Contre jour.Sometimes even an incomplete sentence in brackets can tell a good story or paint a touching picture. Here from Samuel Pepys diary for 12 January 1661:
"With Colonel Slingsby and a friend of his, Major Waters (a deaf most amorous melancholy gentleman, who is under a despayr (sic) in love, as the Colonel told me, which makes him bad company, though a most good natured man) by water to Redriffe ...
Old saw: A young saw likes something to get its teeth into. Christmas cracker joke writers, this is my copyright.
5 comments:
That's one heck of a photograph. Well visioned and, so far as I can tell from the repro', good technically. I am really quite envious.
As with much of my photography, more luck than skill, and taking advantage of interesting conditons. But thank you all the same.
That's a remarkable parenthetical. You get the idea Pepys was more interested in its contents than the main sentence that surrounds it.
That's so with Pepys, always interested in such details. But it was a busy day for him, by then a civil servant of rising importance in the Admiralty. At Deptford his ultimate destination, he and the colonel had to choose four captains to command the guards. After that, dinner at the Globe, where "Never till now did I see the great authority of my place, "all the captains of the fleet coming cap in hand to us."
Pepys stayed that night with Mr Davis the storekeeper "(whose wife is ill and so I could not see her) and there was most princelike lodged, with so much respect and honour that I was almost at a loss how to behave myself."
'a deaf most amorous melancholy gentleman'
What a burden of misfortune and epithet to be labouring under!
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