According to some authors this word comes from “electus,” chosen; it does not appear that its etymology can be derived from any other Latin word, since all is choice that is elegant. Elegance is the result of regularity and grace.
This word is employed in speaking of painting and sculpture. Elegans signum is opposed to signum rigens — a proportionate figure, the rounded outlines of which are expressed with softness, to a cold and badly-finished figure.
The severity of the ancient Romans gave an odious sense to the word “elegantia.” They regarded all kinds of elegance as affectation and farfetched politeness, unworthy the gravity of the first ages. “Vit? non laudi fuit,” says Aulus Gellius. They call him an “elegant man,” whom in these days we designate a petit-ma?tre (bellus homuncio), and which the English call a “beau”; but towards the time of Cicero, when manners received their last degree of refinement, elegans was always deemed laudatory. Cicero makes use of this word in a hundred places to describe a man or a polite discourse. At that time even a repast was called elegant, which is scarcely the case among us.
This term among the French, as among the ancient Romans, is confined to sculpture, painting, eloquence, and still more to poetry; it does not precisely mean the same thing as grace.
The word “grace” applies particularly to the countenance, and we do not say an elegant face, as we say elegant contours; the reason is that grace always relates to something in motion, and it is in the countenance that the mind appears; thus we do not say an elegant gait, because gait includes motion.
The elegance of a discourse is not its eloquence; it is a part of it; it is neither the harmony nor metre alone; it is clearness, metre, and choice of words, united.
There are languages in Europe in which nothing is more scarce than an elegant expression. Rude terminations, frequent consonants, and auxiliary verbs grammatically repeated in the same sentence, offend the ears even of the natives themselves.
A disco............