Page:Impressions of Theophrastus Such - Eliot - 1879.djvu/196

right place, you know." And doubtless if she were to take her boys to see a burlesque Socrates, with swollen legs, dying in the utterance of cockney puns, and were to hang up a sketch of this comic scene among their bedroom prints, she would think this preparation not at all to the prejudice of their emotions on hearing their tutor read that narrative of the Apology which has been consecrated by the reverent gratitude of ages. This is the impoverishment that threatens our posterity:—a new Famine, a meagre fiend with lewd grin and clumsy hoof, is breathing a moral mildew over the harvest of our human sentiments. These are the most delicate elements of our too easily perishable civilisation. And here again I like to quote a French testimony. Sainte Beuve, referring to a time of insurrectionary disturbance, says: "Rien de plus prompt ` baisser que la civilisation dans des crises comme celle-ci; on perd en trois semaines le risultat de plusieurs sihcles. La civilisation, la vie est une chose apprise et inventie, qu'on le sache bien: 'Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes.' Les hommes aprhs quelques annies de paix oublient trop