The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 38, December, 1860: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 38, December, 1860: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
Every one of those hundred orators is to me a more fearful thought than
that of a hundred men gathering samphire. And when we take into account
how large a portion of them (if the present mania hold) are likely to be
commemorated in stone or some even more durable material, the conception
is positively stunning. Let us settle all scores by subscribing to a
colossal statue of the late Town-Crier in bell-metal, with the
inscription, "VOX ET PRAETEREA NIHIL," as a comprehensive tribute to
oratorical powers in general. _He_, at least, never betrayed his
clients. As it is, there is no end to it. We are to set up Horatius Vir
in effigy for inventing the Normal Schoolmaster, and by-and-by we shall
be called on to do the same ill-turn for Elihu Mulciber for getting
uselessly learned (as if any man had ideas enough for twenty languages!)
without any schoolmaster at all. We are the victims of a droll
antithesis. Daniel would not give in to Nebuchadnezzar's taste in
statuary, and we are called on to fall down and worship an image of
Daniel which the Assyrian monarch would have gone to grass again sooner
than have it in his back-parlor. I do not think lions are agreeable,
especially the shaved-poodle variety one is so apt to encounter;--I met
one once at an evening party. But I would be thrown into a den of them
rather than sleep in the same room with that statue. Posterity will
think we cut pretty figures indeed in the monumental line! Perhaps there
is a gleam of hope and a symptom of convalescence in the fact that the
Prince of Wales, during his late visit, got off without a single speech.
The cheerful hospitalities of Mount Auburn were offered to him, as to
all distinguished strangers, but nothing more melancholy. In his case I
doubt the expediency of the omission. Had we set a score or two of
orators on him and his suite, it would have given them a more
intimidating notion of the offensive powers of the country than West
Point and all the Navy-Yards put together.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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