Gryll Grange | Page 4

Catharine
CHAPTER X
The Thunderstorm
CHAPTER XI
Electrical Science--The Death of Philemon
CHAPTER XII
The Forest Dell--The Power of Love--The Lottery of Marriage
CHAPTER XIII
Lord Curryfin--Siberian Dinners--Social Monotony
CHAPTER XIV
Music and Painting--Jack of Dover
CHAPTER XV
Expression in Music--The Dappled Palfrey--Love and
Age--Competitive Examination

CHAPTER XVI
Miss Niphet--The Theatre--The Lake--Divided Attraction --Infallible
Safety
CHAPTER XVII
Horse-Taming--Love in Dilemma--Injunctions--Sonorous Vases
CHAPTER XVIII
Lectures--The Power of Public Opinion--A New Order of Chivalry
CHAPTER XIX
A Symposium--Transatlantic Tendencies --After-Dinner
Lectures--Education
CHAPTER XX
Algernon and Morgana--Opportunity and Repentance --The Forest in
Winter
CHAPTER XXI
Skating--Pas de deux on the Ice--Congeniality --Flints among Bones
CHAPTER XXII
The Seven against Thebes--A Soliloquy on Christmas
CHAPTER XXIII
The two Quadrilles--Pope's Ombre--Poetical Truth to
Nature--Cleopatra
CHAPTER XXIV

Progress of Sympathy--Love's Injunctions--Orlando Innamorato
CHAPTER XXV
Harry and Dorothy
CHAPTER XXVI
Doubts and Questions
CHAPTER XXVII
Love in Memory
CHAPTER XXVIII
Aristophanes in London
CHAPTER XXIX
The Bald Venus--Inez de Castro--The Unity of Love
CHAPTER XXX
A Captive Knight--Richard and Alice
CHAPTER XXXI
A Twelfth-Night Ball--Pantopragmatic Cookery --Modern
Vandalism--A Bowl of Punch
CHAPTER XXXII
Hopes and Fears--Compensations in Life--Athenian Comedy--Madeira
and Music--Confidences
CHAPTER XXXIII

The Conquest of Thebes
CHAPTER XXXIV
Christmas Tales--Classical Tales of Wonder--The Host's Ghost--A Tale
of a Shadow--A Tale of a Bogle--The Legend of St. Laura
CHAPTER XXXV
Rejected Suitors--Conclusion

GRYLL GRANGE
Opinion governs all mankind, Like the blind leading of the blind:-- And
like the world, men's jobbemoles Turn round upon their ears the poles,
And what they're confidently told By no sense else can be controll'd.
In the following pages the New Forest is always mentioned as if it were
still unenclosed. This is the only state in which the Author has been
acquainted with it. Since its enclosure, he has never seen it, and
purposes never to do so.
The mottoes are sometimes specially apposite to the chapters to which
they are prefixed; but more frequently to the general scope, or, to
borrow a musical term, the motivo of the operetta.
CHAPTER I
MISNOMERS
Ego sic semper et ubique vixi, ut ultimam quamque lucem, taraquam
non redituram, consumerem.--Petronius Arbiter.
Always and everywhere I have so lived, that I might consume the
passing light as if it were not to return.
'Palestine soup!' said the Reverend Doctor Opimian, dining with his

friend Squire Gryll; 'a curiously complicated misnomer. We have an
excellent old vegetable, the artichoke, of which we eat the head; we
have another of subsequent introduction, of which we eat the root, and
which we also call artichoke, because it resembles the first in flavour,
although, me judice, a very inferior affair. This last is a species of the
helianthus, or sunflower genus of the Syngenesia frustranea class of
plants. It is therefore a girasol, or turn-to-the-sun. From this girasol we
have made Jerusalem, and from the Jerusalem artichoke we make
Palestine soup.'
Mr. Gryll. A very good thing, doctor.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. A very good thing; but a palpable misnomer.
Mr. Gryll. I am afraid we live in a world of misnomers, and of a worse
kind than this. In my little experience I have found that a gang of
swindling bankers is a respectable old firm; that men who sell their
votes to the highest bidder, and want only 'the protection of the ballot'
to sell the promise of them to both parties, are a free and independent
constituency; that a man who successively betrays everybody that trusts
him, and abandons every principle he ever professed, is a great
statesman, and a Conservative, forsooth, a nil conservando; that
schemes for breeding pestilence are sanitary improvements; that the test
of intellectual capacity is in swallow, and not in digestion; that the art
of teaching everything, except what will be of use to the recipient, is
national education; and that a change for the worse is reform. Look
across the Atlantic. A Sympathiser would seem to imply a certain
degree of benevolent feeling. Nothing of the kind. It signifies a
ready-made accomplice in any species of political villainy. A
Know-Nothing would seem to imply a liberal self-diffidence--on the
scriptural principle that the beginning of knowledge is to know that
thou art ignorant. No such thing. It implies furious political dogmatism,
enforced by bludgeons and revolvers. A Locofoco is the only
intelligible term: a fellow that would set any place on fire to roast his
own eggs. A Filibuster is a pirate under national colours; but I suppose
the word in its origin implies something virtuous: perhaps a friend of
humanity.

The Rev. Dr. Opimian. More likely a friend of roaring-(Greek
phrase)--in the sense in which roaring is used by our old dramatists; for
which see Middleton's Roaring Girl, and the commentators thereon.
Mr. Gryll. While we are on the subject of misnomers, what say you to
the wisdom of Parliament?
The Rev. Dr. Opimian.