Gryll Grange | Page 4

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. Why, sir, I do not call that a misnomer. The term wisdom is used in a parliamentary sense. The wisdom of Parliament is a wisdom sui generis. It is not like any other wisdom. It is not the wisdom of Socrates, nor the wisdom of Solomon. It is the wisdom of Parliament. It is not easily analysed or defined; but it is very easily understood. It has achieved wonderful things by itself, and still more when Science has come to its aid. Between them they have poisoned the Thames, and killed the fish in the river. A little further development of the same wisdom and science will complete the poisoning of the air, and kill the dwellers on the