Leisure+Rewrite

In the passage "Leisure", the author George Eliot suggests that modern advancements and norms have overshadowed the beauty and respect in a simple life. Her personification of old Leisure as an elderly man contributes to her nostalgic tone and insinuates that she has personal ties to Old Leisure over New Leisure. As Eliot juxtaposes Old Leisure with the modern advancements of New Leisure she uses irony and tone shifts to voice her personal preference of Old Leisure even though she reluctantly accepts that it can no longer exist in society.

Eliot's uses provincial and esoteric diction to represent the fading viewpoint belonging to the select few of her peers that remember when life was "happy in his inability to know the causes of things"; the nostalgic language of "Leisure" serves to leave the modern and "theorizing" reader with mixed feelings on the benefits of New Leisure. Eliot means to be ironic by detailing the supposed intellectual increase in modern time and contrasting the advancements with the personification of Old Leisure. Then, upon reading the euphonious pastoral imagery to describe old leisure the reader must rethink the notion that modern means better.