have not handled them from infancy. Do you suppose our dear didascalos over there ever read Poli Synopsis, or consulted Castelli Lexicon, while he was growing up to their stature? Not he; but virtue passed through the hem of their parchment and leather garments whenever he touched them, as the precious drugs sweated through the bat’s handle in the Arabian story. I tell you he is at home wherever he smells the invigorating fragrance of Russia leather. No self-made man feels so. One may, it is true, have all the antecedents I have spoken of, and yet be a boor or a shabby fellow. One may have none of them, and yet be fit for councils and courts. Then let them change places. Our social arrangement has this great beauty, that its strata shift up and down as they change specific gravity, without being clogged by layers of prescription. But I still insist on my democratic liberty of choice, and I go for the man with the gallery of family portraits against the one with the twenty-five-cent daguerreotype, unless I find out that the last is the better of the two.
———I should have felt more nervous about the late comet, if I had thought the world was ripe. But it is very green yet, if I am not mistaken; and besides, there is a great deal of coal to use up, which I cannot bring myself to think was made for nothing. If certain things, which seem to me essential to a millennium, had come to pass, I should have been frightened; but they haven’t. Perhaps you would like to hear my
Latter-Day Warnings.
When banks dispense with bolts and locks,
When berries, whortle—rasp—and straw—
Grow bigger downwards through the box,—
Shows leak in roof or flaw in right,—
When haberdashers choose the stand
Whose window hath the broadest light,—
And party leaders all they mean,—
When what we pay for, that we drink,
From real grape and coffee-bean,—
And doctors give what they would take,—
When city fathers eat to live,
Save when they fast for conscience’ sake,—
Shall bring his merit to the proof,
Without a lie for every nail
That holds the iron on the hoof,—
Our gloves are stitched with special care,
And guarded well the whalebone tips
Where first umbrellas need repair,—
The power of suction to resist,
And claret-bottles harber not
Such dimples as would hold your fist,—
And pay for what they stole before,—
When the first locomotive’s wheel
Rolls through the Hoosac tunnel’s bore;—
And Miller’s saints blow up the globe;
But when you see that blessed day,
Then order your ascension robe!
The company seemed to like the verses, and I promised them to read others occasionally, if they had a mind to hear them. Of course they would not expect it every morning. Neither must the reader suppose that all these things I have reported were said at any one breakfast-time. I have not taken the trouble to date them, as Raspail, père, used to date every proof he sent to the printer; but they were scattered over several breakfasts; and I have said a good many more things since, which I shall very possibly print some time or other, if I am urged to do it by judicious friends.
