Mary Wortley Montague was epigrammatic when she divided mankind into “three classes—men, women, and the Hervey family”; an English writer of the present century, when he summed up Harriet Martineau’s creed, in a travesty on the Mohammedan confession of faith, “There is no God, and Harriet is his prophet;” an English critic, who described Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens as a “Biography of John Forster, with Reminiscences of Dickens”; an American, who said of one of his own noted countrymen (and it is equally true of many others), “He is a self-made man, and he worships his Creator;” finally, President Grant, when he exclaimed: “Sumner does not believe the Bible! I am not surprised; he didn’t write it!”
Charles Francis Adams, in his eloquent eulogy on W. H. Seward, lapses into a mixed metaphor which is, perhaps, all things considered, one of the most remarkable on record. “One single hour,” he says, “of the will displayed by General Jackson, at the time when Mr. Calhoun—the most powerful leader secession ever had—was abetting active measures, would have stifled the fire in its cradle.”
This is scarcely excelled even by Sir Roche Boyle’s celebrated trope: “I smell a rat. I see him floating in the air. But, mark me, I shall nip him in the bud!”
M. B. was planning plank walks from the front doors of his Ellicottville cottage to the gate, wishing to combine greatest convenience with least possible encroachment upon the verdure of the modest lawn. “Friends in council,” assisting at his deliberations, took diverse views of the case. One would have the walks meet obliquely in the form of a Y. Another insisted that whatever angles there were, should be right angles, etc. Finally, M. B. remarked: “Well! we don’t seem to agree. No two of us agree. I think I’ll plank the yard all over, and, where I want the grass to grow BORE HOLES!”
Readers who admire the elliptical and suggestive style, and who, therefore, adore Mrs. R. H. D. and Mrs. A. D. T. W., ought to be pleased with the instructions given by a Philadelphian million-heiress to her agent, in this wise, (audivi):
“Where the men are at work, they will throw stones and earth and timbers against that tree, and there is no use in it. By a little care they could avoid it, but they won’t be careful. So I’d like you, as soon as possible, to put a protection around it—because it isn’t necessary.”