



Produced by Emmy, MFR, Linda Cantoni, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive). This project is dedicated with
love to Emmy's memory.









PATRINS

_TO WHICH IS ADDED_

  An INQUIRENDO Into the WIT &
  Other Good Parts of HIS LATE MAJESTY
  KING CHARLES the Second


  _WRITTEN BY_
  LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY


[Illustration: SICUT LILIUM INTER SPINAS]


  _BOSTON_
  Printed for _Copeland and Day_
  _69 Cornhill_ 1897


COPYRIGHT 1897 BY COPELAND AND DAY




[Inscription: M.R.D., from her affectionate
old friend who wrote it. 1897]




TO BLISS CARMAN


A _patrin_, according to _Romano Lavo-Lil_, is "a Gypsy trail:
handfuls of leaves or grass cast by the Gypsies on the road, to
denote, to those behind, the way which they have taken." Well, these
wild dry whims are _patrins_ dropped now in the open for our tribe;
but particularly for you. They will greet you as you lazily come up,
and mean: Fare on, and good luck love you to the end! On each have I
put the date of its writing, as one might make memoranda of little
leisurely adventures in prolonged fair weather; and you will read, in
between and all along, a record of pleasant lonely paths never very
far from your own, biggest of Romanys! in the thought-country of our
common youth.

  Ingraham Hill, South Thomaston, Maine,
  October 19, 1896.




Contents


                                                                    Page

  On the Rabid _versus_ the Harmless Scholar                           3

  The Great Playground                                                13

  On the Ethics of Descent                                            29

  Some Impressions from the Tudor Exhibition                          39

  On the Delights of an Incognito                                     63

  The Puppy: A Portrait                                               73

  On Dying Considered as a Dramatic Situation                         83

  A Bitter Complaint of the Ungentle Reader                           99

  Animum non Coelum                                                  109

  The Precept of Peace                                               117

  On a Pleasing Encounter with a Pickpocket                          131

  Reminiscences of a Fine Gentleman                                  139

  Irish                                                              153

  An Open Letter to the Moon                                         169

  The Under Dog                                                      181

  Quiet London                                                       191

  The Captives                                                       205

  On Teaching One's Grandmother How to Suck Eggs                     223

  Wilful Sadness in Literature                                       233

  An Inquirendo into the Wit and Other Good Parts
    of His Late Majesty, King Charles the Second                     247




ON THE RABID _VERSUS_ THE HARMLESS SCHOLAR


A PHILOSOPHER now living, and too deserving for any fate but choice
private oblivion, was in Paris, for the first time, a dozen years
ago; and having seen and heard there, in the shops, parks, and
omnibus stations, much more baby than he found pleasing, he remarked,
upon his return, that it was a great pity the French, who are so in
love with system, had never seen their way to shutting up everything
under ten years of age! Now, that was the remark of an artist in
human affairs, and may provoke a number of analogies. What is in the
making is not a public spectacle. It ought to be considered very
outrageous, on the death of a painter or a poet, to exhibit those
rough first drafts, which he, living, had the acumen to conceal.
And if, to an impartial eye, in a foreign city, native innocents
seem too aggressively to the fore, why should not the seclusion
desired for them be visited a thousandfold upon the heads, let us
say, of students, who are also in a crude transitional state, and
undergoing a growth much more distressing to a sensitive observer
than the physical? Youth is the most inspiring thing on earth, but
not the best to let loose, especially while it carries swaggeringly
that most dangerous of all blunderbusses, knowledge at half-cock.
There is, indeed, no more melancholy condition than that of healthy
boys scowling over books, in an eternal protest against their father
Adam's fall from a state of relative omniscience. Sir Philip Sidney
thought it was "a piece of the Tower of Babylon's curse that a man
should be put to school to learn his mother-tongue!" The throes of
education are as degrading and demoralizing as a hanging, and, when
the millennium sets in, will be as carefully screened from the laity.
Around the master and the pupil will be reared a portly and decorous
Chinese wall, which shall pen within their proper precincts the din
of _hic, hæc, hoc_, and the steam of suppers sacrificed to Pallas.

The more noxious variety of student, however, is not young. He is
"in the midway of this our mortal life"; he is fearfully foraging,
with intent to found and govern an academy; he runs in squads after
Anglo-Saxon or that blatant beast, Comparative Mythology; he stops
you on 'change to ask if one has not good grounds for believing that
there was such a person as Pope Joan. He can never let well enough
alone. Heine must be translated and Junius must be identified. The
abodes of hereditary scholars are depopulated by the red flag of
the _nouveau instruit_. He infests every civilized country; the
army-worm is nothing to him. He has either lacked early discipline
altogether, or gets tainted, late in life, with the notion that
he has never shown sufficiently how intellectual he really is. In
every contemplative-looking person he sees a worthy victim, and
his kindling eye, as he bears down upon you, precludes escape: he
can achieve no peace unless he is driving you mad with all which
you fondly dreamed you had left behind in old S.'s accursed
lecture-room. You may commend to him in vain the reminder which
Erasmus left for the big-wigs, that it is the quality of what you
know which tells, and never its quantity. It is inconceivable to him
that you should shut your impious teeth against First Principles,
and fear greatly to displace in yourself the illiteracies you have
painfully acquired.

Judge, then, if the learner of this type (and in a bitterer degree,
the learneress) could but be safely cloistered, how much simpler
would become the whole problem of living! How profoundly would
it benefit both society and himself could the formationary mind,
destined, as like as not, to no ultimate development, be sequestered
by legal statute in one imperative limbo, along with babes, lovers,
and training athletes! _Quicquid ostendis mihi sic, incredulus odi._

For the true scholar's sign-manual is not the midnight lamp on a
folio. He knows; he is baked through; all superfluous effort and
energy are over for him. To converse consumedly upon the weather,
and compare notes as to "whether it is likely to hold up for
to-morrow,"--this, says Hazlitt, "is the end and privilege of a life
of study." Secretly, decently, pleasantly, has he acquired his mental
stock; insensibly he diffuses, not always knowledge, but sometimes
the more needful scorn of knowledge. Among folk who break their
worthy heads indoors over Mr. Browning and Madame Blavatsky, he moves
cheerful, incurious, and free, on glorious good terms with arts and
crafts for which he has no use, with extraneous languages which he
will never pursue, with vague Muses impossible to invite to dinner.
He is strictly non-educational:

     "Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!
     No hungry generations tread thee down."

He loathes information and the givers and takers thereof. Like Mr.
Lang, he laments bitterly that Oxford is now a place where many
things are being learned and taught with great vigor. The main
business to him is to live gracefully, without mental passion, and to
get off alone into a corner for an affectionate view of creation. A
mystery serves his turn better than a history. It is to be remembered
that had the Rev. Laurence Sterne gone to gaze upon the spandrils
of Rouen Cathedral, we should all have lost the _fille de chambre_,
the dead ass, and Maria by the brookside. Any one of these is worth
more than hieroglyphics; but who is to attain that insight that these
are so, except the man of culture, who has the courage to forget at
times even his sole science, and fall back with delight upon a choice
assortment of ignorances?

The scholar's own research, from his cradle, clothes him in privacy;
nor will he ever invade the privacy of others. It is not with a light
heart that he contemplates the kindergarten system. He himself,
holding his tongue, and fleeing from Junius and Pope Joan, from cubic
roots and the boundaries of Hindostan, from the delicate difference
between the idiom of Maeterlinck and that