some portentous morn were to make his first appearance in the West, I
verily believe, that, while all the world were gasping in apprehension
about me, I alone should stand unterrified, from sheer incuriosity
and want of observation. Of history and chronology I possess some
vague points, such as one cannot help picking up in the course of
miscellaneous study; but I never deliberately sat down to a chronicle,
even of my own country. I have most dim apprehensions of the four
great monarchies; and sometimes the Assyrian, sometimes the Persian,
floats as _first_ in my fancy. I make the widest conjectures
concerning Egypt, and her shepherd kings. My friend _M._, with great
painstaking, got me to think I understood the first proposition in
Euclid, but gave me over in despair at the second. I am entirely
unacquainted with the modern languages; and, like a better man than
myself, have "small Latin and less Greek." I am a stranger to the
shapes and texture of the commonest trees, herbs, flowers--not from
the circumstance of my being town-born--for I should have brought the
same inobservant spirit into the world with me, had I first seen it
in "on Devon's leafy shores,"--and am no less at a loss among purely
town-objects, tools, engines, mechanic processes.--Not that I affect
ignorance--but my head has not many mansions, nor spacious; and I have
been obliged to fill it with such cabinet curiosities as it can hold
without aching. I sometimes wonder, how I have passed my probation
with so little discredit in the world, as I have done, upon so meagre
a stock. But the fact is, a man may do very well with a very little
knowledge, and scarce be found out, in mixed company; every body is so
much more ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of your
acquisitions. But in a _tête-à-tête_ there is no shuffling. The truth
will out. There is nothing which I dread so much, as the being left
alone for a quarter of an hour with a sensible, well-informed man,
that does not know me. I lately got into a dilemma of this sort.--