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- unconcern as to who may appropriate, or as to what purpose the
appropriation may be applied. In this particular, what recks the Marquis
de Grandvin, for example? He is the ripe peach-tree shedding its
abundance, careless of the garner; he is the Prince of Golconda at the
ball, some of whose innumerable diamond buttons drop from his raiment
unheeded by him in the chance fleeting rubs and collisions of the dance.
But how transitory these prodigal improvident ones can prove!--and once
gone, how soon all but good as forgotten! True, were an example here
demanded, one adapted for popular illustration, not readily could it be
supplied. Literature will not furnish it, since these natures, never
directly expressing themselves in literature, have no memorial place in
its records. Neither are they Alexanders and Napoleons that the fame
which is all but independent of literature should trumpet them.
Nevertheless, in local tradition, and comparatively recent, I do find a
citable instance which, though below the grade, say, of a de Grandvin,
and but in a minor way to the purpose, may perhaps for these reasons
serve the better to actualise the general truth, in a measure bring it
home.
Rufus Choate, the Boston advocate, when inspired to his best before an
audience, how he exhilarated and elevated and transported his hearers.
But he is gone; and all those fireworks of elfish passion and wit, where
are they? Vainly in the Ceramicus of the libraries will you seek any
enduring monument of that oratorical pyrotechnist. As well ransack the
museums of Natural History for the bottled-up tail of Encke’s comet.
What shall we say, then? Are there natures strong to draw and enthrall,
yet whose influence is like that of the magnet, only operative as a
bodily presence? Yes, withdraw the magnet and all is over. And holds
this true as to the Marquis de Grandvin? Yea, and shall he also at last
vanish, sailing into the boundless Nil, leaving no phosphorescent wake
or magic moon-glade behind? Shall naught remain of his cherub sparkle
and spirit?--nothing of all those ineffable qualities that make him what
Raphael, Milton’s affable archangel, would be seen to be were he
commissioned hither to dissuade mankind from ever perpetrating an
inhumanity or a pun? And, oh, thou Admirable Crichton, nay, a
thousandfold more admirable than he, for art thou not kindly as
wise?--of all thy more sustained sallies of bright fantasy and humour,
let alone thy erratic coruscations, shall nothing be crystallised into
permanence? Nothing at last remain of our Lord Bountiful but the empty
larder and void dusty bin? When we laud thee departed, shall the infidel
twit us with--What were his assets? If the very plenitude and variety of
thy shining gifts, and the preoccupation of thy social charm, if these
indispose thee to drudge it as an ‘author,’ or operate as
disqualifications; will no painstaking aspirant for the literary fame
essay the task of methodising thee, or some little segment of thee, into
the literary form? But even thy foremost disciple, Jack Gentian, though
out of humble emulation he strive to follow thy devious footing, yet thy
brow is among the stars; he ventures not to lift his head to thy height.
But I--ah, brimmed with thy genial flood--I, here, in the small hour,
not long returned from a richer than Plato’s ‘Banquet,’ where thou didst
pour from thy cornucopia, with a hand redundant as that of Millet’s
seed-sower, the profusion of thy good things; I, audacious as I am,
resolved upon an emprise.
The Marquis, methought, though glorious, is not of the gods, the more
reproach to their synod; but I will make them yield a place for him on
their golden benches; I will make him an Immortal! How? Monumentalise
him to the remotest posterity in a book fragrant as violets, yet lasting
as the Pyramids!
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