CHAPTER LXXXIII.

THE AUTHOR REQUESTS THE READER NOT TO BE IMPATIENT. SHEWS FROM LORD SHAFTESBURY AT WHAT RATE A JUDICIOUS WRITER OUGHT TO PROCEED. DISCLAIMS PROLIXITY FOR HIMSELF, AND GIVES EXAMPLES OF IT IN A GERMAN PROFESSOR, A JEWISH RABBI, AND TWO COUNSELLORS, ENGLISH AND AMERICAN.

Pand. He that will have a cake out of the wheat, must tarry the grinding.

Troilus. Have I not tarried?

Pand. Ay, the grinding; but you must tarry the bolting.

Troilus. Have I not tarried?

Pand. Ay, the bolting; but you must tarry the leavening.

Troilus. Still have I tarried.

Pand. Aye, to the leavening: but here's yet in the word hereafter, the kneading, the making of the cake, the heating of the oven, and the baking; nay, you must stay the cooling too; or you may chance to burn your lips.

TROILUS AND CRESSIDA.             

I passed over fourteen years of the Doctor's boyhood and adolescence, as it may be remembered was stated in the twenty-fifth Chapter; but I must not in like manner pass over the years that intervened between his first acquaintance with Deborah Bacon, and the happy day whereon the bells of St. George's welcomed her to Doncaster as his bride. It would be as inconsistent with my design to pretermit this latter portion of his life, as it would have been incompatible with my limits to have recorded the details of the former, worthy to be recorded as they were. If any of my readers should be impatient on this occasion, and think that I ought to have proceeded to the marriage without delay, or at least to the courtship, I must admonish them in the words of a Turkish saying, that “hurry comes from the Devil, and slow advancing from Allah.”—“Needs must go when the Devil drives,” says the proverb: but the Devil shall never drive me. I will take care never to go at such a rate, “as if haste had maimed speed by overrunning it at starting.”

“The just composer of a legitimate piece,” says Lord Shaftesbury, “is like an able traveller, who exactly measures his journey, considers his ground, premeditates his stages and intervals of relaxation and intention, to the very conclusion of his undertaking, that he happily arrives where he first proposed at setting out. He is not presently upon the spur, or in his full career, but walks his steed leisurely out of the stable, settles himself in his stirrups, and when fair road and season offer, puts on perhaps to a round trot, thence into a gallop, and after a while takes up. As down, or meadow, or shady lane present themselves, he accordingly suits his pace, favours his palfrey, and is sure not to bring him puffing, and in a heat, into his last inn.”

Yes, Reader,

——matter needless, of importless burden1

may as little be expected to flow from the slit of my pen, as to “divide the lips” of wise Ulysses. On the other hand what is needful, what is weighty in its import, let who will be impatient, must not be left unsaid.

                 varie fila a varie tele
Uopo mi son, che tutte ordire intendo. 2

1 TROILUS AND CRESSIDA.

2 ARIOSTO.

It is affirmed by the angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas, that of corporeal things the quantity is in proportion to the quality, that which is best being always in the same degree the greatest. “Thus in this our universe,” he says “the water is more than the earth, the air more than the water, the fire more than the air: the first heaven larger than the sphere of fire, the second than the first, the third than the second; and so they proceed increasing to the tenth sphere, and to the empyrean, which is, inestimabilis et incomparabilis magnitudinis.”

Upon the principle which this greatest of the schoolmen has assumed, I leave the reader to infer what would be the probable and proper extent of the present opus, were I to indulge my genius and render justice to the subject.

To make it exceed in length the histories of Sir Charles Grandison and of Clarissa Harlowe, or the bulkier romances of Calprenede and the Scuderys, it would not be necessary to handle it in the manner of a lawyer who, having no more argument than would lie in a nut-shell, wire-draws it and hammers at it, and hammers at it and wire-draws it, and then wire-draws it and hammers at it again, like a lecturer who is exhibiting the infinite ductility of gold.

“What a gift,” says Fuller, “had John Halsebach, Professor at Vienna, in tediousness, who being to expound the Prophet Isaiah to his auditors, read twenty-one years on the first chapter, and yet finished it not!” Mercator, in the description of Austria in his Atlas, has made mention of this Arch-Emperor of the Spintexts.

If I had been in John Halsebach's place, my exposition of that first chapter would have been comprized in one lecture, of no hungry or sleepy duration. But if John Halsebach were in mine, he would have filled more volumes than Rees's Cyclopedia with his account of Daniel Dove.

And yet Rabbi Chananiah may contest the palm with the Vienna Professor. It is recorded of him that when he undertook to write a commentary upon part of the Prophet Ezekiel, he required the Jews to supply him with three hundred tons of oil for the use of his lamp, while he should be engaged in it.

It is well known upon one of the English circuits that a leading barrister once undertook to speak while an express went twenty miles to bring back a witness whom it was necessary to produce upon the trial. But what is this to the performance of an American counsellor, who upon a like emergency held the judge and the jury by their ears for three mortal days! He indeed was put to his wits end, for words wherewith to fill up the time; and he introduced so many truisms, and argued at the utmost length so many indisputable points, and expatiated so profusely upon so many trite ones, that Judge Marshal (the biographer of Washington and the most patient of listeners,) was so far moved at last as to say, “Mr. Such a one!—(addressing him by his name in a deliberate tone of the mildest reprehension,)—there are some things with which the Court should be supposed to be acquainted.”

I can say with Burton, malo decem potius verba, decies repetita licet, abundare, quam unum desiderari. “To say more than a man can say, I hold it not fit to be spoken: but to say what a man ought to say,—there,”—with Simon the tanner of Queenborough,—“I leave you.”