The poet, listening with eager delight, seizes the sword of the landlord's ancestor which was drawn at Concord fight, and tells him that his grandfather was a grander shape than any old Sir William,
"Clinking about in foreign lands,
With iron gauntlets on his hands,
And on his head an iron pot."
All laughed but the landlord,—
"For those who had been longest dead
Were always greatest in his eyes."
Did honest and dull "Conservatism" have ever a happier description? But lest the immortal foes of Conservatism and Progress should come to loggerheads in the conversation, the student opens his lips and breathes Italy upon the New-England autumn night. He tells the tale of "The Falcon of Sir Federigo," from the "Decameron." It is an exquisite poem. So charming is the manner, that the "Decameron," so rendered into English, would acquire a new renown, and the public of to-day would understand the fame of Boccaccio.
But the theologian hears with other ears, and declares that the old Italian tales
"Are either trifling, dull, or lewd."
The student will not argue. He says only,—
"Nor were it grateful to forget
That from these reservoirs and tanks
Even imperial Shakespeare drew
His Moor of Venice and the Jew,
And Romeo and Juliet,
And many a famous comedy."
After a longer pause, the Spanish Jew from Alieant begins "a story in the Talmud old," "The Legend of Rabbi Ben Levi." This is followed after the interlude by the Sicilian's tale, "King Robert of Sicily," a noble legend of the Church, whose moral is humility. It is told in a broad, stately measure, and with consummate simplicity and skill. The attention is not distracted for a moment from the story, which monks might tell in the still cloisters of a Sicilian convent, and every American child hear with interest and delight.