Tea at Trianon: Style vs Substance

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, February 27, 2017

Style vs Substance

From The National Review:

In substance, Trump’s administration has accomplished quite a lot in five weeks. It overturned a passel of Obama-administration executive orders issued on the falsifiable and now falsified assumption that Democrats would hold the White House indefinitely. The Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines are now headed for approval, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan and Waters of the United States mega-regulations are on the way out. Federal hiring is frozen, and two old regulations must be rescinded for each new one issued. The result has been some major changes in policy, as promised during the campaign — the way the political process is supposed to work. The executive order blocking travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries has been blocked by a federal appeals-court decision — labeled “totally unconvincing” by former New York top court judge and Trump critic Robert Smith — which the administration has meekly obeyed. A rewrite is being prepared. (Read more.)