talked with him who chased the flying Syrinx in Arcady and turned the
tide of fight at Marathon.
Yes: to-day the iron horse has searched the country through—east and
west, north and south—bringing with it Commercialism, whose god is
Jerry, and who studs the hills with stucco and garrotes the streams
with the girder. Bringing, too, into every nook and corner fashion and
chatter, the tailor-made gown and the eyeglass. Happily a great part is
still spared—how great these others fortunately do not know—in which
the rural Pan and his following may hide their heads for yet a little
longer, until the growing tyranny has invaded the last common, spinney,
and sheep-down, and driven the kindly god, the well-wisher to
man—whither?
Marginalia
American Hunt, in his suggestive “Talks about Art,” demands that the
child shall be encouraged—or rather permitted, for the natural child
needs little encouragement—to draw when- and whereon-soever he can;
for, says he, the child’s scribbling on the margin of his school-books
is really worth more to him than all he gets out of them, and indeed,
“to him the margin is the best part of all books, and he finds in it
the soothing influence of a clear sky in a landscape.” Doubtless Sir
Benjamin Backbite, though his was not an artist soul, had some dim
feeling of this mighty truth when he spoke of that new quarto of his,
in which “a neat rivulet of text shall meander through a meadow of
margin”: boldly granting the margin to be of superior importance to the
print. This metaphor is pleasantly expanded in Burton’s “Bookhunter”:
wherein you read of certain folios with “their majestic stream of
central print overflowing into rivulets of marginal notes, _sedgy with
citations._” But the good Doctor leaves the main stream for a backwater
of error in inferring that the chief use of margins is to be a
parading-ground for notes and citations. As if they had not absolute
value in themselves, nor served a finer end! In truth, Hunt’s child was
vastly the wiser man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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