You possibly by this time may have explored
all Italy, and toppled, unawares, into Etna, while you went too near
those rotten-jawed, gap-toothed, old worn-out chaps of hell,--while I am
meditating a quiescent letter to the honest postmaster at Toulouse. But
in case you should not have been _felo de se_, this is to tell you that
your letter was quite to my palate; in particular your just remarks upon
Industry, cursed Industry (though indeed you left me to explore the
reason), were highly relishing.
I've often wished I lived in the Golden Age, before doubt, and
propositions, and corollaries, got into the world. _Now_, as Joseph
Cottle, a Bard of Nature, sings, going up Malvern Hills,--
"How steep, how painful the ascent!
It needs the evidence of _close deduction_
To know that ever I shall gain the top."
You must know that Joe is lame, so that he had some reason for so
singing. These two lines, I assure you, are taken _totidem literis_ from
a very _popular_ poem. Joe is also an epic poet as well as a
descriptive, and has written a tragedy, though both his drama and
epopoiea are strictly _descriptive_, and chiefly of the _beauties of
nature_, for Toe thinks _man_, with all his passions and frailties, not:
a proper subject of the _drama_. Joe's tragedy hath the following
surpassing speech in it. Some king is told that his enemy has engaged
twelve archers to come over in a boat from an enemy's country and
way-lay him; he thereupon pathetically exclaims,--
"_Twelve_, dost thou say? Curse on those dozen villains!"
Cottle read two or three acts out to as, very gravely on both sides,
till he came to this heroic touch,--and then he asked what we laughed
at? I had no more muscles that day.
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