Page:Bassetts scrap book 1907 03-1909 02.djvu/78

296 "Thus I once knew a little boy who had an ambi- tion to be a letter carrier and, finding in a cedar chest in the attic a great bundle of love letters that his mother had been preserving since the days of her courtship, he packed them in a leather school satchel and distributed them from house to house throughout the neighborhood."

Alliterative attempts are almost always ambigu- ous, and any arrangement adopted assumes an ap- pearance altogether abnormal.

"The atrocious crime of being a young man, which the honorable gentleman has with such spirit and de- cency charged upon me, I shall neither attempt to palHate nor deny; but content myself with wishing that I may be one of those whose follies may cease with their youth, and not of that number who are ignorant in spite of experience." Every schoolboy has declaimed this sonorous Johnsonesque version of Pitt's reply to Walpole. Not everybody has learned that it is what is now known as a "fake" — the work of Dr. Johnson- founded on some note or statement of the actual speech, but written, as Johnson said, "in a garret in Exeter street." Of course the mock hu- mility of the fine sentiment is in reality bounce and buncombe. The "towering confidence of twenty- one" became the subject of Johnson's sarcasm in an- other place. His shrewd and merciless common sense could not tolerate either any boasting or any invidiousness on the subject of age at either end of life.