INTRODUCTION TO THE BIOGRAPHY OF MY AUNT JEMIMA,
THE POLITICAL ECONOMIST.
BY FRIDOLIN.
PRELIMINARY DISQUISITION ON HUMAN GREATNESS,
TOUCHING UPON THE TRUE PHILOSOPHY OF THE MATTER.
"Some men are born great,
some acquire greatness,
and some have greatness thrust upon them."
Thus read my aunt Jemima, and thus subsequently read I, in the days of our respective and respectable minorities; but with this difference—uncertain whether Greatness had not already clandestinely made its avatar into me at my birth, or whether it was destined hereafter to yield coyly to my wooing, or would force me in future years to cry in vain humility, "Nolo magnificari." I always felt confident of eminence; whereas my aunt Jemima often feelingly reverted to the misery of her young maidenly thoughts, when brooding over the certainty that she could never, under any circumstances, become a "great man."
"Great women" were unknown in her early days. There were no such things; save and except such as might be seen at St. Bartholomew's fair at inexpensive cost,—giantesses, who lowered themselves to gain a living by their height. But my aunt Jemima valued not such feminine greatness as theirs. Her aspiring spirit looked not "to measures, but to men." Our notions change!
It is very melancholy, and rather inconvenient, to drag through the last and heaviest stage of life a martyr to a marvel.
Horace, who forbids all wise men to wonder, himself exhibited a thriftless want of economy in the expenditure of his own wonder when he marvelled, in excellent metre, that any man should eat garlic who had not murdered his father; and also, that any mortal should have dared to venture on the sea before the discovery of Kyan's anti-dry-rot patent.
Nor can I much sympathise in the great marvel of that renowned French statesman, of esculent memory, who professed himself unable to discover any principle in nature, or in philosophy, that could explain how a certain Duke of Thuringia, passing through Strasburg on a diplomatic mission, should not have stopped to dine, en hâte, de foie gras. As for the "three, yea four," curious problems of olden time, which consumed the wise king with their inexplicability, they are as clear to modern apprehensions as plate-glass: nay, as my aunt Jemima used to observe, in the days when glory and greatness had come upon her,—"Thanks be praised!" (My aunt was a religious woman, and guarded herself from profane expressions.)—"Thanks be praised! owing to the enlightenment of the age in which we live, even in those seven wonders of the world there is nothing so very wonderful now." There can be no objection on my part to allow that eclipses were pretty marvellous transactions as long as they occurred in consequence of a bilious dragon needing a pill, and bolting the sun to correct digestion; but ever since dragons have adopted a different treatment, and abandoned the solar bolus, this phenomenon has subsided into one of common-place pretension. The age of wonders, like the New Marriage-act, has passed.