'He is coming! He is coming!
Like a bridegroom from his room,
Came the hero from his prison,
To the scaffold and the doom.
There was glory on his forehead,
There was lustre in his eye,
And he never went to battle
More proudly than to die!'
"I quote only from memory, but the original has 'walked to battle'—is not 'went' a better word? The book is full of gems: let me give you one more, which would make a fine subject for an artist. It is from 'Edinburgh after Flodden;' when Randolph Murray returns from the battle, to announce to the old burghers their sad defeat:
'They knew so sad a messenger,
Some ghastly news must bring;
And all of them were fathers,
And their sons were with the King.'"
"How do you spell Feladelfy?" asked a small city grocer of his partner one day, as he was sprinkling sand upon a letter which he was about to dispatch to the "City of Brotherly Love."
"Why, Fel-a, Fela, del, Feladel, fy—Feladelfy."
"Then I've got it right," said the partner (in ignorance as well as in business), "I thought I might have made a mistake!"
Dickens, in a passage of his Travels in Italy, describes an embarrassing position, and a pursuit of knowledge under difficulties that would have discouraged most learners: "There was a traveling party on board our steamer, of whom one member was very ill in the cabin next to mine, and being ill was cross, and therefore declined to give up the dictionary, which he kept under his pillow; thereby obliging his companions to come down to him constantly, to ask what was the Italian for a lump of sugar, a glass of brandy-and-water, 'what's o'clock?' and so forth; which he always insisted on looking out himself, with his own sea-sick eyes, declining to trust the book to any man alive. Ignorance was scarcely 'bliss' in this case, however much folly there might have been in being 'wise.'"