#original_high_speech Hello, everyone! I am finishing my vacat | The High Speech

#original_high_speech
Hello, everyone! I am finishing my vacation in Abkhazia, that is why I have not been posting anything for quite a long time. Another reason is that I have been pretty busy with work here. But in autamn I want to start making posts more often and regularly.

In this post, I present you with an extract from The Forsyte Saga book 2 'In Chancery' written by John Galsworthy. The whole saga is richly filled with poetic language, which I did not quite realise before. But now that I have I will probably become more keen on this category (Hooray! I have finally found an equivalent for Russian 'рубрика'.) of my channel.

The extract reveals the impression of Soames Forsyte of the funeral of Queen Victoria.

Supportive glossary
stripling – молодой человек
stock – шейный платок
oyster barrel – тара для продажи устриц, в которой помещалось два галлона устриц без раковин
tiger – слуга, сопровождающий хозяина в поездках в экипажах
pigsty – хлев, свинарник
­Mammon – Мамона, слово в Новом Завете, олицетворяющее земные блага и богатство
to buttress – укреплять
to chisel – высекать
to gild – покрывать позолотой
hypocrisy – лицемерие
to gild – покрывать позолотой
transmuting – преобразовывающий

The Queen was dead, and the air of the greatest city upon earth grey with unshed tears. Fur-coated and top-hatted, with Annette beside him in dark furs, Soames crossed Park Lane on the morning of the funeral procession, to the rails in Hyde Park. Little moved though he ever was by public matters, this event, supremely symbolical, this summing-up of a long rich period, impressed his fancy. In ’37, when she came to the throne, ‘Superior Dosset’ was still building houses to make London hideous; and James, a stripling of twenty-six, just laying the foundations of his practice in the Law. Coaches still ran; men wore stocks, shaved their upper lips, ate oysters out of barrels; ‘tigers’ swung behind cabriolets; women said, ‘La!’ and owned no property; there were manners in the land, and pigsties for the poor; unhappy devils were hanged for little crimes, and Dickens had but just begun to write. Well-nigh two generations had slipped by—­of steamboats, railways, telegraphs, bicycles, electric light, telephones, and now these motorcars—­of such accumulated wealth, that eight per cent. had become three, and Forsytes were numbered by the thousand! Morals had changed, manners had changed, men had become monkeys twice-removed, God had become Mammon—­Mammon so respectable as to deceive himself: Sixty-four years that favoured property, and had made the upper middle class; buttressed, chiselled, polished it, till it was almost indistinguishable in manners, morals, speech, appearance, habit, and soul from the nobility. An epoch which had gilded individual liberty so that if a man had money, he was free in law and fact, and if he had not money he was free in law and not in fact. An era which had canonised hypocrisy, so that to seem to be respectable was to be. A great Age, whose transmuting influence nothing had escaped save the nature of man and the nature of the Universe.