The good Schoppe had one fault which no Albano forgives, namely, his
intolerance toward the "female saintly images of isinglass," as he
expressed it,--toward the tender errors of the heart, the sacred
excesses by which man weaves into this short life a still shorter
pleasure. On one occasion Charles walked up and down with arms akimbo
and drooping head, as on a stage, and said, accidentally, so that the
Titular-librarian overheard him, "O I was very little understood by the
world in my youth." He said nothing further; but let anybody shake, in
jest, a baker's dozen[165] of hornets, a basket of crabs, a mug of
wood-pismires, all at once over the Librarian's skin, and take a flying
observation of the effect of the stinging, nipping, biting; then can
one, in a measure at least, conceive what a quivering, swelling, and
irritation there was in him, so soon as he heard the above-mentioned
phraseology. "Mr. Captain!" he began, drawing in a long breath, "I can
stand through a good deal on this rusty, stupid earth,--famine,
pestilence, courts, the stone, and fools from pole to pole; but your
phraseology surpasses the strength of my shoulders. Sir Captain, you
may, most certainly, use this rhetoric with perfect justice, because
you, as you say, are not understood. But, O heavens! O devils! I hear,
in fact, thirty thousand young men and maidens, from one
circulating-library to another, all with inflated breast, saying and
groaning round and round, that nobody understands them, neither their
grandfather nor their god-parents, nor the conrector, when, in fact, the
wrapping-paper,[166] commonplace pack does not itself understand. But
the young man means by this merely a maiden, and the maiden a young man;
these can appreciate each other. Out of love will I undertake, as out of
potatoes, to serve up fourteen different dishes; let one just shear off,
as they do off of the bears in Göttingen, its beastly hair, and no
Blumenbach would any longer recognize it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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