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Untitled Article
piece ; or whether the volume that Alexander the Great put into a precious casket , has a right to be estimated at the value of & box of wafers ?
To be serious ;—they who can afford to give a secondhand bookseller what he asks in his catalogue , may in general do it with good reason , as well as a safe conscience . He is of
an anxious and industrious class of men , compelled to begin the world with laying out ready money and living very closely : and if he prospers , the commodities and
people he is conversant with , encourage the good and intellectual impressions with which he set out , and generally end in procuring him a reputation for liberality as well as
acuteness . Now observe . Not long since , we picked up , within a short interval of each other , and for eighteen-pence , versions of the two most famous
books of instruction in polite manners , that Italy , their first Christian teacher , refined the world with;—the Courtier' of Count Baldassare Castiglione
( Raphael ' s friend ) , for a shilling ; and the c Galateo' of Giovanni de la Casa , Archbishop of Benevento ( who wrote the banter on the name
of John , which was translated i « our third number ) for sixpence . The former we may perhaps give an account of another time . It is a book of greater pretensions , and embracing wider and more general considerations than * Galateo ;'
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which chiefly concerns itself with what is decorous and graceful in points more immediately relating to the person and presence . Some of these would be held of a trifling , and others of a coarse nature in the
present day , when we are reaping the benefit of treatises of this kind ; and the translator , in his notes , has , shown an unseasonable disposition to extract amusement from that which the
more gentlemanlike author feels bound but not Willing to notice . Delia Casa indeed was not always decent in his other works ; and it is curious to
observe that these public teachers of decorum , who do not avoid , if they do not seek , subjects of an unpleasant nature , have been less nice in their own
practice , than they might have been . Chesterfield himself was a man of no very refined imagination , and Swift is proverbially coarse . Swift indeed has said , that " a nice man is a
man of nasty ideas ; " which may be true of some kinds of nice men , but is certainly not of all . The difference depends upon whether the leading idea of a man ' s mind is
deformity or beauty . A man undoubtedly may avoid what is unbecoming , from thinking too nicely of it ; but in that ca&e , the habitual idea is deformity . On the other hand , he may tend to the becoming out of such an habitual love of the
beautiful , that the mind naturally adjusts itself to that side of things , without thinking of the other ; just as some people
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358 Retrospective Review .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 1, 1837, page 358, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1837/page/62/
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