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- "_Urquhartian Club for the Immediate Extension of the Limits of all
Knowledge, both Human and Divine._
"ZADOCKPRATTSVILLE,
"_June 11th, 18--_.
"_Author of the 'Tropical Summer,' &c._
"HONORED AND DEAR SIR:--
"Official duty and private inclination in this present case most
delightfully blend. What was the ardent desire of my heart, has now
by the action of the _Committee on Lectures_ become professionally
obligatory upon me. As Chairman of our _Committee on Lectures_, I
hereby beg the privilege of entreating that you will honor this
Society by lecturing before it on any subject you may choose, and
at any day most convenient to yourself. The subject of Human
Destiny we would respectfully suggest, without however at all
wishing to impede you in your own unbiased selection.
"If you honor us by complying with this invitation, be assured,
sir, that the Committee on Lectures will take the best care of you
throughout your stay, and endeavor to make Zadockprattsville
agreeable to you. A carriage will be in attendance at the
Stage-house to convey yourself and luggage to the Inn, under full
escort of the _Committee on Lectures_, with the Chairman at their
head.
"Permit me to join my private homage
To my high official consideration for you,
And to subscribe myself
Very humbly your servant,
DONALD DUNDONALD."
III.
But it was more especially the Lecture invitations coming from
venerable, gray-headed metropolitan Societies, and indited by venerable
gray-headed Secretaries, which far from elating filled the youthful
Pierre with the sincerest sense of humility. Lecture? lecture? such a
stripling as I lecture to fifty benches, with ten gray heads on each?
five hundred gray heads in all! Shall my one, poor, inexperienced brain
presume to lay down the law in a lecture to five hundred life-ripened
understandings? It seemed too absurd for thought. Yet the five hundred,
through their spokesman, had voluntarily extended this identical
invitation to him. Then how could it be otherwise, than that an
incipient Timonism should slide into Pierre, when he considered all the
disgraceful inferences to be derived from such a fact. He called to
mind, how that once upon a time, during a visit of his to the city, the
police were called out to quell a portentous riot, occasioned by the
vast press and contention for seats at the first lecture of an
illustrious lad of nineteen, the author of "A Week at Coney Island."
It is needless to say that Pierre most conscientiously and respectfully
declined all polite overtures of this sort.
Similar disenchantments of his cooler judgment did likewise deprive of
their full lusciousness several other equally marked demonstrations of
his literary celebrity. Applications for autographs showered in upon
him; but in sometimes humorously gratifying the more urgent requests of
these singular people Pierre could not but feel a pang of regret, that
owing to the very youthful and quite unformed character of his
handwriting, his signature did not possess that inflexible uniformity,
which--for mere prudential reasons, if nothing more--should always mark
the hand of illustrious men. His heart thrilled with sympathetic anguish
for posterity, which would be certain to stand hopelessly perplexed
before so many contradictory signatures of one supereminent name. Alas!
posterity would be sure to conclude that they were forgeries all; that
no chirographic relic of the sublime poet Glendinning survived to their
miserable times.
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