Poor Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart,
Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart
By the women of Marblehead!
SOLITUDE AND SOCIETY.
I fell in with a humorist, on my travels, who had in his chamber a
cast of the Rondanini Medusa, and who assured me that the name which
that fine work of art bore in the catalogues was a misnomer, as he was
convinced that the sculptor who carved it intended it for Memory, the
mother of the Muses. In the conversation that followed, my new friend
made some extraordinary confessions. "Do you not see," he said, "the
penalty of learning, and that each of these scholars whom you have met
at S., though he were to be the last man, would, like the executioner
in Hood's poem, guillotine the last but one?" He added many lively
remarks, but his evident earnestness engaged my attention, and, in the
weeks that followed, we became better acquainted. He had great
abilities, a genial temper, and no vices; but he had one defect,--he
could not speak in the tone of the people.
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