[1] ‘Pall Mall Gazette,’ July 31st, 1873. [↑]
[2] “Rigurgitava”—gushed or gorged up; as a bottle which you have filled too full and too fast. [↑]
[3] Sensale, an interesting Venetian word. The fair on the Feast of the Ascension at Venice became in mellifluous brevity, ‘Sensa,’ and the most ornamental of the ware purchaseable at it, therefore, Sensale.
A “Holy-Thursday-Fairing,” feeling herself unwell, would be the properest translation. [↑]
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER XLIII.
Rome, Corpus-Domini, 1874.
I wrote, for a preface to the index at the end of the second volume of Fors, part of an abstract of what had been then stated in the course of this work. Fate would not let me finish it; but what was done will be useful now, and shall begin my letter for this month. Completing three and a half volumes of Fors, it may contain a more definite statement of its purpose than any given hitherto; though I have no intention of explaining that purpose entirely, until it is in sufficient degree accomplished. I have a house to build; but none shall mock me by saying I was not able to finish it, nor be vexed by not finding in it the rooms they expected. But the current and continual purpose of Fors Clavigera is to explain the powers of Chance, or Fortune (Fors), as she offers to men the conditions of prosperity; and as these conditions are accepted or refused, nails down and fastens their fate for ever, being thus ‘Clavigera,’—‘nail-bearing.’ [[138]]The image is one familiar in mythology: my own conception of it was first got from Horace, and developed by steady effort to read history with impartiality, and to observe the lives of men around me with charity. “How you may make your fortune, or mar it,” is the expansion of the title.
Certain authoritative conditions of life, of its happiness, and its honour, are therefore stated, in this book, as far as they may be, conclusively and indisputably, at present known. I do not enter into any debates, nor advance any opinions. With what is debateable I am unconcerned; and when I only have opinions about things, I do not talk about them. I attack only what cannot on any possible ground be defended; and state only what I know to be incontrovertibly true.