Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/877

1868.] hear the shouts of the battle, and see the dust of the arena. 'English literature to the rescue!' shouts one warrior, fiercely brandishing a volume of 'Chaucer.' 'Down with the classics!' is the war-cry of another doughty champion, who with his right hand wields a French dictionary, and with his left a bottle of sulphuric acid and a variety of other scientific weapons. And hark, the cry is David! and from the cave of Adullam issues forth a rebel chief at the head of a band of bold outlaws, armed to the teeth with history, geography and useful information. Meanwhile, the established tyrants are hoisting the standard of antiquity and buckling on afresh the armor of their university distinctions. The younger ones among them seize pen and paper and go forth to meet the foe at the Janiculum, or elsewhere, and there will be beaten, slain, or taken prisoners—except a few, who, escaping, will shut themselves up in the Capitol and be preserved for a time by the cackling of sundry geese, the sacred birds of Superstitio and Consuetudo. But the elder ones, the white-haired senators, disdain either to fight or fly. With their rods in their hands, they ascend into their oaken seats of office, and there await, in awful silence, the coming of the Goths and Gauls, that at the end they may die with proper dignity. Now the foe is on them, and they clasp each other's hands, and, for the last time before the shrine of self-opinion, join in the solemn chorus, '''O tempora! O mores!''

This topic, however, has but a trifling portion of the little book under mention, for the volume is more a record of observations than of philosophical deductions therefrom, though every here and there it is spiced with scraps of wisdom. "Trouble to a boy is like water to a duck; he is always getting into it, but it runs off his back as soon as he can manage to scramble upon dry land for a little." "The existence of the hobbledehoy is a horrible state of anarchy, intervening between despotic authority and constitutional self-government." The boy is not considered here as a being growing toward maturity and manhood, but as a genus distinct and complete by himself, and as in his natural and normal state only when at school; for parents, it is given us to understand, have no more right to bring up their own boys at home than physicians have to medicine their own families. In the beginning, the author excludes four classes from his contemplation, which may be further condensed into two—the jackanapes and the preternatural; although confessing that his heart yet yearns toward these banished ones, since they are, in a manner, after all, boys and brothers; and how far he enters into the nature of the boy proper—the hearty, rollicking, frolicking, tumbling, noisy imp, that somehow works his way into the affections through his very unbearableness—may be seen in the way in which a single incident is related. "How my heart has bled as I have seen one of my boys bending over his book and faintly muttering, 'Oh, Forty-seventh Prop., how I do hate you!' Through the open window of the room the sweet June breeze came peering, wondering, no doubt, to what end was the dull, dusty prison it had found its way to. Merry shouts and careless laughs were borne on its wings to mock the sad captive of angles and parallelograms. Cruelly sweet visions of green cricket-fields and cool bathing-places floated before his weary eyes. But there he sat at his hard task, and presently I heard him lift up his voice again, and exclaim, 'Oh, Euclid, I wish you had died when you were a boy!' It was so hard for him to learn; yet learn he must, and I must make him; so on he sat, and on I sat; and to occupy my mind, and to fortify it against the compassionate impulses which might prevent me from doing my duty, I began to turn over these thoughts about the troubles of boys. This was