honored with a baronetcy,--a splendid
recompense for his great literary industry.
This, and much other information, adapted to our rude plantation in the
New-England wilderness, did Sir Joseph patronizingly impart. And it was
good to meet a man with a sense of corporeal identity so honest and
satisfactory. A cynic might have said that his mind moved in rather
narrow limits. But then within those limits he was so ruddy and jubilant
that I could not but remember something Shakspeare says about the ease
of being bounded in a nutshell and yet counting one's self king of
infinite space,--were it not for bad dreams. These "bad dreams" had
never retarded the British digestion of Sir Joseph Barley. No American
citizen could, by any possibility, be so shut in measureless content. It
is only a very few of our well-to-do women of the Mrs. Widesworth
class--ladies inclining to knitting and corpulency in the afternoon of
life--who possess the like faculty of warming society with the blaze of
an ecstatic egotism. Well, there are moments--why not confess it? for is
not man body as well as soul?--when it is a relief to get away from our
mystics, system-mongers, and peerers into the future, and claim a
brotherhood after the flesh with your average Briton, who looks out of
his comfortable present only to look into his comfortable past.
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