Its dark and intricate mazes of
halls, galleries, and apartments were all well provided with good and
substantial furniture; and whatever might have been the purposes of
their original construction, they were now peacefully appropriated to
the service of a quiet and well-ordered family.
There were divers portentous traditions of cruel separations and
blighted loves, which always linger, like cobwebs, around the walls of
old houses, to be heard here also, and which, doubtless, in abler hands,
might easily have been wrought up into scenes of high interest and
delectable pathos. But our humbler efforts must be limited by an attempt
to describe man as God has made him, vulgar and unseemly as he may
appear to sublimated faculties, to the possessors of which enviable
qualifications we desire to say, at once, that we are determined to
eschew all things supernaturally refined, as we would the devil. To all
those, then, who are tired of the company of their species we would
bluntly insinuate, that the sooner they throw aside our pages, and seize
upon those of some more highly gifted bard, the sooner will they be in
the way of quitting earth, if not of attaining heaven. Our business is
solely to treat of man, and this fair scene on which he acts, and that
not in his subtleties, and metaphysical contradictions, but in his
palpable nature, that all may understand our meaning as well as
ourselves--whereby we may manifestly reject the prodigious advantage of
being thought a genius, by perhaps foolishly refusing the mighty aid of
incomprehensibility to establish such a character.
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