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Begbie, Harold, 1871-1929

"The Bed-Book of Happiness"

Leonidas W._ Smiley, and so I
started away.
At the door I met the social Wheeler returning, and he buttonholed me
and recommenced:
"Well, thish-yer Smiley had a yaller one-eyed cow that didn't have no
tail, only just a short stump like a bannanner, and--"
"Oh! hang Smiley and his afflicted cow!" I muttered good-naturedly, and,
bidding the old gentleman good-day, I departed.

THE CHARMING FRENCHMAN

BOSSUET
[Sidenote: _Sainte-Beuve_]
As for the happiness itself, of which he would give us a just idea, the
purely spiritual and internal happiness of the soul in the other life,
he sums it up in an expression which concludes a happy development of
the subject, and he defines it: _Reason always attentive and always
contented_. Take reason in its liveliest and most luminous sense, the
pure flame disengaged from the senses.

ROUSSEAU
[Sidenote: _Sainte-Beuve_]
It is from him that the sentiment of nature is reckoned among us, in the
eighteenth century. It is from him also that is dated, in our
literature, _the sentiment of domestic life; of that homely, poor,
quiet, hidden life, in which are accumulated so many treasures of virtue
and affection_. Amid certain details, in bad taste, in which he speaks
of robbery and of eatables, how one pardons him on account of that old
song of childhood, of which he knows only the air and some words
stitched together, but which he always wished to recover, and which he
never recalls, old as he is, without a soothing charm!

JOUBERT
[Sidenote: _Sainte-Beuve_]
Taste, for him, is the literary conscience of the soul.


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