Ponkapog Papers | Page 4

nobody good.
Sir John Bankes would scarcely have been heard of in our young
century if it had not been for his footman. As Robert stood day by day,
sleek and solemn, behind his master's chair in Corfe Castle, how little it
entered into the head of Sir John that his highly respectable name
would be served up to posterity--like a cold relish--by his own butler!
By Robert!
IN the east-side slums of New York, some- where in the picturesque
Bowery district, stretches a malodorous little street wholly given over
to long-bearded, bird-beaked mer- chants of ready-made and
second-hand clothing. The contents of the dingy shops seem to have
revolted, and rushed pell-mell out of doors, and taken possession of the
sidewalk. One could fancy that the rebellion had been quelled at this
point, and that those ghastly rows of complete suits strung up on either
side of the doorways were the bodies of the seditious ringleaders. But
as you approach these limp figures, each dangling and gyrating on its
cord in a most suggestive fashion, you notice, pinned to the lapel of a
coat here and there, a strip of paper announcing the very low price at
which you may become the happy possessor. That dis- sipates the
illusion.

POLONIUS, in the play, gets killed--and not any too soon. If it only
were practicable to kill him in real life! A story--to be called The
Passing of Polonius--in which a king issues a decree condemning to
death every long-winded, didactic person in the kingdom, irrespective
of rank, and is himself instantly arrested and de- capitated. The man
who suspects his own tediousness is yet to be born.
WHENEVER I take up Emerson's poems I find myself turning
automatically to his Bacchus. Elsewhere, in detachable passages
embedded in mediocre verse, he rises for a moment to heights not
reached by any other of our poets; but Bacchus is in the grand style
throughout. Its tex- ture can bear comparison with the world's best in
this kind. In imaginative quality and austere richness of diction what
other verse of our period approaches it? The day Emerson wrote
Bacchus he had in him, as Michael Drayton said of Marlowe, "those
brave translunary things that the first poets had."
IMAGINE all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting
one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London.
Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house
and hearing a ring at the door-bell!
No man has ever yet succeeded in painting an honest portrait of himself
in an autobiography, however sedulously he may have set to work
about it. In spite of his candid purpose he omits necessary touches and
adds superfluous ones. At times he cannot help draping his thought,
and the least shred of drapery becomes a disguise. It is only the diarist
who accom- plishes the feat of self-portraiture, and he, with- out any
such end in view, does it unconsciously. A man cannot keep a daily
record of his com- ings and goings and the little items that make up the
sum of his life, and not inadvertently betray himself at every turn. He
lays bare his heart with a candor not possible to the self- consciousness
that inevitably colors premeditated revelation. While Pepys was filling
those small octavo pages with his perplexing cipher he never once
suspected that he was adding a pho- tographic portrait of himself to the
world's gal- lery of immortals. We are more intimately acquainted with
Mr. Samuel Pepys, the inner man--his little meannesses and his large

gener- osities--then we are with half the persons we call our dear
friends.
THE young girl in my story is to be as sensitive to praise as a prism is
to light. Whenever any- body praises her she breaks into colors.
IN the process of dusting my study, the other morning, the maid
replaced an engraving of Philip II. of Spain up-side down on the man-
tel-shelf, and his majesty has remained in that undignified posture ever
since. I have no dis- position to come to his aid. My abhorrence of the
wretch is as hearty as if he had not been dead and--otherwise provided
for these last three hundred years. Bloody Mary of England was nearly
as merciless, but she was sincere and uncompromising in her
extirpation of heretics.
Philip II., whose one recorded hearty laugh was occasioned by the news
of the St. Bartholomew massacre, could mask his fanaticism or drop it
for the time being, when it seemed politic to do so. Queen Mary was a
maniac; but the suc- cessor of Torquemada was the incarnation of
cruelty pure and simple, and I have a mind to let my counterfeit
presentment of him