The Bed-Book of Happiness: Being a colligation or assemblage of cheerful writings brought together from many quarters into this one compass for the diversion, distraction, and delight of those who lie abed,—a friend to the invalid, a companion to the sleepless, an excuse to the tiredBegbie, Harold
General
The Bed-Book of Happiness: Being a colligation or assemblage of cheerful writings brought together from many quarters into this one compass for the diversion, distraction, and delight of those who lie abed,—a friend to the invalid, a companion to the sleepless, an excuse to the tired
Begbie, Harold
Literature -- Collections
Then comes retribution. They who cry "Wolf!" whenever they see a leveret
are not believed when Lupus comes. They who suffer "excruciating agony"
whenever a thorn pricks, can say no more under exquisite pain, and their
familiar words are powerless to evoke the sympathy which they have
repelled so long. They are more likely to receive the severe rebuke
administered by a gruff old gentleman to his maudlin, moribund
neighbour, who was ever exaggerating his ailments, and who, upon his
doleful declaration that "between three and four o'clock that morning he
had been at Death's door!" was abruptly but anxiously asked--"Oh, why
didn't you go in?"
I protest, in the next place, against the use of long, large words for
the gratification of that conceit or covetousness which seeks to obtain,
from mere grandiloquence, reputations and rewards to which it is not
entitled. Being a gardener, I like to call a spade as spelt; and if any
one terms it an horticultural implement, or a mattock, I do not expect
him to dig much. I have used the monosyllable "shop," and I will not
recall it, though a thousand pairs of gleaming scissors were pointed at
my breast, and I was told by an angry army of apprentices to talk shop
no more--the word was vulgar, or rather obsolete, superseded by the more
graceful terms of mart, emporium, warehouse, repository, bazaar, and
lounge.
Plain folk, who sold drugs when I was a boy, were not ashamed to be
called druggists, but now they are pharmaceutical chymists, and
analytical Homoeopathists; and one is tempted to quote Canning's
paraphrase, which he made when Dr. Addington had been complimenting the
country party, "I do remember an apothecary, gulling of simples."
Persons who cut hair were known as hair-cutters, and they who attended
to the feet were called corn-cutters; but now the former are artists in
hair, and the latter are chiropodists.
No long time ago I consulted with an intelligent tradesman as to the
best way of protecting from frost a long line of standard rose-trees,
growing near a wall in my garden, and shortly afterwards I received from
him the drawing of a clever design, with a letter informing me that he
had now the pleasure of submitting to my inspection his idea of a
_Cheimoboethus_. When I rallied from my swoon, and was staggering
towards my lexicon, I remembered that, as [Greek: cheimon] was the Greek
for winter, and [Greek: boaethos] for a friend in need, the word was not
without appropriate meaning; but I never took heart to order the
invention, because I felt convinced that, if I were to inform my
gardener that we were going to have a Cheimoboethus, he would say that
he would rather leave.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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