him for my museum, and will pay Dinosaur rates.
Will you say it isn’t infraction of the law,
but only annual evasion of it? Comfort yourselves
with that nice distinction if you like —for
the present. But by and by, when you
arrive, I will show you something interesting:
a whole hell-full of evaders! Sometimes a frank
law-breaker turns up elsewhere, but I get those others
every time.
To return to my muttons. I wish you to remember
that my rich perjurers are contributing to the American
Board with frequency: it is money filched from
the sworn-off personal tax; therefore it is the wages
of sin; therefore it is my money; therefore it is I
that contribute it; and, finally, it is therefore as
I have said: since the Board daily accepts contributions
from me, why should it decline them from Mr. Rockefeller,
who is as good as I am, let the courts say what they
may?
Satan.
Portuguese and english”
by Pedro Carolino
In this world of uncertainties, there is, at any rate,
one thing which may be pretty confidently set down
as a certainty: and that is, that this celebrated
little phrase-book will never die while the English
language lasts. Its delicious unconscious ridiculousness,
and its enchanting naivete, as are supreme and unapproachable,
in their way, as are Shakespeare’s sublimities.
Whatsoever is perfect in its kind, in literature,
is imperishable: nobody can imitate it successfully,
nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect,
it must and will stand alone: its immortality
is secure.
It is one of the smallest books in the world, but
few big books have received such wide attention, and
been so much pondered by the grave and learned, and
so much discussed and written about by the thoughtful,
the thoughtless, the wise, and the foolish. Long
notices of it have appeared, from time to time, in
the great English reviews, and in erudite and authoritative
philological periodicals; and it has been laughed
at, danced upon, and tossed in a blanket by nearly
every newspaper and magazine in the English-speaking
world. Every scribbler, almost, has had his little
fling at it, at one time or another; I had mine fifteen
years ago. The book gets out of print, every
now and then, and one ceases to hear of it for a season;
but presently the nations and near and far colonies
of our tongue and lineage call for it once more, and
once more it issues from some London or Continental
or American press, and runs a new course around the
globe, wafted on its way by the wind of a world’s
laughter.
