Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Daily grumble

Somehow this struck me as hilarious:

"He found Lord Brentford living in a spacious house, with a huge garden round it, close upon the northern confines of the town. Dresden, taken together, is a cheerful city, and strikes the stranger on his first entrance as a place in which men are gregarious, busy, full of merriment, and pre-eminently social. Such is the happy appearance of but few towns either in the old or the new world, and is hardly more common in Germany than elsewhere. Leipsig is decidedly busy, but does not look to be social. Vienna is sufficiently gregarious, but its streets are melancholy. Munich is social, but lacks the hum of business. Frankfurt is both practical and picturesque, but it is dirty, and apparently averse to mirth. Dresden has much to recommend it, and had Lord Brentford with his daughter come abroad in quest of comfortable easy social life, his choice would have been well made. But, as it was, any of the towns above named would have suited him as well as Dresden, for he saw no society, and cared nothing for the outward things of the world around him. He found Dresden to be very cold in the winter and very hot in the summer, and he liked neither heat nor cold; but he had made up his mind that all places, and indeed all things, are nearly equally disagreeable, and therefore he remained at Dresden, grumbling almost daily as to the climate and manners of people."
—Anthony Trollope, Phineas Redux

1 Comments:

Blogger Jenny Davidson said...

I LOVE Trollope's Palliser novels, they are some of the most underrated novels in the 19th-century canon. (The Barset novels are great too, and if you just put in "academia" for "the church" you get a frighteningly accurate picture of my work life...) I didn't remember that passage at all, I will take that as a cue for the ritual rereading--in grad school, I had a whole week off at Thanksgiving, and I would always reread either Palliser or Bartlett in an excessive Trollope feast.

9:05 AM  

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