The Humour of Homer and Other EssaysButler, Samuel
History
The Humour of Homer and Other Essays
Butler, Samuel
Essays; Greek wit and humor -- History and criticism; Homer -- Humor
The seventh, and in many respects most interesting chapel at Oropa,
shows what is in reality a medieval Italian girl school, as nearly
like the thing itself as the artist could make it; we are expected,
however, to see in this the high-class kind of Girton College for
young gentlewomen that was attached to the Temple at Jerusalem,
under the direction of the Chief Priest's wife, or some one of his
near female relatives. Here all well-to-do Jewish young women
completed their education, and here accordingly we find the Virgin,
whose parents desired she should shine in every accomplishment, and
enjoy all the advantages their ample means commanded.
I have met with no traces of the Virgin during the years between her
Presentation in the Temple and her becoming head girl at Temple
College. These years, we may be assured, can hardly have been other
than eventful; but incidents, or bits of life, are like living
forms--it is only here and there, as by rare chance, that one of
them gets arrested and fossilized; the greater number disappear like
the greater number of antediluvian molluscs, and no one can say why
one of these flies, as it were, of life should get preserved in
amber more than another. Talk, indeed, about luck and cunning; what
a grain of sand as against a hundredweight is cunning's share here
as against luck's. What moment could be more humdrum and unworthy
of special record than the one chosen by the artist for the chapel
we are considering? Why should this one get arrested in its flight
and made immortal when so many worthier ones have perished? Yet
preserved it assuredly is; it is as though some fairy's wand had
struck the medieval Miss Pinkerton, Amelia Sedley, and others who do
duty instead of the Hebrew originals. It has locked them up as
sleeping beauties, whose charms all may look upon. Surely the hours
are like the women grinding at the mill--the one is taken and the
other left, and none can give the reason more than he can say why
Gallio should have won immortality by caring for none of "these
things."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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