The Professor at the Breakfast-TableHolmes, Oliver Wendell
General
The Professor at the Breakfast-Table
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
American fiction -- 19th century; Conversation -- Fiction; Poetry
he has learned the use of his various faculties, which is his first
duty,--that a boy of courage and animal vigor is in a proper state to
read these tearful records of premature decay. I have no doubt that
disgust is implanted in the minds of many healthy children by early
surfeits of pathological piety. I do verily believe that He who took
children in His arms and blessed them loved the healthiest and
most playful of them just as well as those who were richest in the
tuberculous virtues. I know what I am talking about, and there are more
parents in this country who will be willing to listen to what I say than
there are fools to pick a quarrel with me. In the sensibility and the
sanctity which often accompany premature decay I see one of the most
beautiful instances of the principle of compensation which marks the
Divine benevolence. But to get the spiritual hygiene of robust natures
out of the exceptional regimen of invalids is just simply what we
Professors call “bad practice”; and I know by experience that there are
worthy people who not only try it on their own children, but actually
force it on those of their neighbors.
--Having been photographed, and stereographed, and chromatographed, or
done in colors, it only remained to be phrenologized. A polite note
from Messrs. Bumpus and Crane, requesting our attendance at their
Physiological Emporium, was too tempting to be resisted. We repaired to
that scientific Golgotha.
Messrs. Bumpus and Crane are arranged on the plan of the man and the
woman in the toy called a “weather-house,” both on the same wooden arm
suspended on a pivot,--so that when one comes to the door, the other
retires backwards, and vice versa. The more particular speciality of one
is to lubricate your entrance and exit,--that of the other to polish
you off phrenologically in the recesses of the establishment. Suppose
yourself in a room full of casts and pictures, before a counterful of
books with taking titles. I wonder if the picture of the brain is
there, “approved” by a noted Phrenologist, which was copied from my, the
Professor's, folio plate, in the work of Gall and Spurzheim. An extra
convolution, No. 9, Destructiveness, according to the list beneath,
which was not to be seen in the plate, itself a copy of Nature, was very
liberally supplied by the artist, to meet the wants of the catalogue
of “organs.” Professor Bumpus is seated in front of a row of women,
--horn-combers and gold-beaders, or somewhere about that range of
life,--looking so credulous, that, if any Second-Advent Miller or Joe
Smith should come along, he could string the whole lot of them on his
cheapest lie, as a boy strings a dozen “shiners” on a stripped twig of
willow.
The Professor (meaning ourselves) is in a hurry, as usual; let
the horn-combers wait,--he shall be bumped without inspecting the
antechamber.
Tape round the head,--22 inches. (Come on, old 23 inches, if you think
you are the better man!)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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