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

Saturday, November 5, 2022

Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens

I loved this story and the pictures when I was a child, especially since my godmother had visited Kensington Gardens, so I knew it was a real place. From The Marginalian:

In the first years of the twentieth century, a strange book titled The Little White Bird, or Adventures in Kensington Gardens enchanted readers with its fusion of whimsy and dark humor, its way of addressing adults in a way that honors the eternal child alive in each of us, and especially with one of its characters: a small boy named Peter Pan.

Four years later, six of its chapters sprouted a new book, not for adults but for actual children. J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (public library | public domain) — the story of baby Peter, who, “like all infants,” was part bird but has now to learn to live an earthbound life — was published in 1906 with illustrations by the wildly imaginative, wildly prolific Arthur Rackham (September 19, 1867–September 6, 1939). (Read more.)