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Confederates. Few books got across the line. A vigorous effort was made
to supply our soldiers with Bibles and parts of the Bible, and large
consignments ran the blockade. Else little came from abroad, and few
books were reprinted in the Confederacy. Of these I recall especially
Bulwer's Strange Story; Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, popularly
pronounced "Lee's Miserables"; and the historical novels of Louise
Muehlbach, known to the Confederate soldier as "Lou Mealbag." All were
eagerly read, but Cosette and Fantine and Joseph the Second would not
last forever, and we fell back on the old stand-bys. Some of us exhumed
neglected treasures, and I remember that I was fooled by Bulwer's
commendation of Charron into reading that feebler Montaigne. The
Southerner, always conservative in his tastes and no great admirer of
American literature, which had become largely alien to him, went back to
his English classics, his ancient classics. Old gentlemen past the
military age furbished up their Latin and Greek. Some of them had never
let their Latin and Greek grow rusty. When I was serving on General
Gordon's staff, I met at Millwood, in Clarke County, a Virginian of the
old school who declaimed with fiery emphasis, in the original, choice
passages of Demosthenes' tirade against AEschines. Not Demosthenes
himself could have given more effective utterance to "Hearest thou,
AEschines?" I thought of my old friend again not so very long ago, when I
read the account that the most brilliant of modern German classicists
gives of his encounter with a French schoolmaster at Beauvais in 1870,
during the Franco-Prussian war, and of the heated discussion that ensued
about the comparative merits of Euripides and Racine. The bookman is not
always killed in a man by service in the field. True, Lachmann dropped
his Propertius to take up arms for his country, but Reisig annotated his
Aristophanes in camp, and everybody knows the story of Courier, the
soldier Hellenist. But the tendency of life in the open air is to make
the soul imbody and imbrute, and after a while one begins to think
scholarship a disease, or, at any rate, a bad habit; and the Scythian
nomad, or, if you choose, the Texan cowboy, seems to be the normal,
healthy type. You put your Pickering Homer in your kit. It drops out by
reason of some sudden change of base, and you do not mourn as you ought
to do. The fact is you have not read a line for a month. But when the
Confederate volun