Harper's New Monthly Magazine Vol. IV, No. 19, Dec 1851Various
History
Harper's New Monthly Magazine Vol. IV, No. 19, Dec 1851
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Civilization -- Periodicals; Culture -- Periodicals
I have only further to add, that the parcel intrusted to me was safely
delivered, and that I have reason to believe Mrs. Hendrick remained to
her last hour ignorant of the sad fate of her son. It was her
impression, induced by his last letter, that he was about to enter the
South-American service under Cochrane, and she ultimately resigned
herself to a belief that he had there met a brave man's death. My
promise was scrupulously kept, nor is it by this publication in the
slightest degree broken; for both the names of Hendrick and Pickard are
fictitious, and so is the place assigned as that of the lieutenant's
birth. That rascal Sparkes, I am glad to be able to say--chasing whom
made me an actor in the melancholy affair--was sent over the herring
pond for life.
THE TUB SCHOOL.
Speaking without passion, we are bound to state, in broad terms, that
the founder of the Diogenic philosophy was emphatically a humbug. Some
people might call him by a harsher name; we content ourselves with the
popular vernacular. Formidable as he was--this unwashed
dog-baptized--with a kind of savage grandeur, too, about his
independence and his fearlessness--still was he a humbug; setting forth
fancies for facts, and judging all men by the measure of one. Manifestly
afflicted with a liver complaint, his physical disorders wore the mask
of mental power, and a state of body that required a course of calomel
or a dose of purifying powders, passed current in the world for
intellectual superiority; not a rare case in times when madness was
accounted potent inspiration, and when the exhibition of mesmeric
phenomena formed the title of the Pythoness to her mystic tripod.
Diogenes is not the only man whose disturbed digestion has led
multitudes, like an _ignis fatuus_, into the bogs and marshes of
falsehood. Abundance of sects are about, which their respective
followers class under one generic head of inspiration, but which have
sprung from the same hepatic inaction, or epigrastic inflammation, as
that which made the cynic believe in the divinity of dirt, and see in a
tub the fittest temple to virtue. All that narrows the sympathies--all
that makes a man think better of himself than of his "neighbors"--all
that compresses the illimitable mercy of God into a small talisman which
you and your followers alone possess--all that creates condemnation--is
of the Diogenic Tub School; corrupt in the core, and rotten in the
root--fruit, leaves, and flowers, the heritage of death.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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