To boys he has always been the Robinson Crusoe of classic antiquity, making what had hitherto seemed a remote island sequestered from them by a trackless flood of years, living and real.  Those obscure solitudes which their imagination had peopled with spectral equestrian statues, are rescued by the sound of his cheery voice as part of the familiar and daylight world.  We suspect that Agesilaus on his hobby-horse first humanized antiquity for most of us.  Here was the human footprint which persuaded us that the past was inhabited by creatures like ourselves.

A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS

A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS

I must beg allowance to use the first person singular.  I cannot, like old Weller, spell myself with a We.  Ours is, I believe, the only language that has shown so much sense of the worth of the individual (to himself) as to erect the first personal pronoun into a kind of votive column to the dignity of human nature.  Other tongues have, or pretend, a greater modesty.

I

What a noble letter it is!  In it every reader sees himself as in a glass.  As for me, without my I’s, I should be as poorly off as the great mole of Hadrian, which, being the biggest, must be also, by parity of reason, the blindest in the world.  When I was in college, I confess I always liked those passages best in the choruses of the Greek drama which were well sprinkled with ai ai, they were so grandly simple.  The force of great men is generally to be found in their intense individuality,—­in other words, it is all in their I. The merit of this essay will be similar.

What I was going to say is this.

My mind has been much exercised of late on the subject of two epidemics, which, showing themselves formerly in a few sporadic cases, have begun to set in with the violence of the cattle-disease:  I mean Eloquence and Statuary.  They threaten to render the country unfit for human habitation, except by the Deaf and Blind.  We had hitherto got on very well in Chesumpscot, having caught a trick of silence, perhaps from the fish which we cured, more medicorum, by laying them out.  But this summer some misguided young men among us got up a lecture-association.  Of course it led to a general quarrel; for every pastor in the town wished to have the censorship of the list of lecturers.  A certain number of the original projectors, however, took the matter wholly into their own hands, raised a subscription to pay expenses, and resolved to call their lectures “The Universal Brotherhood Course,”—­for no other reason, that I can divine, but that they had set the whole village by the ears.  They invited that distinguished young apostle of Reform, Mr. Philip Vandal, to deliver the opening lecture.  He has just done so, and, from what I have heard about his discourse, it would have been fitter as the introductory