Modern Essays Part 21

wtihout malice=>without malice

smooth and omnious=>smooth and ominous

kinds words uttered=>kind words uttered

It is cardinal rule=>It is (a) cardinal rule

FOOTNOTES:

[A] _A Personal Record._

[B] William Sidney Porter, 1862-1910, son of Algernon Sidney Porter, physician, was born, bred, and meagerly educated in Greensboro, North Carolina. In Greensboro he was drug clerk; in Texas he was amateur ranchman, land-office clerk, editor, and bank teller. Convicted of misuse of bank funds on insufficient evidence (which he supplemented by the insanity of flight), he pa.s.sed three years and three months in the Ohio State Penitentiary at Columbus. Release was the prelude to life in New York, to story-writing, to rapid and wide-spread fame. Latterly, his stories, published in New York journals and in book form, were consumed by the public with an avidity which his premature death, in 1910, scarcely checked. The pen-name, O. Henry, is almost certainly borrowed from a French chemist Etienne-Ossian Henry, whose abridged name he fell upon in his pharmacal researches. See the interesting "O. Henry Biography" by C. Alphonso Smith.

[C] O Henry's stories have been known to coincide with earlier work in a fashion which dims the novelty of the tale without clouding the originality of the author. I thought the brilliant "Harlem Tragedy" (in the "Trimmed Lamp") unique through sheer audacity, but the other day I found its motive repeated with singular exactness in Montesquieu's "Lettres Persanes" (Letter LI).

[D] "These views, as usual, pleased some more, others less; some chid and calumniated me, and laid it to me as a crime that I had dared to depart from the precepts and opinions of all Anatomists."--De Motu Cordis, chap. i.

[E] This visit (in the early eighties) had another relish. The inn coffee-room had a copy of Mr. Freeman's book on the adjoining Cathedral, and this was copiously annotated in a beautiful and scholarly hand, but in a most virulent spirit. "Why can't you call things by their plain names?" (in reference to the historian's Macaulayesque periphrases) etc.

I have often wondered who the annotator was.

[F] When I went up this March to help man the last ditch for Greek, I happened to mention "Archdeacon": and my interlocutor told me that he believed no college now brewed within its walls. After the defeat, I thought of the stages of the Decline and Fall of Things: and how a sad but n.o.ble ode might be written (by the right man) on the Fates of Greek and Beer at Oxford. He would probably refer in the first strophe to the close of the Eumenides; in its antistrophe to Mr. Swinburne's great adaptation thereof in regard to Carlyle and Newman; while the epode and any reduplication of the parts would be occupied by showing how the departing ent.i.ties were of no equivocal magnificence like the Eumenides themselves; of no flawed perfection (at least as it seemed to their poet) like the two great English writers, but wholly admirable and beneficent--too good for the generation who would banish them, and whom they banished.

[G] This was one of the best ill.u.s.trations of the old phrase, "a good pennyworth," that I ever knew for certain. I add the two last words because of a mysterious incident of my youth. I and one of my sisters were sitting at a window in a certain seaside place when we heard, both of us distinctly and repeatedly, this mystic street cry: "A bible and a pillow-case for a penny!" I rushed downstairs to secure this bargain, but the crier was now far off, and it was too late.

[H] By the way, are they still as good for flip at New College, Oxford, as they were in the days when it numbered hardly any undergraduates except scholars, and one scholar of my acquaintance had to himself a set of three rooms and a garden? And is "The Island" at Kennington still famous for the same excellent compound?

[I] It came from Alford, the chef-lieu, if it cannot be called the capital, of the Tennyson country. I have pleasant a.s.sociations with the place, quite independent of the beery ones. And it made me, partially at least, alter one of the ideas of my early criticism--that time spent on a poet's local habitations was rather wasted. I have always thought "The Dying Swan" one of its author's greatest things, and one of the champion examples of pure poetry in English literature. But I never fully heard the "eddying song" that "flooded"

the creeping mosses and clambering weeds, And the willow branches h.o.a.r and dank, And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds.

And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank, And the silvery marish-flowers that throng The desolate creeks and pools among--

till I saw them.

[J] Herefordshire and Worcestershire cider can be very strong and the perry, they say, still stronger.