Pardon, reader, this most unseemly wandering from the illustrious subject of our present biography, the erudite Zerubbabel Dickinson. Now it was in the contemplation of this unique monument of baronial greatness,—it was in the collection and collocation of manuscripts relative to the identity of the several shoes,—it was in the array of the pedigrees of those in whose names they were put up,—it was in brushing away the rust (not from the shoes, for the discerning Dickinson would have adjudged him a pagan, of a verity, and no Christian, who dared to disturb a grain of it!)—the rust of uncertainty that hung about the names and memories of those to whom the more ancient furniture of horses' feet belonged,—it was in this mine profound of all that was important, and noble, and useful, and great, and grand, about the countless catalogue of horse-shoes that were nailed to the walls of the great hall in the castle of Oakham, that the learned and laborious Zerubbabel dug and delved,—it was on these themes, I say (and I scarcely know how to express myself worthily on so magnitudinous a matter), that the indefatigable and magnanimous schoolmaster-antiquary expended the choicest energies of his untiring intellect. This, courteous reader, was the prime labour—the _opus majus_ of Master Zerubbabel Dickinson. The work was to have been entituled "_Tallagium illustrissimum; seu Catalogus solearum ferrearum_"—with I know not how many more _ums_ and _arums_, besides. _Was_ to have been? Yes; for let it not be supposed that so stupendous a work was ever finished. It was the opinion of the laborious Zerubbabel himself that it never could be finished, so transcendent was the _beau-idéal_ of such a work that he had conceived. But enough of a subject which, in this degenerate age, will never be placed at its right value. This slender fragment of a biographic memorial was not commenced so much with the view of showing how truly great a man was the erudite Master Zerubbabel,—since we would despair as deeply of doing justice to so immense a subject as Zerubbabel himself despaired of completing the leviathan folios of the mighty "Tallagium illustrissimum:" we have a more philosophic purpose in view—namely, the proof, by history, of the striking moral truism, that the greatest men are very little men when you take them out of their accustomed sphere: in other words, that the wisest men are fools when you talk to them about things with which, in spite of their wisdom, they are not conversant. But why prove a truism? Ah, my friend, these same truisms, as the world calls them, for the greater part, are just the very things that want proving——.