through every harmless little deception he tries to play; it pitilessly
exposes him as a tin hero worshipping himself as Big Metal every time he
tries to do the modest-unconsciousness act before the reader. This is
not guessing; I am speaking from autobiographical personal experience; I
was never able to refrain from mentioning, with a studied casualness that
could deceive none but the most incautious reader, that an ancestor of
mine was sent ambassador to Spain by Charles I., nor that in a remote
branch of my family there exists a claimant to an earldom, nor that an
uncle of mine used to own a dog that was descended from the dog that was
in the Ark; and at the same time I was never able to persuade myself to
call a gibbet by its right name when accounting for other ancestors of
mine, but always spoke of it as the "platform"--puerilely intimating that
they were out lecturing when it happened.

It is Mrs. Eddy over again. As regards her minor half, she is as
commonplace as the rest of us. Vain of trivial things all the first half
of her life, and still vain of them at seventy and recording them with
naive satisfaction--even rescuing some early rhymes of hers of the sort
that we all scribble in the innocent days of our youth--rescuing them and
printing them without pity or apology, just as the weakest and commonest
of us do in our gray age. More--she still frankly admires them; and in
her introduction of them profanely confers upon them the holy name of
"poetry." Sample:

"And laud the land whose talents rock
The cradle of her power,
And wreaths are twined round Plymouth Rock
From erudition's bower."

"Minerva's silver sandals still