Word: gentlemanly
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Dates: during 1870-1879
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...needless to say that what little wealth remained to me, after the first elan of the Portfolio subscription, had been dissipated in heliotypes of the highest class, such as that charming picture by Campagnola representing a very obese gentleman with a pipe in his mouth, lazily inspecting his single sheep, the exquisite grace of whose legs reminds one of the carved animal that goes by that name in the toy known as Noah...
...lectures are of greater value for the reason that they are presented by a gentleman of culture, who has not only a theoretical, but a practical knowledge of the subject; and the description of the difficulties of an amateur engraver, although certainly not inspiring to those who stand on the threshold of the art, are yet illustrative of what patience and perseverance can accomplish in this branch of the Fine Arts...
...never questioned here, nor have we different codes for different classes of society. But in essentials they are the same. The accident which changes a bourgeois into an artiste does not give him the social training, or, as the French call it, the savoir vivre, requisite of a gentleman, much less his delicacy of feeling. Wordsworth certainly was superior to bourgeois, but De Quincey might well be pardoned for denying the name of gentleman to a man who cut the leaves of a book, in the author's presence, with a table-knife covered with butter. This indeed...
...should not be understood that the artiste is merely a hybrid between a bourgeois and a gentleman, - the term connotes more than this. The moment a man's taste so changes that he fails to appreciate the exquisite beauty of chromos, and Dickens's pathos, and prayer-meetings, or in regard to anything else, ceases to be enrapport with bourgeois ideas, he becomes artiste, and a bourgeois-gentilhomme is as much an artiste as anybody. A thing to be noticed in the metamorphosis from bourgeois to artiste is that the change is unnatural and revolutionary. Bourgeois should and do gradually...
...find a Tartar, for the oil of the paint corrodes and spoils the bourgeois beneath. No bourgeois needs to be told that he is as good as the next man and a good deal better, and though as poeta nascitur, etc., a man can't make himself a gentleman, he can become the pinchbeck imitation thereof, and if he cannot attract notice in one way he can in another. No one would bear any ill-will to a man who snorted in chapel through ignorance, but if he continued to disgust a crowd of men because he thought it funny...