During this peroration poor Blodgett wrung her hands and shook her head, and kept repeating some such mystical phrase as:
"He is off at the top again! He is off at the top again!"
However, this strange old parson, all unconscious of the distress of mind he was occasioning his handmaid or housekeeper, or whatever she might call herself, flowed on and on in his extraordinary monologue, and led us indoors into a spacious room full of a remarkable disorder of books, which doubtless composed his library. Books open and shut, piled up and overlaid, were on the table, and under the table, on the chairs, and on the floor. Any square inch of space wherein a book might insinuate itself, there was a book to be found. Dusty, black-letter, grimy Aldine, foxed Elzevir, any folio, quarto, or octavo, providing it was old enough and dirty enough, was assembled there. Those that lay open seemed to be annotated and scored under, and embellished with marginal notes in a delicate minute handwriting, on every page. And among all these tomes there was never a one that was in a new dress, or done in a reasonable easy print, nor one written by a reasonably modern author. To observe the Paradise Lost, with the imprint of Jacob Tonson upon it, was to be startled with that sense of gratified surprise that one would experience at unexpectedly meeting with a personal friend in a foreign country.
The parson was an odd match to his books. His conversation was as musty, learned and interminable as themselves. He talked of all topics but those that could have been of the least interest to anybody. He never thought to ask who we were, or what business had brought us thither, but having lured us into his library, he very vigorously began to engage us with matters at least a thousand years old. We were very polite at first, and nodded our heads in deep interest at the mention of the first Punic war, and kept saying, "Ah, to be sure!" and inserting "yes" and "oh yes" whenever we found half a chance to get in so much in the middle of some animadversions he thought fit to make on the behaviour of the Carthaginians generally. But when proceeding to move with an air of great mystery and consequence to topics of the most inconsequent character, and presently to prove to us that in his opinion the battle of Cannæ, or it may have been Marathon, or the siege of Troy for aught we knew or cared, was not so important and decisive an affair as the historians of these times had represented, our observance of a polite interest showed signs of giving out.
We might shuffle, however, and shift our stations, and cough, and take our weight off our right leg and lean it on our left, but it never made one bit of difference to this terrible monologue. The old parson, with his eyes half closed and his hands spread forth, poured out the finest prose in his mellifluous voice, with every period rounded to such a perfection that had he been a historian and his speech a printed page the world could never have sufficiently admired his attainments. And every emphasis and quantity seemed so indubitably exact in the classical tongues he so freely quoted, as must have made him the envy of pedagogues and the paragon among them all. And all this time we were striving to maintain our well-bred interest as best we might, and inwardly cursed Rome and Greece and the whole race of poets, historians and soldiers that ever sprang from them.
His mind was filled with a vast deal of knowledge of a recondite sort. It could have been of no possible service to anybody, least of all to himself. Yet he moved lightly and easily from one antediluvian topic to others more antediluvian still. He was armed with a great array of theories of no moment at all, and a matchless sheaf of facts that proved and disproved and proved them over again. How weary we became! How we fidgeted and looked at one another in our despair, for he grew more minute as he proceeded, and called up, extempore, authority upon authority to show that Lais was a woman of virtue, and that Virgil did not write his own works. He split straws with Aristotle, and picked holes in his Ethics. He said that Cicero was a windbag, and that Plato was a dunce. He said that Herodotus was loose in his facts, and no more worthy of credence than Plutarch, and that Plutarch was not a whit better than Herodotus neither. He said that Homer was the biggest impostor in history. He had nothing to do with the Iliad, whilst as for the Odyssey, he had long come at the truth that it was by a female hand, most probably one of the Hesperides, though to be sure he had not quite satisfied himself as to which, just as the plays of the poet Shakespeare would one day be allowed to be the handiwork of Lord Bacon, the eminent lawyer and philosopher; and again, as the world, purblind as it was, would one day discover that Mr. Fielding's so-called novel of Joseph Andrews had sprung from the fertile brain of Mr. Colley Gibber. Indeed I was so fearful lest he should take steps to disprove my grandfather's claims to have produced his celebrated Commentary on the Analects of Confucius, that I became quite desperate, and determined to put a stop to the unceasing current of his talk, even at the risk of making a hole in my good manners. Having reached a point in his discourse wherein he showed that Cæsar did not cross the Rubicon, I slapped my hand on the table with a vigour that knocked down half-a-score of tomes and startled everything and everybody but the speaker himself; and, says I, at the top of my heartiest voice:
"I quite agree with you there, sir; I do indeed."
"I presume, sir," says the parson, "you know the authorities there are against us, and what adversaries of weight, Cæsar himself, Suetonius, and Plutarch, to name only three, that we have to face."
"I care not if there are three thousand," says I valiantly, "in this matter I am entirely of your mind."
The parson, whose simplicity was as great as his learning, grasped my hand with the utmost fervour.