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- 2806
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:18.535Z
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- 2762
- text
- friendly clasp, or smote a foe, was no food, thought Samoa, for fowls
of the air nor fishes of the sea.
Now, which was Samoa? The dead arm swinging high as Haman? Or the
living trunk below? Was the arm severed from the body, or the body from
the arm? The residual part of Samoa was alive, and therefore we say it
was he. But which of the writhing sections of a ten times severed worm,
is the worm proper?
For myself, I ever regarded Samoa as but a large fragment of a man, not
a man complete. For was he not an entire limb out of pocket? And the
action at Teneriffe over, great Nelson himself—physiologically
speaking—was but three-quarters of a man. And the smoke of Waterloo
blown by, what was Anglesea but the like? After Saratoga, what Arnold?
To say nothing of Mutius Scaevola minus a hand, General Knox a thumb,
and Hannibal an eye; and that old Roman grenadier, Dentatus, nothing
more than a bruised and battered trunk, a knotty sort of hemlock of a
warrior, hard to hack and hew into chips, though much marred in
symmetry by battle-ax blows. Ah! but these warriors, like anvils, will
stand a deal of hard hammering. Especially in the old knight-errant
times. For at the battle of Brevieux in Flanders, my glorious old
gossiping ancestor, Froissart, informs me, that ten good knights, being
suddenly unhorsed, fell stiff and powerless to the plain, fatally
encumbered by their armor. Whereupon, the rascally burglarious
peasants, their foes, fell to picking their visors; as burglars, locks;
or oystermen, oysters; to get at their lives. But all to no purpose.
And at last they were fain to ask aid of a blacksmith; and not till
then, were the inmates of the armor dispatched. Now it was deemed very
hard, that the mysterious state- prisoner of France should be riveted
in an iron mask; but these knight-errants did voluntarily prison
themselves in their own iron Bastiles; and thus helpless were murdered
there-in. Days of chivalry these, when gallant chevaliers died
chivalric deaths!
And this was the epic age, over whose departure my late eloquent and
prophetic friend and correspondent, Edmund Burke, so movingly mourned.
Yes, they were glorious times. But no sensible man, given to quiet
domestic delights, would exchange his warm fireside and muffins, for a
heroic bivouac, in a wild beechen wood, of a raw gusty morning in
Normandy; every knight blowing his steel-gloved fingers, and vainly
striving to cook his cold coffee in his helmet.
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