Читать книгу: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 29, March, 1860», страница 11
How long I slept thus I know not. Once I had a vague sense of the Mangouste gliding across me, but it was only part of a dream; and it was still night, black and awful, when I started up in good earnest, at a piercing shriek from the united family of white mice, whose cage stood upon a low stand, about two yards to the right of where I lay.
The sound which followed this was one which the man is not likely to forget who has once heard it,—whether beneath his foot, as he steps upon the moss-grown log in the rank cedar-swamp, or under his hand, when about to grasp with it a ledge of the rocks among which he is clambering, unknowing of the serpent's dens. With clenched teeth, and hair that rustled like the sedge-grass, I rose and woke up the obedient gas, which flashed tremulously on the scales of an enormous rattlesnake coiled round the mice's cage, tightening his folds as he whizzed his infernal warning, and darting out his lightning tongue with baffled fury at the trembling group in the middle of the cage. This I saw by the first flash. Grasping a sword from among the weapons with which the walls were studded, I made a pass to sever the monster; but the Mangouste was quicker than I, as he darted upon the coils of the serpent, which, in a moment, fell heavily to the floor, a writhing, headless mass.
In the heavy dreams which haunted me during the sleep from which I had just been roused, I had a vision of the planter of the balcony with a snake coiled round his naked arm. Who so dull as to require an interpreter for such plain speakings? Rushing down-stairs, I burst open the door of that person's room with one kick, and there, in the middle of the floor, half-dressed and bending over a censer of red-hot charcoal, knelt Mr. Désolé Arcubus, the poison-man of Mrs. Silvernails boarding-house. His features were collapsed and livid, and he held his left arm, which was much swollen and discolored, close over the red-hot coals, basting it wildly, the while, with ladlefuls of some hot liquid, while he crammed into his mouth, at intervals, a handful of herb-fodder of some kind from a salad-bowl on the floor beside him. He was rapidly growing faint and sinking, but indicated his wishes by signs, and one of several strangers who now entered the room continued the fomenting treatment, while another ran for medical assistance.
There was an open letter on the table, which I had no hesitation in reading, when I saw at a glance that it threw light on the matter. The following is an exact copy of it:—
"Hollow Rock–County. N. Y. 17 Jewly. 18—
MR. HARKABUS dear Sir.
a cording to promis i send the sneak by Xpress. He is the Largest and wust Sneak we have ketched In these parts. Bit a cow wich died in 2.40 likeways her calf of fright. Hope the sneak weed growed up strong and harty. By eting and drinking of that wede the greatest sneak has no power. Smeling of it a loan will cure a small sneak ader or the like. I go in upon the dens tomorough and if we find any Pufing Aders will Xpres them to you per Xpress.
Yr. oblgd. servt. SILENUS CLUCK."
Here was the whole story in a nutshell. For his experiments in septic poisons, Mr. Arcubus had hired this apartment, with its convenient balcony for the cultivation of his antidotes. Having prepared his decoctions, he had this night caused himself to be bitten by the snake, which, disgusted probably at its services being then rudely dispensed with, had followed its guiding instinct up to the room where the animals were, making its way through the holes nibbled by the Mangouste underneath the doors. A cold shudder seized me when I guessed the reality of the sense of something gliding over me in the night. The hunger of the reptile had steered him straight to the cage of the mice, whose cry of agony at the presence of the great enemy of mouse-kind had fortunately roused me from my lethargy,—for the rattle of the snake is but a drowsy sound, and will not awaken the sleeper. How the Mangouste came to appear on the scene at the nick of time, I know not. He might have come in at the open window, or possibly had been sleeping, since I missed him, among the trappings and traveller's gear with which the room was lumbered.
And these were the delights of lodgings,—of lodgings without board! And who could see the end of it all?—for, if snake-poison lurked on the stairs, probably hydrophobia was tied up in the cupboard. Brief time I expended in making my arrangements to quit, having first seen Mr. Arcubus carted away to a hospital, where by skilful treatment he slowly recovered. For the Mangouste and the mice, the parrots and the blasphemous macaw, I engaged temporary board and lodging with a bird-and-rabbit man in the neighborhood, telegraphing De Vonville that I had departed from lodgings forever,—lodgings for single gentlemen, without board.
But, on leaving the house, I did not forget the dust-colored old woman, whose last words to me, as I tipped her with a gratuity, were oracular:—"Forty long years and more have I lived in lodgin'-houses and never before seen a sarpint. It behooves all on us, now, to be watchful for what may be coming next, and wakeful. Circumspectangular."
I live in a hotel now, a very noisy life, and fearfully expensive. "But what do you wish, my friend?" as the French say, in their peculiar idiom. Believing in the ancient Egyptians, who worshipped the Nilotic ichneumon, I have privately canonized his cousin, the Mangouste, by the style and title of St. Mungo; and if ever surplus funds are discovered to my credit in any solvent bank, at present unknown to me, I will certainly devote a moiety of them to the foundation of a neat row of alms-cages, for the reception of decayed members of the family of White Mice.
FOR CHRISTIE'S SAKE
Upon us falls the shadow of night,
And darkened is our day:
My love will greet the morning light
Four hundred miles away.
God love her, torn so swift and far
From hearts so like to break!
And God love all who are good to her,
For Christie's sake!
I know, whatever spot of ground
In any land we tread,
I know the Eternal Arms are round,
That heaven is overhead;
And faith the mourning heart will heal,
But many fears will make
Our spirits faint, our fond hearts kneel,
For Christie's sake.
Good bye, dear! be they kind to you,
As though you were their ain!
My daisy opens to the dew,
But shuts against the rain.
Never will new moon glad our eyes
But offerings we shall make
To old God Wish, and prayers will rise
For Christie's sake.
Four years ago we struck our tent;
O'er homeless babes we yearned;
Our all—three darlings—with us went,
But only two returned!
While life yet bleeds into her grave,
Love ventures one more stake;
Hush, hush, poor hearts! if big, be brave,
For Christie's sake!
Like crown to most ambitious brows
Was Christie to us given,
To make our home a holy house
And nursery of heaven.
Oh, softer was her bed of rest
Than lily's on the lake!
Peace filled so deep each billowy breast,
For Christie's sake!
To music played by harps and hands
Invisible were we drawn
O'er charmèd seas, through faëry lands,
Under a clearer dawn:
We entered our new world of love
With blessings in our wake,
While prospering heavens smiled above,
For Christie's sake.
We gazed with proud eyes luminous
On such a gift of grace,—
All heaven narrowed down to us
In one dear little face!
And many a pang we felt, dear wife,
With hurt of heart and ache
All shut within like clasping knife,
For Christie's sake.
I would no tears might e'er run down
Her patient face, beside
Such happy pearls of heart as crown
Young mother, new-made bride!
For 'tis a face that, looking up
To passing heaven, might make
An angel stop, a blessing drop,
For Christie's sake.
If Love in that child's heart of hers
Should breathe and break its calm,
With trouble sweet as that which stirs
The brooding buds of balm,—
Listening at ear of peeping pearl,
Glistening in eyes that shake
Their sweet dew down,—God bless our girl,
For Christie's sake!
But, Father, if our babe must mourn,
Be merciful and kind!
And if our gentle lamb be shorn,
Attemper thou the wind!
Across the Deluge guide our Dove,
And to thy bosom take
With arm of love, and shield above,
For Christie's sake!
We have had sorrows many and strange:
Poor Christie I when I'm gone,
Some of my words will weirdly change,
If she read sadly on!
Lightnings, from what was dark of old,
With meanings strange will break
Of sorrows hid or dimly told,
For Christie's sake.
Wife, we should still try hard to win
The best for our dear child,
And keep a resting-place within,
When all without grows wild:
As on the winter graves the snow
Falls softly, flake by flake,
Our love should whitely clothe our woe,
For Christie's sake.
For one will wake at midnight drear
From out a dream of death,
And find no dear head pillowed near,
No sound of peaceful breath!
May no weak wailing words arise,
No bitter thoughts awake
To see the tears in Memory's eyes:
For Christie's sake!
And There, where many crownless kings
Of earth a crown shall wear,
The martyrs who have borne the pangs
Their palm at last shall bear,—
When with our lily pure of sin
Our heavenward way we take,
There may we walk with welcome in,
For Christie's sake!
THE NURSERY BLARNEY-STONE
Where is it kept? We have often longed for a sight of that precious bit of aërolite, that talismanic moon-stone and bewildering boulder, to which the lips of all devoted to infantile education must be religiously pressed.
In vain have we searched in the closet, where the headless dolls and tailless horses, the collapsed drum and the torn primer, are put away. We have privately climbed to the summit of the clothes-press, we have surreptitiously invaded the nurse's own private work-basket, lured by disappointing lumps of wax and fragments of rhubarb-root; but we did not find it. We believe in its existence none the less. Real as the coronation-stone of the Scottish kings now in Westminster Abbey, as the Caaba at Mecca, as the loadstone mountain against which dear old Sinbad was wrecked, as the meteor which fell into the State of Connecticut and the volcanic island which rose out of the Straits of Messina, as the rock of Plymouth, or the philosopher's stone,—yet we have sought in vain for it, and only know of it as of the Great Carbuncle, by the light it sheds.
"Pray, my good Sir," ask legions of fond parents, "what do you mean? Is it Dalby's Carminative, Daffy's Elixir, Brown's Syrup of Squills, or White's Magnetic Mixture? Is it of the soothing or the coercing system? a substitute for lollipops or for birch? rock candy or rock the cradle?"
"Look" not "into your heart," responds our Muse, but into your nursery, and write!
We invite a general review of all infantry divisions. We may be, for aught you know, Mrs. Ellis incog., warning the mothers of America, as of yore the Cornelias of England. What is the Nursery Blarney-Stone? You have none in your own airy and southern-exposed first-pair-back, (Nov-Anglicè>, "the keeping-room chamber,") where you daily water and rake your young olive-sprouts? upon your word of honor, Madam, you have not? You never tell nursery-tales of ghosts or fairies; you have conscientiously stripped from the dark closet every vestige of a legend; you have permitted juvenile inspection of the chimney, to prove that Santa Claus could not descend its sooty flue without grievous nigritude of the anticipated doll's frock, and have logically appealed to Miss Bran Beeswax's satin silveriness in proof of the non-existence of the saint beloved of Christmas-tide. Nay, more, you tell us you have actually invited inspection of the overnight process of filling the stockings, (you brute!) and you appropriately label each gift, "From Papa," "From Uncle Edward," "From Sister Kate," "From dear Mamma," lest a figment of the supernatural untruth should linger in the infantile brain. The "Arabian Nights'" (and "Arabian Days'") "Entertainments" are on your Index Expurgatorius. You have banned Bluebeard, and treated Red Ridinghood as no better than the Bonnet Rouge of domestic Jacobinism.
You are a model mother, with whom even the late Mr. Gradgrind might be satisfied. "Truth, crushed to earth" by the whole race of nurses of the good old time, rises again triumphant at your hearth-stone. Then answer us,—Why did you tell your little ones to-night, as the sparrows were making an unusually loquacious preparation for their dormitories, that the little birds were singing their evening hymns, and exhort, thereupon, your unwilling nestlings to a rival performance of the verses of Dr. Watts? You ought to be prepared to explain, also, for the benefit of any sucking Socrates, why it is that these feathered choristers have their "revival seasons," and are terrible backsliders during the moulting period. When you looked out of the nursery-window, into the poultry-yard, and heard the noisy confabulation of the motherly hens and pert pullets, you should be prepared to state upon what theological principles it is that psalmody is not the wont of the Gallinacae. Are the Biddies given over to a reprobate mind, because you don't happen to like their vocalization? Is it only the Piccolomini and Linds of the feathered kingdom who have a right to practise sacred music?
And how about that other stupendous fiction of the harvest-moon? Tell us, since you are voluntarily in the confessional, tell us why you kept back that explanation of its dependence on the Precession of the Equinoxes, which, at Professor Cram's finishing examination, in your school-girl days, you so glibly recited before your admiring papa and mamma? Do you really believe that the solar and stellar system was arranged to accommodate "the reapers reaping early" of the little island of Great Britain?
We think you said angels! When little Isabel Montgomery, with her long, sunny curls, and sweet, blue eyes, was taken away, you made a very touching application of her decease, to illustrate what all good people were to become in the unknown world. How did you get out of the scrape which followed the remark of your downright eldest, remembering also the departure of a good-natured, obese, elderly neighbor,—"Then I thpothe Mithter Thimmonth ith a big angel"? So he probably is; but Simmons's two hundred pounds of earthliness did not suit your sentimentality quite as readily as the little fairy who always wore such clean pantalets and never tore her pretty white frocks in a game of romps. Is beatification dependent upon the platform-balance? and what amount of flesh will turn the scale in favor of the Avvocato del Diavolo?
Once upon a time, a little boy was allowed to ramble in the woods. Being an adventurous little boy, he saw and coveted, and also conquered, (in the good old English sense of the word,) a pretty bird's-nest and its contents, to wit, several shiny, speckled eggs. He brought them home for triumphant display. He set them out upon the drawing-room table, and called a family conclave to admire and exult. What was the surprise and grief of the infant Catiline, to find himself received, not with applause, but horror! He was accused of robbery, was threatened with Solomonic penalties, was finally condemned to penance at a side-table upon dry bread and water, while his innocent brothers and sisters were regaling upon chickens and custards. He was edified over his scanty meal by melting descriptions of the mother-bird returning to the desolated home, of her positive sorrow and her probable pining to death. And the same little boy, looking out through the prison-bars of the nursery-window, saw his mother take by the hand his weeping sister (much cast down by the fraternal wickedness) and lead her to the nest of another mother-bird, and then and there encourage her to perform the same act of spoliation. True, the eggs were not speckled and small, but of a very pretty white, and quite a handful for the juvenile fingers. But the bereaved "parient" was not slender and active,—in fact, was rather a tame, confiding, dumpy and dull, pepper-and-salt-colored dame. Her complaints were not touching, but rather ludicrous,—so much so, indeed, as to suggest to the human hen-bird that "Biddy was laughing to think what a nice breakfast little Carrie would have off her nice eggs!" The young Trenck, from aloft beholding, could not but stumble upon certain "glittering generalities," as, that "eggs was eggs," and that the return of them on the fowl's part, in consideration of an advance of corn, was not altogether a voluntary barter,—quite, in short, after the pattern of Coolie apprenticeship. And thus the high moral lesson of the morning was sadly shaken. Of course this boy did not belong to any of the model mammas, for whom we are writing.
A large fragment of the Nursery Blarney-Stone has been made over, to have and to hold, to the writers of the Children's Astor-Place Library. We yawn over poetical justice in novels, and only tolerate it as an amusing absurdity in genteel comedy, for the sake of getting the curtain rapidly down over the benedictory guardian and the virtue-rewarded fair, who are impatient themselves to be off to a very different distribution of cakes and ale. We know that the hero and the heroine walk complacently away in the company of the dejected villain to wash off their rouge and burnt cork, and experience the practical domestic felicity which is ordered for them on the same principles as for us who sit in the pit and applaud. If it were not so, and if we did not know it to be so, and if we did not know that they know that we know it, we should perhaps feel very differently.
Why must we, then, be conscientiously constrained to mark out such a very different plan for our children at home? Why is the life of little boys and girls in books always pictured on the foot-lights pattern? We remember that we were of those good little boys and girls,—quite as good as that one who saved his pennies for the missionary-box, or that other who hemmed a tiny pocket-handkerchief against the nasal needs of a forlorn infant in Burmah; but we don't remember ever (then or since) to have encountered any of those delightful (and strong-minded) mothers or those sensible and always well-informed fathers of whom we read. Neither in our own particularly pleasant home, nor in any where we went, (at three, P.M., to take an early tea with preparatory barmecidal rehearsals on doll's china,) did we ever meet them. Perhaps they were the progenitors of the authors of the books. Mr. Thackeray has introduced us to sundry gentlemen and ladies bearing a faint likeness to them; but he also permitted us to behold Lady Beckie Crawley née Sharpe boxing little Rawdon's ears, and to meet Mrs. Hobson Newcome at one of her delightful "at homes," where Runmun Loll, of East Indian origin, was the lion of the evening.
We couldn't get through five pages of Hannah More, on a wet day, at the dreariest railway-station, when the expected train was telegraphed as "not due under two hours." What have the innocent heirs of our name done, that Hannah should continue under numberless noms-de-plume to cater for them?
We know there must have been a large lump of the Blarney-Stone, conglomerate probably, kept in the desk of our reverend instructor in the ways of syntax and the dismal paths of numbers. We have a lively recollection of the countless tables of foreign coins which we committed to memory, and of the provoking additions and subtractions we underwent to reduce to dollars and cents of the Federal denomination the fortunes of a score of Rothschilds. But when, under the shadow of the Drachenfels, we attempted to reimburse the Teutonic waiter for a cup of café noir, we were ignominiously constrained to hold forth a handful of coin and to await the white-jacketed and bearded one's pleasure, as he helped himself.
We have a strong impression that we should never have attained to our present proud position of being allowed to write for (and be printed in) the "Atlantic Monthly," without much previous polish, through the companionship of the fairer sex. Why was it made a crime worthy of Draconian sternness to address our she-comrades in the pleasant paths of learning? Why did we behold the severe Magister Morum himself, in utter forgetfulness of his own rule, mingle in the mazy dance on an evening occasion, at which we were allowed to sit up? Did the girls of a larger growth lose their dangerous qualities on arriving at belle-hood? Why were our primary billets-doux confiscated, and our offending palms, like Cranmer's, visited with the first penalty, though we had been obliged to walk blushingly the gauntlet of fifty pairs of maiden eyes and deliver to the "female principal" of the girls' school across the entry notes which we have since but too much reason to conclude bore no reference to the affairs of the school-realm? There is a bit of the Blarney-Stone (always of the nursery formation) which we are sure is discoverable to the true geologic eye in the underpinning of the Fifth Congregational Society's house of worship,—then called a meeting-house, now, we believe, styled a church. For all sermons therein delivered were supposed to be for our personal edification; albeit we were not, by reason of our tender years, specifically exposed to the heresies of Origen or Pelagius. It must have been on some afternoon when we were absent, then, that Dr. Baxter delivered the discourse of which we found a commentary written on the fly-leaf of the hymn-book in our pew,—"Terribly tedious this P.M., isn't he?" We have always felt that a great opportunity was lost to us. We should doubtless have been permitted to indulge unchecked in the solution of that lost mystery of our boyhood, as to the exact number of little brass rods in the front of the gallery, to scratch our initials with a pin upon the pew-side, or, propped by the paternal arm, to sweetly slumber till nineteenthly's close. No such sermon was ever pronounced in our hearing. Oh, golden time of youth! precious season thus lost! We intend yet revisiting that ancient and time-worn edifice, and, borrowing the keys of the sexton, we mean to revel in all and sundry those delights of "boyhood's breezy hour" from which we were debarred by that untimely absence. Like the old gentleman who visited nightly Van Amburg's exhibition of the head-in-the-lion's-mouth feat, in the moral certainty that a single absence would fall inevitably upon the one night when Leo would vary the programme by decapitation,—so we lost the one afternoon when that dull discourse diversified the pious eloquence of Jotham Baxter, D.D., disciple of Dr. Hopkins and believer in Cotton Mather. Many a refreshing slumber has sealed our eyes under subsequent outpourings of divinity, but never with that entire sense of permissible indulgence which then would certainly have been ours. Why was it—except for the Blarney-Stone—that we were always checked in any Sabba'day notes and queries of what we had noticed in the sanctuary? Why was it wicked and deserving of a double infliction of catechism (Assembly's) for us to have seen that Bob Jones had a new jacket, and that he took five marbles and a jack-knife (in aggravating display) out of its pockets, while our mother and sisters were enabled, without let or hindrance to the most absorbing devotion, to chronicle every bonnet and ribbon within the walls of the temple?
Certainly, the family-physician carried—as well he might—a bit of the precious rock in his waistcoat-pocket; for all our subsequent experience of materia medica has never revealed to us the then patent fact, that all our bodily ailments were the consequence of those particular sports which damaged clothes and disturbed the quiet of the household. Surely, the connection between the measles and sailing on the millpond was about as obvious as that between Macedon and Monmouth; and whooping-cough must have had a very long road to travel, if it originated in our nutting frolic, when we returned home with a ghastly gash in our trousers-knee.
The Blarney-Stone got into our "Manual of History"; for either it or the "Boston Centinel" must have made some egregious mistakes as to the character of some famous men who nursed our country's fortunes. So, too, did the author of "Familiar Letters on Public Characters"; for he was anything but an indorser of the History-Book, with its wood-cuts (after Trumbull and West) of the death of General Wolfe, exclaiming, "They run who run the French then I die happy," and of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker's Hill, with its amazing portraits of the first six Presidents, and the death of Tecumseh. Nay, we have found hard work to reconcile our faith, as per History-Book, in the loveliness of those gentlemen whom stress of weather and a treacherous pilot put ashore upon Plymouth beach, (where they luckily found a rock to step upon,) with a certain sweet pastoral called "Evangeline." We found ourselves, just after reading the proceedings of the Plymouth Monument Association, the other day, pondering over the possible fate of the Dutch colony of the Mannahattoes, supposing that the Mayflower had made (as was purposed) the Highlands of Neversink instead of Shankpainter Hill at the end of Cape Cod. It was a perilous meditation, for we found our belief in Plutarch's Lives, the Charter Oak, and the existence of the Maelström all sliding away from under us. "Think," we said, "if New York had been Boston, how it would have fared with the good Knickerbockers!"
Who was our geographer? Why did he insist upon our believing that all French men and women passed their time in mutual bows and "curchies," and that all Italians were on their knees to fat priests, clean and rosy-looking? Why did he palm upon us that outrageous fiction of three kings (like those of Cologne) sitting in full ermine robes, with gold crowns on their heads, all alone in a sort of summer-parlor, where the heat, must have been at 80° in the shade, engaged in disparting Poland? We have seen, say, a million of Frenchmen, and nearly the same of Italians, since then, with a dozen or so of kings and emperors,—but never the faintest likeness to those deluding pictures. We learned at the same time, by painful rote, the population of various capital cities; but we cannot find in any statistic-book gazetteer, neither in McCulloch nor in Worcester, any of the old, familiar numbers. Also in that same Wonder-Book of Malte-Brun, edited by Pietro il Parlatore, we recall a sketch of a boy running for life down a slope of at least 45°, just before a snowball some five hundred times as big as the one our school-boys unitedly rolled up in the back-yard. It was a snowball, round, symmetrical, just such a magnified copy of the backyard one as might be expected to follow a boy in dreams after too much Johnny-cake for supper. And that was an avalanche. We have stood since then under the shadow of the Jungfrau, on the Wengern Alp, at the selfsame spot where Byron beheld the fall of so many. We had the noble lord's luck, (as most people have.) and saw dozens, but not one big snowball.
We believe there has been reform since that day. Thanks to the London "Illustrated News" and the "Penny Magazine," juster ideas visit the ingenious youth of the present age. But we solemnly declare that we grew up in the belief that the President of the United States was daily ushered to his carriage by a long array of bareheaded and bowing menials, and that his official dress was a cocked hat and knee-breeches. We furthermore make affidavit that we supposed all the nobility of Europe to be in the habit of driving four-in-hand over wooden-legged beggars. And we also depose and say, that we had no other idea of royalty than as continually clad in coronation-robes, with six peers in the same, with huge wigs, as attendants. All this upon the faith of that same Malte-Brun, à la P.P. Wasn't this a pretty dish to set before—not a king-but a young republican, who fancied himself the equal of kings? And lastly, upon the same authority, we held that "the horrible custom of eating human flesh does not belong exclusively to any nation." We have seen, we repeat, men and cities. We have dined at the Rocher de Cancale, the Maison Dorée, at Delmonico's, at German Gasthauses, at Italian Trattorias, at "Joe's" in London, the Trosachs Inn in the Highlands, and upon all peculiar and national dishes, from the sardines au gratin of Naples to the sauer kraut of Berlin, from the "one fish-ball" of Boston to the hog and hominy of Virginia,—but never yet upon any carte did we encounter "Cold Missionary" or "Enfans en potage Fijien."
Where, we repeat, is the Nursery Blarney-Stone? or rather, where is it not?
The gentle reader (prepared to corroborate with many a juvenile reminiscence) must by this time be prepared for our moral; and it is very briefly this:—Is it not time to consider the budding brain as entitled to fair play? We, the dear middle-aged people, must surely remember that it has taken us much toil and trouble to unlearn many things. We know, that, when we pen anything for our coevals, it is with due attention to such facts as we can command,—that we have a wholesome fear of criticism,—that, if we make blunders in our seamanship, even though professedly land-lubbers, some awful Knickerbocker stands by with the Marine Dictionary in hand to pounce upon us. But for the poor little innocents at home any cast-off rags of knowledge are good enough. We hand down to them the worn-out platitudes of history which we have carefully eschewed. We humbug their inexperience with the same nursery fables beneath whose leonine hide our matured vision detects the ass's ears.
We have been writing lightly enough, but with a purpose. For, absurd as may seem the fictions we have sported with, are they not types of many other far more serious ones which we cram down the throats of our rising generation, long after we ourselves have begun to disbelieve them? There is a conventional teaching which we decorously administer, and leave our pupils to disavow it when they can. History is still taught in our public and private schools, seasoned with all the exploded blunders of the past. Men grow up to full manhood with ideas of foreign lands as ridiculous and unfounded as the pictures over which we have been amusing ourselves just now in our old Geography. Young America is ignorant enough, Heaven knows, of a great deal he ought to learn; but what shall we say of our persistently cramming him with what he ought not to learn? No exploding process is strong enough, it would seem, to blow away the countless pretty stories with which juvenile histories are embroidered. Niebuhr and Arnold have forever finished Romulus and Remus and the Livian legends, for maturer beliefs; but childhood goes on in the same track. Lord Macaulay's Romance of English History has been riddled by the acute reviewers; but he will be abridged for the use of schools, and not a fiction about William Penn, or John of Marlborough, or Grahame of Claverhouse, be left out.
