ly minted than the Yankee? Had the Old World anything to show more
positive and uncompromising in all the elements of character than the
Englishman? And if the edges of these were being rounded off, was there
not developing in the extreme West a type of men different from all
preceding, which the world could not yet define? He believed that the
production of original types was simply infinite.

Herbert urged that he must at least admit that there was a freshness of
legend and poetry in what we call the primeval peoples that is wanting
now; the mythic period is gone, at any rate.

Mandeville could not say about the myths. We couldn't tell what
interpretation succeeding ages would put upon our lives and history and
literature when they have become remote and shadowy. But we need not go
to antiquity for epigrammatic wisdom, or for characters as racy of the
fresh earth as those handed down to us from the dawn of history. He
would put Benjamin Franklin against any of the sages of the mythic or
the classic period. He would have been perfectly at home in ancient
Athens, as Socrates would have been in modern Boston. There might have
been more heroic characters at the siege of Troy than Abraham Lincoln,
but there was not one more strongly marked individually; not one his
superior in what we call primeval craft and humor. He was just the man,
if he could not have dislodged Priam by a writ of ejectment, to have
invented the wooden horse, and then to have made Paris the hero of some
ridiculous story that would have set all Asia in a roar.

Mandeville said further, that as to poetry, he did not know much
about that, and there was not much he cared to read except parts of
Shakespeare and Homer, and passages of Milton. But it did seem to him
that we had men nowadays, who could, if they would give their minds to
it, manufacture in quantity the same sort of epigrammatic sayings and
legends that our scholars were digging out of the Orient. He did not
know why Emerson in antique setting was not as good as Saadi. Take for
instance, said Mandeville, such a legend as this, and how easy it would
be to make others like it:

The son of an Emir had red hair, of which he was ashamed, and wished
to dye it. But his father said: "Nay, my son, rather behave in such a
manner that all fathers shall wish their sons had red hair."

This was too absurd. Mandeville had gone too far, except in the opinion
of Our Next Door, who declared that an imitation