“No; it has not sense enough for that,” he replied, with an incredulous leer.
By dint of repeated blows he had split his cudgel, and the sound caused by the divided portion had alarmed Shelley’s humanity. I pointed to it and said, “You have split your stick; it is not good for much now.”
He turned it, and held the divided end in his hand.
“The other end is whole, I see, but I suppose you could split that too on the ass’s back, if you chose; it is not so thick.”
“It is not so thick, but it is full of knots. It would take a great deal of trouble to split it, and the beast is not worth that; it would do no good!”
“It would do no good, certainly; and if anybody saw you, he might say that you were a savage young ruffian and that you ought to be served in the same manner yourself.”
The fellow looked at me in some surprise, and sank into sullen silence.
He presently threw his cudgel into the wood as far as he was able, and began to amuse himself by pelting the birds with pebbles, leaving my long-eared client to proceed at its own pace, having made up his mind, perhaps, to be beaten himself, when he reached home, by a tyrant still more unreasonable than himself, on account of the inevitable default of his ass.
Shelley was satisfied with the result of our conversation, and I repeated to him the history of the injudicious and unfortunate interference of Don Quixote between the peasant, John Haldudo, and his servant, Andrew. Although he reluctantly admitted that the acrimony of humanity might often aggravate the sufferings of the oppressed by provoking the oppressor, I always observed that the impulse of generous indignation, on witnessing the infliction of pain, was too vivid to allow him to pause and consider the probable consequences of the abrupt interposition of the knight-errantry, which would at once redress all grievances. Such exquisite sensibility and a sympathy with suffering so acute and so uncontrolled may possibly be inconsistent with the calmness and forethought of the philosopher, but they accord well with the high temperature of a poet’s blood.
As his port had the meekness of a maiden, so the heart of the young virgin who had never crossed her father’s threshold to encounter the rude world, could not be more susceptible of all the sweet domestic charities than his: in this respect Shelley’s disposition would happily illustrate the innocence and virginity of the Muses.