h persuaded us that the past was
inhabited by creatures like ourselves.

A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH
AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS

A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH
AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS

I must beg allowance to use the first person singular. I cannot, like
old Weller, spell myself with a We. Ours is, I believe, the only
language that has shown so much sense of the worth of the individual (to
himself) as to erect the first personal pronoun into a kind of votive
column to the dignity of human nature. Other tongues have, or pretend, a
greater modesty.

I

What a noble letter it is! In it every reader sees himself as in a
glass. As for me, without my I's, I should be as poorly off as the great
mole of Hadrian, which, being the biggest, must be also, by parity of
reason, the blindest in the world. When I was in college, I confess I
always liked those passages best in the choruses of the Greek drama
which were well sprinkled with _ai ai_, they were so grandly simple. The
force of great men is generally to be found in their intense
individuality,--in other words, it is all in their I. The merit of this
essay will be similar.

What I was going to say is this.

My mind has been much exercised of late on the subject of two epidemics,
which, showing themselves formerly in a few sporadic cases, have begun
to set in with the violence of the cattle-disease: I mean Eloquence and
Statuary. They threaten to render the country unfit for human
habitation, except by the Deaf and Blind. We had hitherto got on very
well in Chesumpscot, having caught a trick of silence, perhaps from the
fish which we cured, _more medicorum_, by laying them out. But this
summer some misguided young men among us got up a lecture-association.
Of course it led to a general quarrel; for every pastor in the town
wished to have the censorship of the list of lecturers. A certain number
of the original projectors, however, took the matter wholly into their
own hands, raised a subscription to pay expenses, and resolved to call
their lectures "The Universal Brotherhood Course,"--for no other reason,
that I can divine, but that they had set the whole village by the ears.
They invited that distinguished young apostle of Reform, Mr. Philip
Vandal, to deliver the opening lecture. He has just done so, and, from
what I have heard about his discourse, it would have been fitter as the
introductory to a nunnery of Kilkenny cat