The Senator for Mickewa,—whose name we have taken for a book which might perhaps have been better called "The Chronicle of a Winter at Dillsborough"—did not stay long in London after the unfortunate close of his lecture. He was a man not very pervious to criticism, nor afraid of it, but he did not like the treatment he had received at St. James's Hall, nor the remarks which his lecture produced in the newspapers. He was angry because people were unreasonable¹ with him, which was surely unreasonable in him who accused Englishmen generally of want of reason. One ought to take it as a matter of course that a bull should use his horns, and a wolf his teeth. The Senator read everything that was said of him, and then wrote numerous letters to the different journals which had condemned² him. Had any one accused him of an untruth? Or had his inaccuracies been glaring? Had he not always expressed his readiness to acknowledge his own mistake if convicted of ignorance? But when he was told that he had persistently³ trodden upon all the corns of his English cousins, he declared that corns were evil things which should be abolished, and that with corns such as these there was no mode of abolition⁴ so efficacious as treading on them.

"I am sorry that you should have encountered anything so unpleasant," Lord Drummond said to him when he went to bid adieu to his friend at the Foreign Office.

"And I am sorry too, my Lord;—for your sake rather than my own. A man is in a bad case who cannot endure to hear of his faults."

"Perhaps you take our national sins a little too much for granted."

"I don't think so, my Lord. If you knew me to be wrong you would not be so sore with me. Nevertheless I am under deep obligation for kind-hearted hospitality. If an American can make up his mind to crack up everything he sees here, there is no part of the world in which he can get along better." He had already written a long letter home to his friend Mr. Josiah Scroome, and had impartially⁵ sent to that gentleman not only his own lecture, but also a large collection of the criticisms made on it. A few weeks afterwards he took his departure, and when we last heard of him was thundering in the Senate against certain practices on the part of his own country which he thought to be unjust to other nations. Don Quixote was not more just than the Senator, or more philanthropic,—nor perhaps more apt to wage war against the windmills.

分享到：