Opinion governs all mankind,
Like the blind leading of the blind:—
And like the world, men's jobbemoles
Turn round upon their ears the poles,
And what they're confidently told
By no sense else can be controll'd.
In the following pages the New Forest is always mentioned as if it were still unenclosed. This is the only state in which the Author has been acquainted with it. Since its enclosure, he has never seen it, and purposes never to do so.
The mottoes are sometimes specially apposite to the chapters to which they are prefixed; but more frequently to the general scope, or, to borrow a musical term, the motivo of the operetta.
CHAPTER I
MISNOMERS
Ego sic semper et ubique vixi, ut ultimam quamque lucem,
taraquam non redituram, consumerem.—Petronius Arbiter.
Always and everywhere I have so lived, that I might consume
the passing light as if it were not to return.
'Palestine soup!' said the Reverend Doctor Opimian, dining with his friend Squire Gryll; 'a curiously complicated misnomer. We have an excellent old vegetable, the artichoke, of which we eat the head; we have another of subsequent introduction, of which we eat the root, and which we also call artichoke, because it resembles the first in flavour, although, me judice, a very inferior affair. This last is a species of the helianthus, or sunflower genus of the Syngenesia frustranea class of plants. It is therefore a girasol, or turn-to-the-sun. From this girasol we have made Jerusalem, and from the Jerusalem artichoke we make Palestine soup.'
Mr. Gryll. A very good thing, doctor.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. A very good thing; but a palpable misnomer.