The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [1162]
CL.
It is certainly very remarkable that although destiny is the ruling idea of the Greek drama, the word [[Greek text:]] xxxxx [[Greek text]] (Fortune) does not appear once in the whole Iliad.
CLI.
Had John Bernouilli lived to have experience of Fuller’s occiput and sinciput, he would have abandoned, in dismay, his theory of the non-existence of hard bodies.
CLII.
They have ascertained, in China, that the abdomen is the seat of the soul; and the acute Greeks considered it a waste of words to employ more than a single term, [[Greek text:]] xxxxx [[:Greek text]] [[Apexes]], for the expression both of the mind and of the diaphragm.
CLIII.
Mr. Grattan, who, in general, writes well, has a bad habit of loitering — of toying with his subject, as a cat with a mouse, instead of grasping it firmly at once, and devouring it without ado. He takes up too much time in the ante-room. He has never done with his introductions. Sometimes one introduction is merely the vestibule to another; so that by the time he arrives at his main theme, there is none of it left. He is afflicted with a perversity common enough even among otherwise good talkers — an irrepressible desire of tantalizing by circumlocution.
If the greasy print here exhibited is, indeed, like Mr. Grattan, then is Mr. Grattan like nobody else — for who else ever thrust forth, from beneath a wig of wire, the countenance of an over-done apple-dumpling?
CLIV.
“What does a man learn by travelling?” demanded Doctor Johnson, one day, in a great rage — “What did Lord Charlemont learn in his travels, except that there was a snake in one of the pyramids of Egypt?” — but had Doctor Johnson lived in the days of the Silk Buckinghams, he would have seen that, so far from thinking anything of finding a snake in a pyramid, your traveller would take his oath, at a moment’s notice, of having found a pyramid in a snake.
CLV.
“The author of “Miserrimus” might have been W. G. Simms (whose “Martin Faber” is just such a work) — but is † G. M. W. Reynolds, an Englishman, who wrote, also, “Albert de Rosann,” and “Pickwick Abroad” — both excellent things in their way.
CLVI.
L—— is busy in attempting to prove that his play was not fairly d——d — that it is only “skotched, not killed;” but if the poor play could speak from the tomb, I fancy it would sing with the opera heroine:
The flattering error cease to prove!
Oh, let me be deceased!
CLVII.
We may safely grant that the effects of the oratory of Demosthenes were vaster than those wrought by the eloquence of any modern, and yet not controvert the idea that the modern eloquence, itself, is superior to that of the Greek. The Greeks were an excitable, unread race, for they had no printed books. Vivâ voce exhortations carried with them, to their quick apprehensions, all the gigantic force of the new. They had much of that vivid interest which the first fable has upon the dawning intellect of the child — an interest which is worn away by the frequent perusal of similar things — by the frequent inception of similar fancies. The suggestions, the arguments, the incitements of the ancient rhetorician were, when compared with those of the modern, absolutely novel; possessing thus an immense adventitious force — a force which has been, oddly enough, left out of sight in all estimates of the eloquence of the two eras.
The finest philippic of the Greek would have been hooted at in the British House of Peers, while an impromptu of Sheridan, or of Brougham, would have carried by storm all the hearts and all the intellects of Athens.
CLVIII.
Much has been said, of late, about the necessity of maintaining a proper nationality in American Letters; but what this nationality is, or what is to be gained by it, has never been distinctly understood. That an American should confine himself to American themes, or even prefer them, is rather a political than a literary idea — and at best is a questionable point. We would do well to bear in mind that “distance lends enchantment to the view.” Ceteris paribus, a foreign