Daily Inspiration Quote by Maria Monk

That prim little understatement is doing far more work than it admits. By opening with “as I have remarked,” Maria Monk plants her flag as a reliable narrator who has already built a case; you’re meant to feel you’ve been reading evidence, not gossip. Then she slides in the dagger: “not very dignified on all occasions.” It’s a Victorian-era euphemism that weaponizes propriety. She doesn’t accuse the Bishop directly of a specific crime here; she suggests he fails at the one thing a Bishop is supposed to embody: public virtue that’s seamless, effortless, beyond suspicion.

The line’s real heat is in the passive, socially policed phrasing: “would not have appeared well in public.” The implied audience isn’t God, or even the Church, but the gaze of respectable society. Monk leverages that gaze as an instrument of moral authority, turning reputation into a courtroom. The subtext is scandal without the libel: if she spelled out what “not appeared well” means, she might lose credibility or invite legal retaliation; by leaving it vague, she recruits the reader’s imagination to supply something worse than any explicit detail could.

Context matters: Monk’s notoriety was bound up with anti-Catholic sensationalism, a market that thrived on insinuation, purity talk, and the thrill of “exposing” secret vice. This sentence is a calibrated tease, offering just enough decorous disapproval to sound restrained while priming the audience for the salacious payload that restraint implies.