The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiving a soil;
and cleanliness in them to be something more than the absence of its
contrary. Every Quakeress is a lily; and when they come up in bands
to their Whitsun-conferences, whitening the easterly streets of the
metropolis, from all parts of the United Kingdom, they show like
troops of the Shining Ones.

[Footnote 1: From "Poems of all sorts," by Richard Fleckno, 1653.]




THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER


My reading has been lamentably desultory and immethodical. Odd, out of
the way, old English plays, and treatises, have supplied me with most
of my notions, and ways of feeling. In every thing that relates to
_science_, I am a whole Encyclopædia behind the rest of the world.
I should have scarcely cut a figure among the franklins, or country
gentlemen, in king John's days. I know less geography than a
school-boy of six weeks' standing. To me a map of old Ortelius is as
authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not know whereabout Africa merges into
Asia; whether Ethiopia lie in one or other of those great divisions;
nor can form the remotest conjecture of the position of New South
Wales, or Van Diemen's Land. Yet do I hold a correspondence with a
very dear friend in the first-named of these two Terræ Incognitæ.
I have no astronomy. I do not know where to look for the Bear, or
Charles's Wain; the place of any star; or the name of any of them at
sight. I guess at Venus only by her brightness--and if the sun on