to read him; it props a
startling assertion by a grave authority--you long to refer to it.
During the nights of the past winter, Leonard's intelligence had
made vast progress; he had taught himself more than the elements of
mechanics, and put to practice the principles he had acquired not only
in the hydraulical achievement of the fountain, nor in the still
more notable application of science, commenced on the stream in which
Jackeymo had fished for minnows, and which Lenny had diverted to the
purpose of irrigating two fields, but in various ingenious contrivances
for the facilitation or abridgment of labour, which had excited great
wonder and praise in the neighbourhood. On the other hand, those rabid
little tracts, which dealt so summarily with the destinies of the
human race, even when his growing reason and the perusal of works
more classical or more logical had led him to perceive that they were
illiterate, and to suspect that they jumped from premises to conclusions
with a celerity very different from the careful ratiocination of
mechanical science, had still, in the citations and references wherewith
they abounded, lured him on to philosophers more specious and more
perilous. Out of the tinker's bag he had drawn a translation of
Condorcet's "Progress of Man" and another of Rousseau's "Social
Contract." Works so eloquent had induced him to select from the tracts
in the tinker's miscellany those which abounded most in professions of
philanthropy, and predictions of some coming Golden Age, to which old
Saturn's was a joke,--tracts so mild and mother-like in their language,
that it required a much more practical experience than Lenny's to
perceive that you would have to pass a river of blood before you had
the slightest chance of setting foot on the flowery banks on which they
invited you to repose; tracts which rouged poor Christianity on the
cheeks, clapped a crown of innocent daffodillies on her head, and
set her to dancing a pas de zephyr in the pastoral ballet in which
Saint-Simon pipes to the flock he shears; or having first laid it down
as a preliminary axiom that--

"The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,--
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,"

substituted in place thereof M. Fourier's symmetrical phalanstere, or
Mr. Owen's architectural parallelogram. It was with some such tract
that Lenny was seasoning his crusts and his radishes,