prejudice. In the meantime, we must settle for Christopher Syke's splendid biography...
Leger's childhood supplied plenty of background for an elegist of dying civilizations. His family was old French-Colonial stock (his enemies like to call Leger a mulatto), which had lived for two centuries in the West Indies. Alexis was born (1887) on the family's coral island of Saint-Leger les Feuilles, near Guadeloupe. Once a cyclone picked up little Alexis and left him in a treetop. Once his Hindu nurse, a secret priestess of Siva, took him to a Siva temple, painted him black and stood him in a niche above the worshipers. Then she made...
...sound of a drum was heard, and soon a procession appeared, at the head of which was a drum-major or grand marshal with a huge bearskin cap and baton, accompanied by assistants with craped staff and torches, and followed by two bass-drummers (students beating muffled drums); the elegist or chaplain, with his Oxford cap and black gown, and brows and cheeks crocked so as to appear as if wearing huge goggles; four spade-bearers; six pall bearers with a six foot coffin on their shoulders; and then the sophomore class in full ranks. They looked poverty-stricken; their...
...usual with students in their most ragged attire, and with spectators; but ere long the sound of drum was heard, and soon a procession appeared, at the head of which was a drum-major, or grand-marshal, with a huge bearskin cap and baton, followed by two students; the elegist, with his Oxford cap and black gown, and brows and cheeks cropped so as to appear as if wearing huge goggles; four spade-bearers, six pall-bearers, with a six-foot coffin on their shoulders. They looked poverty-stricken: their hats, with rims torn off or turned in, bore...