Quotations

— It is generally admitted that the human memory is a most wayward associate, and not only fails us utterly at a crisis, but thrusts into our mouths altered and even invented facts to suit its own wicked purposes. A very gallant soldier of the late war insisted the other day that Fredericksburg was fought early in 1864, and scouted a lady who said she remembered its wounded at Washington in January, 1863. But it is in dealing with quotations that memory is most depraved, and will not avail itself of its undoubted right not to quote at all. Mr. Lowell, at one of the last public dinners he ever attended, credited to Wordsworth the lines,

and really resented the idea that they are Milton’s. Mr. Webster once quoted Dr. Johnson for certain lines in Goldsmith’s Traveller, thinking they were from the Vanity of Human Wishes ; but by a piece of superhuman luck they happened to be among the handful of lines that Johnson is known to have supplied in Goldsmith’s poem. Less eminent persons will talk about the chapter on there being “ no snakes in Ireland ; ” and when you tell them it is in Horrebow’s History of Iceland, they say, “ Everybody quotes the other way, and it must be Ireland on account of St. Patrick” but then it is not so.

Now, quotation, though sometimes a spicer, is oftener a diluter of talk, and if it is not right gives indeed a mawkish twang. A young lady favored me the other day with a panegyric on “ the farmer,” — whoever he is,— and, drawing herself up, informed me that George Washington, being asked who he considered was the greatest benefactor of the human race, replied, “ He who made two blades of grass grow where one grew before.” Perhaps Gulliver’s Travels is not good reading for young ladies ; but really, she need not have treated her company to this very castanean quotation as coming from such an uncongenial source, when so many lives of Washington and so many editions of Bartlett’s Quotations are accessible. The latter invaluable book might be well studied by people who talk of “ the Simon Pure Democracy ” without the faintest idea who Simon Pure was, and that his name loses all its meaning unless it is a noun, with the word “ real ” or “ true ” prefixed to it. Hoyle is often accused of giving the advice, “ When in doubt, play trumps.” What he does say is, “ When in doubt, win the trick,” which is not exactly the same. And to conclude : will people never stop saying that some one “ lay low, like Brer Rabbit ” ? It would have been the best thing if poor Brer Rabbit, instead of meddling with Tar Baby, had learned to “lay low ” from his vulpine antagonist.