Wise Saws and Modern Instances, Volume 2 (of 2)

London:
Printed by A. Spottiswoode, New-Street-Square.
THE CHARTIST, AUTHOR OF THE PURGATORY OF SUICIDES. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. II. LONDON: PRINTED FOR JEREMIAH HOW, 209. PICCADILLY. 1845.

Those words odd, and singular, and eccentric, what odd, singular, eccentric sort of words they are, reader! How often they mean nothing,—being thrown out, as descriptions of character, by drivelling Ignorance, who scrapes them up as the dregs,—the mere siftings left at the bottom of his vocabulary, when he has expended his scant collection of more definite images-in-syllables. And how much more often are they affixed to the memories of the living or dead, who have been real brothers among men, and have thus earned these epithets from jaundiced envy, or guilty selfishness, or heartless pride and tyranny. How little it commends to us, either our common nature, or such corrupt fashioning as ages of wrong have given it, that, if we would become acquainted with a truly good man,—a being to love and to knit the heart unto,—we must seek for him among the class of character which the world—woe worth it!—calls odd, or singular, or eccentric!
Yet so it is, the best of mankind, those, most veritably, of whom the world was not worthy, have been, in their day, either the butt for the sneers of silliness, or the object of envy's relentless hate, or they have toiled and toiled, perhaps unto martyrdom, beneath the withering, blasting frown of pride and oppression. Ay, and let us be honest with ourselves, and confess, that though years or hard experience may have bettered our own natures,—for we are all too much like that kind of fruit which takes long days and many weathers to ripen it, so as to bring forth its most wholesome flavour,—let us be honest, I say, with ourselves, and confess, that we were as foolishly willing as others, in our youth, to laugh at what the varlet world calls oddness, and singularity, and eccentricity. Some of us, however, now see matters in a somewhat different light. We have discovered that there is some marrow of meaning in many of those old saws we once thought so tiresome and dry,—such as, All is not gold that glitters, and, Judge not a nut by the shell, and the like; and we say, within ourselves, when we are in a moralising mood, (as you and I are now, reader,) that, if we were young again, we would not join the world in laughing as we used to laugh with it, at certain queer folk who dwell in our memories,—for we begin to have a shrewd suspicion that they were among the true diamonds in the rough of human character.