knowledge was in his day. Men cannot talk about
things they have seen from the outside with the same
magisterial authority the talking dynasty pretended
to. The sturdy old moralist felt grand enough,
no doubt, when he said, “He that is growing
great and happy by electrifying a bottle wonders how
the world can be engaged by trifling prattle about
war or peace.” Benjamin Franklin was one
of these idlers who were electrifying bottles, but
he also found time to engage in the trifling prattle
about war and peace going on in those times.
The talking Doctor hits him very hard in “Taxation
no Tyranny”: “Those who wrote the
Address (of the American Congress in 1775), though
they have shown no great extent or profundity of mind,
are yet probably wiser than to believe it: but
they have been taught by some master of mischief how
to put in motion the engine of political electricity;
to attract by the sounds of Liberty and Property,
to repel by those of Popery and Slavery; and to give
the great stroke by the name of Boston.”
The talking dynasty has always been hard upon us Americans.
King Samuel II. says: “It is, I believe,
a fact verified beyond doubt, that some years ago
it was impossible to obtain a copy of the Newgate
Calendar, as they had all been bought up by the Americans,
whether to suppress the blazon of their forefathers
or to assist in their genealogical researches I could
never learn satisfactorily.” As for King
Thomas, the last of the monological succession, he
made such a piece of work with his prophecies and his
sarcasms about our little trouble with some of the
Southern States, that we came rather to pity him for
his whims and crotchets than to get angry with him
for calling us bores and other unamiable names.
I do not think we believe things because considerable
people say them, on personal authority, that is, as
intelligent listeners very commonly did a century
ago. The newspapers have lied that belief out
of us. Any man who has a pretty gift of talk
may hold his company a little while when there is
nothing better stirring. Every now and then a
man who may be dull enough prevailingly has a passion
of talk come over him which makes him eloquent and
silences the rest. I have a great respect for
these divine paroxysms, these half-inspired moments
of influx when they seize one whom we had not counted
among the luminaries of the social sphere. But
the man who can—give us a fresh experience
on anything that interests us overrides everybody
else. A great peril escaped makes a great story-teller
of a common person enough. I remember when a
certain vessel was wrecked long ago, that one of the
survivors told the story as well as Defoe could have
told it. Never a word from him before; never
a word from him since. But when it comes to
talking one’s common thoughts,—those
that come and go as the breath does; those that tread
the mental areas and corridors with steady, even foot-fall,
an interminable procession of every hue and garb,—there