Ridicule vanished.

Could it ever have existed?
If London had witnessed the scene down in Wales, London never again would laugh at the Whitechapel Countess.
He laughed amicably at himself for the citizen sobriety of these views, on the part of a nobleman whose airy pleasure it had been to flout your sober citizens, with their toad-at-the-hop notions, their walled conceptions, their drab propriety; and felt a petted familiar within him dub all pulpitizing, poetizing drivellers with one of those detested titles, invented by the English as a corrective of their maladies or the excesses of their higher moods.

But, reflection telling him that he had done injury to Carinthia--had inflicted the sorest of the wounds a young woman a new bride can endure, he nodded acquiescence to the charge of misbehaviour, and muzzled the cynic.
As a consequence, the truisms flooded him and he lost his guard against our native prosiness.

Must we be prosy if we are profoundly, uncynically sincere?
Do but listen to the stuff we are maundering! Extracts of poetry, if one could hit upon the right, would serve for a relief and a lift when we are in this ditch of the serious vein.

Gower Woodseer would have any number handy to spout.