Mr. Gryll. I wonder the Pantopragmatics have not a department of cookery; a female department, to teach young wives how to keep their husbands at home, by giving them as good dinners as they can get abroad, especially at club. Those anti-domestic institutions receive their chief encouragment from the total ignorance of cookery on the part of young wives: for in this, as in all other arts of life, it is not sufficient to order what shall be done: it is necessary to know how it ought to be done. This is a matter of more importance to social well-being than nine-tenths of the subjects the Pantopragmatics meddle with.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. And therefore I rejoice that they do not meddle with it. A dinner, prepared from a New Art of Cookery, concocted under their auspices, would be more comical and more uneatable than the Roman dinner in Peregrine Pickle. Let young ladies learn cookery by all means: but let them learn under any other tuition than that of the Pantopragmatic Society.
Mr. Gryll. As for the tribulation coming on the earth, I am afraid there is some ground to expect it, without looking for its foreshadowing exclusively to the Apocalypse. Niebuhr, who did not draw his opinions from prophecy, rejoiced that his career was coming to a close, for he thought we were on the eve of a darker middle age.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. He had not before his eyes the astounding march of intellect, drumming and trumpeting science from city to city. But I am afraid that sort of obstreperous science only gives people the novel 'use of their eyes to see the way of blindness.'{1}
Truths which, from action's paths retired,
My silent search in vain required,{2}
1 Gaoler. For look you, sir: you know not which way you
shall go. Posthumus. Yes, indeed do I, fellow.
Gaoler. Your death has eyes in's head, then: I have not seen
him so pictured... .
Posthumus. I tell thee, fellow, there are none want eyes to
direct them the way I am going, but such as wink, and will
not use them.
Gaoler. What an infinite mock is this, that a man should
have the best use of eyes to see the way of blindness!
—Cymbeline: Act v. Scene 4.
2 Collins: Ode on the Manners.
I am not likely to find in the successive gabblings of a dozen lecturers of Babel.
Mr. Gryll. If you could so find them, they would be of little avail against the new irruption of Goths and Vandals, which must have been in the apprehension of Niebuhr. There are Vandals on northern thrones, anxious for nothing so much as to extinguish truth and liberty wherever they show themselves—Vandals in the bosom of society everywhere even amongst ourselves, in multitudes, with precisely the same aim, only more disguised by knaves, and less understood by dupes.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. And, you may add, Vandals dominating over society throughout half America, who deal with free speech and even the suspicion of free thought just as the Inquisition dealt with them, only substituting Lynch law and the gallows for a different mockery of justice, ending in fire and faggot.
Mr. Gryll. I confine my view to Europe. I dread northern monarchy, and southern anarchy; and rabble brutality amongst ourselves, smothered and repressed for the present, but always ready to break out into inextinguishable flame, like hidden fire under treacherous ashes.{1}
1 ——incedis per ignes
suppositos cineri doloso.
—Hor. Carm, 11. i.