The Cinque Ports: A Historical and Descriptive Record (Classic Reprint) [Idioma Inglés] - Tapa blanda

Excerpt from The Cinque Ports: A Historical and Descriptive Record

For the same reason I have unstintedly abused the mutilators of the public buildings, sacred and secular, that remain within the Liberties. Nothing, it seems to me, is so absolutely essential to the cure of certain mental maladies fostered by the spirit of the age as the sight of the good work they did in the old days before our times; nothing so curative as the sight of the good craftsmanship; nothing so essential for the preserva tion of the old faith as the being for a little time within the walls that that faith caused to rise. Yet within these last few years every one of these buildings has been bescrubbed and transformed to suit the ideals of the modern housemaid. It is almost impossible to distinguish any one of them from the products of the years we live in, years sad for the craftsman, sadder for the artist, sadder still for the upholder of any faith whatsoever. There is not, I think, within the Liberties of the Ports one single church that has not been thus restored. It is lamentable, it is pitiful, to think that a century that some one has bitterly nicknamed the wonderful should have left nothing unspoilt of so much that humbler centuries had left of the beautiful, of the reverend; to think that we must go down to all time - in swcu/u sweulorum - as a people who worshipped in temples of plaster of Paris and of pitch-pine; to think that where we found the real thing, we inevitably, inexorably, replaced it by a makeshift, by a cheap imitation of the real thing that we found.

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Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.. NOTA: El libro no está en español, sino en inglés.

Excerpt from The Cinque Ports: A Historical and Descriptive Record

My Dear Robert,

Permit me to dedicate this book, or so much of it as is mine, to you. It is a practice not unusual for a dedicator to assure a dedicatee that he - perhaps more frequently she - is the fountain and origin of the work dedicated, the head and front of the offence. This practice I can to some extent, and with a good conscience, follow; for I hold it certain that but for your friendly and professional advice I should long since have ended, if not on the gallows, at least in a union workhouse, a not vastly promising career. In the latter of these predicaments the writing of a book about the Cinque Ports would have been difficult; in the former, impossible. Hence your vicarious responsibility.

With regard to this book: as you are aware, I have lived within the Liberties of one or other of the Five Ports ever since I can remember, and, ever since I can remember, the glamour of their name has been upon me. As a boy at school in one of the Corporate Members of the Port of Dover I always thought that the estate of a Baron of the Ports was the highest of ultimate human attainments; I had no wish, like my schoolmates, to be either a pirate, or a railway-guard, or even a baron of the realm.

As perhaps you remember, at the very outset of writing I confided to you my ideas of what the book was to be: neither archæological nor topographical, nor even archæologico-topographical.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.