CHAPTER XIV. P. I.

AN OBJECTION ANSWERED.

“This account of Textor's Dialogues,” says a critical Reader, “might have done very well for the Retrospective Review, or one of the Magazines, or D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature. But no one would have looked for it here, where it is completely out of place.”

“My good Sir, there is quite enough left untouched in Textor to form a very amusing paper for the journal which you have mentioned, and the Editor may thank you for the hint. But you are mistaken in thinking that what has been said of those Dialogues is out of place here. May I ask what you expected in these volumes?”

“What the Title authorized me to look for.”

“Do you know, Sir, what mutton broth means at a city breakfast on the Lord Mayor's Day, mutton broth being the appointed breakfast for that festival? It means according to established usage—by liberal interpretation—mutton broth and every thing else that can be wished for at a breakfast. So, Sir, you have here not only what the title seems to specify, but every thing else that can be wished for in a book. In treating of the Doctor, it treats de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis. It is the Doctor &c., and that &c., like one of Lyttleton's, implies every thing that can be deduced from the words preceding.

“But I maintain that the little which has been said of comical old Textor (for it is little compared to what his Dialogues contain) strictly relates to the main thread of this most orderly and well compacted work. You will remember that I am now replying to the question proposed in the third chapter P. I. ‘Who was the Doctor?’ And as he who should undertake to edite the works of Chaucer, or Spenser, or Shakespear would not be qualified for the task, unless he had made himself conversant with the writings of those earlier authors, from whose storehouses (as far as they drew from books) their minds were fed; so it behoved me (as far as my information and poor ability extend) to explain in what manner so rare a character as Dr. Dove's was formed.

“Quo semel est imbuta recens,—you know the rest of the quotation, Sir. And perhaps you may have tasted water out of a beery glass,—which it is not one or two rinsings that can purify.

“You have seen yew trees cut into the forms of pyramids, chess-kings, and peacocks:—nothing can be more unlike their proper growth—and yet no tree except the yew could take the artificial figures so well. The garden passes into the possession of some new owner who has no taste for such ornaments: the yews are left to grow at their own will; they lose the preposterous shape which had been forced upon them, without recovering that of their natural growth, and what was formal becomes grotesque—a word which may be understood as expressing the incongruous combination of formality with extravagance or wildness.”

The intellectual education which young Daniel received at home was as much out of the ordinary course as the book in which he studied at school. Robinson Crusoe had not yet reached Ingleton. Sandford and Merton had not been written, nor that history of Pecksey and Flapsey and the Robin's Nest, which is the prettiest fiction that ever was composed for children, and for which its excellent authoress will one day rank high among women of genius when time shall have set its seal upon desert. The only book within his reach, of all those which now come into the hands of youth, was the Pilgrim's Progress, and this he read at first without a suspicion of its allegorical import. What he did not understand was as little remembered as the sounds of the wind, or the motions of the passing clouds; but the imagery and the incidents took possession of his memory and his heart. After a while Textor became an interpreter of the immortal Tinker, and the boy acquired as much of the meaning by glimpses as was desirable, enough to render some of the personages more awful by spiritualizing them, while the tale itself remained as a reality. Oh! what blockheads are those wise persons who think it necessary that a child should comprehend every thing it reads!