The Baron afterwards informed me that he had purposely
thrown the treatise in Hermann’s way two or
three weeks before the adventure, and that he was
satisfied, from the general tenor of his conversation,
that he had studied it with the deepest attention,
and firmly believed it to be a work of unusual merit.
Upon this hint he proceeded. Hermann would have
died a thousand deaths rather than acknowledge his
inability to understand anything and everything in
the universe that had ever been written about the duello.
Littleton
Barry.
~~~ End of Text ~~~
======
CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE EXACT SCIENCES.
Hey, diddle diddle
The cat and the fiddle
SINCE the world began there have been two Jeremys.
The one wrote a Jeremiad about usury, and was called
Jeremy Bentham. He has been much admired by Mr.
John Neal, and was a great man in a small way.
The other gave name to the most important of the Exact
Sciences, and was a great man in a great way —
I may say, indeed, in the very greatest of ways.
Diddling — or the abstract idea conveyed
by the verb to diddle — is sufficiently
well understood. Yet the fact, the deed, the thing
diddling, is somewhat difficult to define. We
may get, however, at a tolerably distinct conception
of the matter in hand, by defining- not the thing,
diddling, in itself — but man, as an animal
that diddles. Had Plato but hit upon this, he
would have been spared the affront of the picked chicken.
Very pertinently it was demanded of Plato, why a picked
chicken, which was clearly “a biped without
feathers,” was not, according to his own definition,
a man? But I am not to be bothered by any similar
query. Man is an animal that diddles, and there
is no animal that diddles but man. It will take
an entire hen-coop of picked chickens to get over
that.
What constitutes the essence, the nare, the principle
of diddling is, in fact, peculiar to the class of
creatures that wear coats and pantaloons. A crow
thieves; a fox cheats; a weasel outwits; a man diddles.
To diddle is his destiny. “Man was made
to mourn,” says the poet. But not so:
— he was made to diddle. This is his
aim — his object- his end. And for
this reason when a man’s diddled we say he’s
“done.”
Diddling, rightly considered, is a compound, of which
the ingredients are minuteness, interest, perseverance,
ingenuity, audacity, nonchalance, originality, impertinence,
and grin.
Minuteness: — Your diddler is minute.
His operations are upon a small scale. His business
is retail, for cash, or approved paper at sight.
Should he ever be tempted into magnificent speculation,
he then, at once, loses his distinctive features,
and becomes what we term “financier.”
This latter word conveys the diddling idea in every
respect except that of magnitude. A diddler may
thus be regarded as a banker in petto —
a “financial operation,” as a diddle at
Brobdignag. The one is to the other, as Homer
to “Flaccus” — as a Mastodon
to a mouse — as the tail of a comet to that
of a pig.
