When anything is
presented to us different from what we have been long accustomed to,
unless it is evidently better, we are inclined to consider it worse. In
the same way, things which at first we consider wrong, we finally come
to think unobjectionable.
In taste and our sense of the ludicrous, we find ourselves greatly under
the influence of habit. What seems to be a logical error is often found
to be merely something to which we are unaccustomed; thus the double
negative, which sounds to us absurd and equivalent to an affirmation, is
used in many languages merely to give emphasis.
How ridiculous do the manners of our forefathers now seem, their
pig-tails, powder, and patches, the large fardingales, and the stiff and
pompous etiquette. I remember a gentleman, a staunch admirer of the old
school, who, lamenting over the lounging and lolling of the present day,
said that his grandmother, even when dying, refused to relax into a
recumbent posture. She was sitting erect even to her very last hour, and
when the doctor suggested to her that she would find herself easier in a
reposing posture, she replied, "No, sir, I prefer to die as I am," and
she breathed her last, sitting bolt upright in her high-backed chair. So
great indeed is the power of custom that it almost leads us to view
artificial things as natural productions--to commit as great an error as
that of the African King who said that "England must be a fine country,
where the rivers flow with rum.
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