Van Diemen’s Land. Yet do I hold a correspondence
with a very dear friend in the first-named of these
two Terrae Incognitae. I have no astronomy.
I do not know where to look for the Bear, or Charles’s
Wain; the place of any star; or the name of any of
them at sight. I guess at Venus only by her brightness—and
if the sun on some portentous morn were to make his
first appearance in the West, I verily believe, that,
while all the world were gasping in apprehension about
me, I alone should stand unterrified, from sheer incuriosity
and want of observation. Of history and chronology
I possess some vague points, such as one cannot help
picking up in the course of miscellaneous study; but
I never deliberately sat down to a chronicle, even
of my own country. I have most dim apprehensions
of the four great monarchies; and sometimes the Assyrian,
sometimes the Persian, floats as first in my
fancy. I make the widest conjectures concerning
Egypt, and her shepherd kings. My friend M.,
with great painstaking, got me to think I understood
the first proposition in Euclid, but gave me over
in despair at the second. I am entirely unacquainted
with the modern languages; and, like a better man than
myself, have “small Latin and less Greek.”
I am a stranger to the shapes and texture of the commonest
trees, herbs, flowers—not from the circumstance
of my being town-born—for I should have
brought the same inobservant spirit into the world
with me, had I first seen it in “on Devon’s
leafy shores,”—and am no less at a
loss among purely town-objects, tools, engines, mechanic
processes.—Not that I affect ignorance—but
my head has not many mansions, nor spacious; and I
have been obliged to fill it with such cabinet curiosities
as it can hold without aching. I sometimes wonder,
how I have passed my probation with so little discredit
in the world, as I have done, upon so meagre a stock.
But the fact is, a man may do very well with a very
little knowledge, and scarce be found out, in mixed
company; every body is so much more ready to produce
his own, than to call for a display of your acquisitions.
But in a tete-a-tete there is no shuffling.
The truth will out. There is nothing which I
dread so much, as the being left alone for a quarter
of an hour with a sensible, well-informed man, that
does not know me. I lately got into a dilemma
of this sort.—
In one of my daily jaunts between Bishopsgate and Shacklewell, the coach stopped to take up a staid-looking gentleman, about the wrong side of thirty, who was giving his parting directions (while the steps were adjusting), in a tone of mild authority, to a tall youth, who seemed to be neither his clerk, his son, nor his servant, but something partaking of all three. The youth was dismissed, and we drove on. As we were the sole passengers, he naturally enough addressed his conversation to me; and we discussed the merits of the fare, the civility and punctuality of the driver; the circumstance of an opposition coach having been