Patrins / To Which Is Added an Inquirendo Into the Wit & Other Good Parts of His Late Majesty King Charles the Second

M.R.D., from her affectionate old friend who wrote it. 1897
WRITTEN BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY
BOSTON Printed for Copeland and Day 69 Cornhill 1897
COPYRIGHT 1897 BY COPELAND AND DAY
A patrin , according to Romano Lavo-Lil , is a Gypsy trail: handfuls of leaves or grass cast by the Gypsies on the road, to denote, to those behind, the way which they have taken. Well, these wild dry whims are patrins dropped now in the open for our tribe; but particularly for you. They will greet you as you lazily come up, and mean: Fare on, and good luck love you to the end! On each have I put the date of its writing, as one might make memoranda of little leisurely adventures in prolonged fair weather; and you will read, in between and all along, a record of pleasant lonely paths never very far from your own, biggest of Romanys! in the thought-country of our common youth.
Ingraham Hill, South Thomaston, Maine, October 19, 1896.

A PHILOSOPHER now living, and too deserving for any fate but choice private oblivion, was in Paris, for the first time, a dozen years ago; and having seen and heard there, in the shops, parks, and omnibus stations, much more baby than he found pleasing, he remarked, upon his return, that it was a great pity the French, who are so in love with system, had never seen their way to shutting up everything under ten years of age! Now, that was the remark of an artist in human affairs, and may provoke a number of analogies. What is in the making is not a public spectacle. It ought to be considered very outrageous, on the death of a painter or a poet, to exhibit those rough first drafts, which he, living, had the acumen to conceal. And if, to an impartial eye, in a foreign city, native innocents seem too aggressively to the fore, why should not the seclusion desired for them be visited a thousandfold upon the heads, let us say, of students, who are also in a crude transitional state, and undergoing a growth much more distressing to a sensitive observer than the physical? Youth is the most inspiring thing on earth, but not the best to let loose, especially while it carries swaggeringly that most dangerous of all blunderbusses, knowledge at half-cock. There is, indeed, no more melancholy condition than that of healthy boys scowling over books, in an eternal protest against their father Adam's fall from a state of relative omniscience. Sir Philip Sidney thought it was a piece of the Tower of Babylon's curse that a man should be put to school to learn his mother-tongue! The throes of education are as degrading and demoralizing as a hanging, and, when the millennium sets in, will be as carefully screened from the laity. Around the master and the pupil will be reared a portly and decorous Chinese wall, which shall pen within their proper precincts the din of hic, hæc, hoc , and the steam of suppers sacrificed to Pallas.