of a noxious ingredient. But I must return
to your friend. His cheeks seem ready to burst with common sense, and
polished with ruddy conceit. "Do you remember," said I, "any particular
passage upon which your observations will bear?" "Why," said he, "there
was one in that paper which first struck me as utter nonsense; but a
little alteration easily sets it to rights. There was a quotation from
Milton: I wasn't very well acquainted with his poems, but I have read
since, with much trouble to understand it, that whole scene and passage;
it is in a play of his called 'Comus;'--and, by the by, all that part of
the prose in the letter relating to the seashore and its treasures, is
all stuff; all the roads about the country are made and mended with
those pebbles--they are worth nothing. What Milton is supposed to have
said, when they wrote down for him, that the billows of the Severn "roll
ashore"--"the beryl and the golden ore"--never could have been written
by any one who knew the Severn. A beryl is a clear crystal, isn't it?
and if the billows should roll one ashore in the muddy Severn, I should
like to know who could find it! There are no billows but from the
Bristol Channel, and that's mud all the way, miles and miles up;--pretty
shores for a beryl to be _rolled_ on. Besides, now, what man of common
sense would talk of rolling a bit of a thing, not half so big as a
nutmeg, and that upon mud, in which it would sink like a bullet? _He_
would have said 'washed ashore;' but I'll tell you what it was: I
understand Milton was blind, and his daughters wrote what he dictated:
they say, too, he had a good deal of knowledge of things, and, without
doubt, knew very well the trade of the Bristol Channel, and from the
Severn into the Avon; and certainly meant '_barrel_ and the golden ore,'
and this word suggested the precious ornament which most women like to
think of, and as she, his daughter, minced it in her own mouth, a beryl
dropped from her pen. Now, only consider what was the great trade in
those parts; the West India and the African trade were both at their
height, and didn't one bring _barrels_ of sugar, and the other gold
dust--what can be clearer? There you see how proper the word _rolling_
is, for you must have often seen them rolling their _barrels_ from their
ships upon planks, and so on their quays; and the golden ore speaks for
itself, as plain as can be, gold dust; and there you have a reading that
agrees with fact. I d