“He’s gone, too. Well, them fellows have all tackled the old Oracle, as they say, but the old man’s most too many for ‘em. Maybe the Poet Lariat ain’t satisfied with them deductions?"
The poet replied with a barbarous rhyme, and went below.
“POET LARIAT.”
“’Pears that he can’t qualify, neither. Well, I didn’t expect nothing out of him. I never see one of them poets yet that knowed anything. He’ll go down, now, and grind out about four reams of the awfullest slush about that old rock, and give it to a consul, or a pilot, or a nigger, or any body he comes across first which he can impose on. Pity but somebody’d take that poor old lunatic and dig all that poetry rubbage out of him. Why can’t a man put his intellect onto things that’s some value? Gibbons, and Hippocratus, and Sarcophagus, and all them old ancient philosophers was down on poets—”
“Doctor,” I said, “you are going to invent authorities, now, and I’ll leave you, too. I always enjoy your conversation, notwithstanding the luxuriance of your syllables, when the philosophy you offer rests on your own responsibility; but when you begin to soar—when you begin to support it with the evidence of authorities who are the creations of your own fancy, I lose confidence.”
That was the way to flatter the doctor. He considered it a sort of acknowledgment on my part of a fear to argue with him. He was always persecuting the passengers with abstruse propositions framed in language that no man could understand, and they endured the exquisite torture a minute or two and then abandoned the field. A triumph like this, over half a
