Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: FORTUNE. old idolatries have passed away, and their statues and temples are little now but dust. The few shrines that remain show the defeat of paganism more signally than the shrines that have vanished. The crumbling walls of the empty Parthenon record the downfall of Minerva on the Acropolis of Athens, and the rejuvenated Parthenon, now crowned with the cross, celebrates daily at Rome the triumph of Christianity over the heathen gods. Yet on one point the world is about as idolatrous as ever, and invokes one mysterious name about as superstitiously as when temples were built to the goddess Fortuna and her various symbols, the rudder, the wheel, the globe, the horn of plenty, and the wings indicated her fitful temper and her various gifts. Now, as of old, the multitude crowd every place where Fortune divides her frowns and favors. No matter what the place or the auspices, however mean or majestic whether a raffle in a grog-shop, among greasy tipplers, or a card-table in a gamester's brilliant pandemonium, with dainty gentlemen and perhaps jeweled ladies for players; whether a dog-fight for pennies in a filthy eellar, or a horse-race, with thousands of pounds at stake, on grounds famous as the haunts of the beauty and chivalry of centuries wherever Fortune holds her court, she is sure to find ready suitors. In peace and war she still keeps her prestige; and when no battle compels combatants to watch for her fitful signals, she hangs up her banner in the busy streets of trade, and solid men, who are not to be caught by the shining wheel at the lottery-office, may be entrapped at once by the specious bulletins of the stock-board, and give their money for that which is not bread. But apart from all tropes and figures, do we not all seriously recognize the fact, which was of...
Synopsis
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