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