Note 51 — LECTURE X. —— ON THINGS IN GENERAL. ——
Reading edition
“O dreary life!” we cry, “O dreary life!” And still the generation of the birds Sing through our sighing, and the flocks and herds Serenely live while we are keeping strife.
“The education of the whist-player is peculiar. How he becomes a whist-player nobody knows. He never learns his alphabet or the catechism or anything that he ought to do. He appears full-grown, mushroom-like. He remembers someone blowing him up for doing something he ought not to have done, and somebody else blowing him up for doing something else, and he is blown up to the end of the chapter. This phase of being blown up is varied by grumbling sometimes aloud, sometimes sotto voce; so that the whist-player is reared on scolding and grumbling as other youngsters are reared on pap. Truly this is a happy life. Some men grumble on principle because it is a national privilege, and they avail themselves of the Englishman’s birthright.”
“A sect whose chief devotion lies In odd perverse antipathies: In falling out with that or this, And finding somewhat still amiss, More peevish, cross, and splenetic Than dog distract, or monkey sick.”—Hudibras.
“Some do it because they believe that if they grumble enough, it will bring them luck. Some do it in the hope that they will excite sympathy, and that their friends will feel for their ill-fortune, which, by-the-bye, whist-players never do. Some grumble to annoy their friends, and we are bound to say these succeed.”—Westminster Papers.
“The croaking nuisance lurked in every nook; And the land stank—so numerous was the fry.”—Cowper.