The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table | Page 8

when I am
fitting sentiments to these venerable jingles.
. . . . youth . . . . . morning . . . . . truth . . . . . warning
Nine tenths of the "Juvenile Poems" written spring out of the above musical and
suggestive coincidences.
"Yes?" said our landlady's daughter.
I did not address the following remark to her, and I trust, from her limited range of
reading, she will never see it; I said it softly to my next neighbour.
When a young female wears a flat circular side--curl, gummed on each temple,--when
she walks with a male, not arm in arm, but his arm against the back of hers,--and when
she says "Yes?" with the note of interrogation, you are generally safe in asking her what
wages she gets, and who the "feller" was you saw her with.
"What were you whispering?" said the daughter of the house, moistening her lips, as she
spoke, in a very engaging manner.
"I was only laying down a principle of social diagnosis."
"Yes?"
- It is curious to see how the same wants and tastes find the same implements and modes
of expression in all times and places. The young ladies of Otaheite, as you may see in
Cook's Voyages, had a sort of crinoline arrangement fully equal in radius to the largest
spread of our own lady-baskets. When I fling a Bay-State shawl over my shoulders, I am
only taking a lesson from the climate that the Indian had learned before me. A
BLANKET-shawl we call it, and not a plaid; and we wear it like the aborigines, and not
like the Highlanders.
- We are the Romans of the modern world,--the great assimilating people. Conflicts and
conquests are of course necessary accidents with us, as with our prototypes. And so we
come to their style of weapon. Our army sword is the short, stiff, pointed gladius of the
Romans; and the American bowie-knife is the same tool, modified to meet the daily
wants of civil society. I announce at this table an axiom not to be found in Montesquieu
or the journals of Congress:-
The race that shortens its weapons lengthens its boundaries.
Corollary. It was the Polish LANCE that left Poland at last with nothing of her own to
bound.
"Dropped from her nerveless grasp the SHATTERED SPEAR!"
What business had Sarmatia to be fighting for liberty with a fifteen-foot pole between her

and the breasts of her enemies? If she had but clutched the old Roman and young
American weapon, and come to close quarters, there might have been a chance for her;
but it would have spoiled the best passage in "The Pleasures of Hope."
- Self-made men?--Well, yes. Of course everybody likes and respects self-made men. It is
a great deal better to be made in that way than not to be made at all. Are any of you
younger people old enough to remember that Irishman's house on the marsh at
Cambridgeport, which house he built from drain to chimney-top with his own hands? It
took him a good many years to build it, and one could see that it was a little out of plumb,
and a little wavy in outline, and a little queer and uncertain in general aspect. A regular
hand could certainly have built a better house; but it was a very good house for a
"self-made" carpenter's house, and people praised it, and said how remarkably well the
Irishman had succeeded. They never thought of praising the fine blocks of houses a little
farther on.
Your self-made man, whittled into shape with his own jack-knife, deserves more credit, if
that is all, than the regular engine- turned article, shaped by the most approved pattern,
and French- polished by society and travel. But as to saying that one is every way the
equal of the other, that is another matter. The right of strict social discrimination of all
things and persons, according to their merits, native or acquired, is one of the most
precious republican privileges. I take the liberty to exercise it, when I say, that, OTHER
THINGS BEING EQUAL, in most relations of life I prefer a man of family.
What do I mean by a man of family?--O, I'll give you a general idea of what I mean. Let
us give him a first-rate fit out; it costs us nothing.
Four or five generations of gentlemen and gentlewomen; among them a member of his
Majesty's Council for the Province, a Governor or so, one or two Doctors of Divinity, a
member of Congress, not later than the time of top-boots with tassels.
Family portraits. The member of the Council, by Smibert. The great merchant-uncle, by
Copley, full length, sitting in his arm- chair, in a