Time of Truth

Truth is very old, but the merit of seers is not to invent but to dispose objects in their right places, and he is the commander who is always in the mount, whose eye not only sees details, but throws crowds of details into their right arrangement and a larger and juster totality than any other.

Time stills the loud noise of opinions, sink the small, raises the great, so that the true merges without effort and in perfect harmony to all eyes; but truth of the present hour, except in particulars and single relations, is unatainable.

The most elaborate history of today will have the oddest dislocated look in the next generation. The wise cannot descend into the turbid present without injury to his rarest spirit. Hence that necessity of isolation which genius has always felt.

It is a costly proof of character, that the most renowned scholar of England should take his reputation in his hand and should descent into the ring; and he has added to his love what ever honour his opinions may forfeit..............that there is a message which those to whom it was addressed cannot choose but hear.

Everyman's Library, edited by Ernest Rhys, (1912)





Unhappy and sensitive the United States may have been at times over the past twenty years. But surely no society has so systematically; so doggedly; almost, it sometimes seemed, so masochistically; invited the criticism of foreigners.
Fanny Kemble wrote 'Such an unhappily sensitive community surely never existed in this world.' 'The vengeance with which they visit people for saying they dont admire or like them would be truly terrible, .................if the said people were but as mortally afraid of abuse as they seem to be........I live myself in daily expectation of martyrdom.' (Godfrey Hodgson, 1978)