A MAN who had experienced the favours of fortune and was an
Optimist, met a man who had experienced an
optimist and was a Cynic.
The reinsurer, the
optimist of ill-luck and disaster, slaps his pocket with satisfaction.
"The world is all created," said God, "but you have overlooked something -- the mortality of the
optimist."
John, I knew, had a horror of any kind of publicity, and was an easygoing
optimist, who preferred never to meet trouble half-way.
Yet he was an
optimist. He was always gleeful and laughing.
"After all," she said, "you know that I am a professional
optimist, and I have faith in my luck.
"Don't you think that, if I had not been the
optimist I am, I could not have found in fifteen years some means to cut my throat?
Nevertheless, the doctor, who was less of an
optimist, let out as much rope as he could, so as to escape these pitiless insects, that began to rise toward him with a threatening hum.
They were paralyzed with fear, and first of all he played his role of the big vital
optimist. Times were improving.
"Alas, my stalwart friend, I fear that you are by nature an
optimist! I am not a betting man, but I am prepared to bet you a hundred pounds to one that you have made your last communication with the outside world until I say the word."
Every woman not so much a rake at heart, as an
optimist, because they don't think.' What do you say, Rachel?" He paused with his pencil in his hand and a sheet of paper on his knee.
He derived the ideas, in fragmentary fashion, from Bolingbroke, who was an amateur Deist and
optimist of the shallow eighteenth century type, and so far was Pope from understanding what he was doing that he was greatly disturbed when it was pointed out to him that the theology of the poem was Deistic rather than Christian [Footnote: The name Deist was applied rather generally in the eighteenth century to all persons who did not belong to some recognized Christian denomination.