American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home'Street, Julian
General
American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home'
Street, Julian
Southern States -- Description and travel; Southern States -- Social life and customs
Upon this pious person his cousin of Annapolis looked with something not
unlike contempt; for the latter, though he too was a scholar, possessed
the sort of scholarliness which takes into account beauty and the lore
of cosmopolitanism. He may have been religious or he may not have been,
but if religious he demanded something handsome, something stylish, in
his religion, as he did also in his residence, in his wife, his sons,
his daughters, his horses, coaches, dinners, wines, and slaves. He did
things with a flourish, and was not beset by a perpetual consciousness
and fear of hell. He approved of pretty women; he made love to them; he
married them; he was the father of them. His pretty daughters married
men who also admired pretty women, and became the mothers of other
pretty women, who became, in turn, the mothers and grandmothers of the
pretty women of the South to-day.
Your old-time Annapolis gentleman's ideas of a republic were far indeed
from those now current, for he understood perfectly the difference
between a republic and a democracy--a difference which is not now so
well understood. He believed that the people should elect the heads of
the government, but he also believed that these heads should be elected
from his own class, and that, having voted, the people should go about
their business, trusting their betters to run the country as it should
be run.
This, at least, is my picture of the old aristocrats of Maryland,
Virginia, and South Carolina, as conveyed to me by what I have seen of
their houses and possessions and what I have read of their mode of life.
They were the early princes of the Republic and by all odds its most
picturesque figures.
* * * * *
Very different from the spirit of appreciation and emulation shown by
the trustees of Johns Hopkins University with regard to the old house,
Homewood, in Baltimore, is that manifested in the architecture of the
Naval Academy at Annapolis, where, in a city fairly flooded with
examples of buildings, both beautiful and typically American,
architectural hints were ignored, and there were erected great stone
structures whose chief characteristics are size, solidity, and the look
of being "government property." The main buildings of the Academy, with
the exception of the chapel, suggest the sort of sublimated penitentiary
that Mr. Thomas Mott Osborne might, one fancies, construct under a
carte-blanche authorization, while the chapel, the huge dome of which is
visible to all the country round, makes one think of a monstrous wedding
cake fashioned in the form of a building and covered with white and
yellow frosting in ornamental patterns.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account