Domestic fiction; Short stories; Suburban life -- Fiction
“Why, that's what we call our Boston look, Cousin Lucy. You needn't have
written anything to have it,--it's as general as tubercular consumption,
and is the effect of our universal culture and habits of reading. I
heard a New-Yorker say once that if you went into a corner grocery in
Boston to buy a codfish, the man would ask you how you liked 'Lucille,'
whilst he was tying it up. No, no; you mustn't be taken in by that
literary look; I'm afraid the real literary men don't always have it.
But I _do_ see a literary man aboard yonder,” he added, craning his neck
to one side, and then furtively pointing,--“the most literary man I ever
knew, one of the most literary men that ever lived. His whole existence
is really bound up in books; he never talks of anything else, and never
thinks of anything else, I believe. Look at him,--what kind and
pleasant eyes he's got! There, he sees me!” cries Cousin Frank, with a
pleasurable excitement. “How d'ye do?” he calls out.
“O Cousin Frank, introduce us,” sighs Lucy.
“Not I! He wouldn't thank me. He doesn't care for pretty girls outside
of books; he'd be afraid of 'em; he's the bashfullest man alive, and
all his heroines are fifty years old, at the least. But before I go any
further, tell me solemnly, Lucy, you're not interviewing me? You're not
going to write it to a New York newspaper? No? Well, I think it's best
to ask, always. Our friend there--he's everybody's friend, if you mean
nobody's enemy, by that, not even his own--is really what I say,--the
most literary man I ever knew. He loves all epochs and phases of
literature, but his passion is the Charles Lamb period and all Lamb's
friends. He loves them as if they were living men; and Lamb would have
loved him if he could have known him. He speaks rapidly, and rather
indistinctly, and when you meet him and say Good day, and you suppose
he answers with something about the weather, ten to one he's asking
you what you think of Hazlitt's essays on Shakespeare, or Leigh Hunt's
Italian Poets, or Lamb's roast pig, or Barry Cornwall's songs. He
couldn't get by a bookstall without stopping--for half an hour, at any
rate. He knows just when all the new books in town are to be published,
and when each bookseller is to get his invoice of old English books.
He has no particular address, but if you leave your card for him at any
bookstore in Boston, he's sure to get it within two days; and in the
summer-time you're apt to meet him on these excursions. Of course, he
writes about books, and very tastefully and modestly; there's hardly any
of the brand-new immortal English poets, who die off so rapidly, but has
had a good word from him; but his heart is with the older fellows, from
Chaucer down; and, after the Charles Lamb epoch, I don't know whether
he loves better the Elizabethan age or that of Queen Anne. Think of him
making me stop the other day at a bookstall, and read through an essay
out of the “Spectator!” I did it all for love of him, though money
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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