A gentleman of Typee can bring up a numerous family of children and give them all a highly respectable cannibal education, with in...finitely less toil and anxiety than he expends in the simple process of striking a light; whilst a poor European artisan, who through the instrumentality of a lucifer performs the same operation in one second, is put to his wits' end to provide for his starving offspring that food which the children of a Polynesian father, without troubling their parent, pluck from the branches of every tree around them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Civilization does not engross all the virtues of humanity: she has not even her full share of them. They flourish in greater abund...ance and attain greater strength among many barbarous people. The hospitality of the wild Arab, the courage of the North American Indian, and the faithful friendships of some of the Polynesian nations, far surpass any thing of a similar kind among the polished communities of Europe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I should like to have seen a gallery of coronation beauties, at Westminster Abbey, confronted for a moment by this band of Island ...girls; their stiffness, formality, and affectation contrasted with the artless vivacity and unconcealed natural graces of these savage maidens. It would be the Venus de' Medici placed beside a milliner's doll.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »