s in
considerable poetic license, representing it in fact as quite an elegant
apartment, whereas, though it is kept scrupulously neat and clean, the
air of it is ancient and rude. This is a somewhat flattered likeness.
The roughly-plastered walls are so covered with names that it seemed
impossible to add another. The name of almost every modern genius, names
of kings, princes, dukes, are shown here; and it is really curious to
see by what devices some very insignificant personages have endeavored
to make their own names conspicuous in the crowd. Generally speaking the
inscription books and walls of distinguished places tend to give great
force to the Vulgate rendering of Ecclesiastes i. 15, "The number of
fools is infinite."

To add a name in a private, modest way to walls already so crowded, is
allowable; but to scrawl one's name, place of birth, and country, half
across a wall, covering scores of names under it, is an operation which
speaks for itself. No one would ever want to know more of a man than to
see his name there and thus.

Back of this room were some small bed rooms, and what interested me
much, a staircase leading up into a dark garret. I could not but fancy I
saw a bright-eyed, curly-headed boy creeping up those stairs, zealous to
explore the mysteries of that dark garret. There perhaps he saw the cat,
with "eyne of burning coal, crouching 'fore the mouse's hole." Doubtless
in this old garret were wonderful mysteries to him, curious stores of
old cast-off goods and furniture, and rats, and mice, and cobwebs. I
fancied the indignation of some belligerent grandmother or aunt, who
finds Willie up there watching a mouse hole, with the cat, and has him
down straightway, grumbling that Mary did not govern that child better.

We know nothing who this Mary was that was his mother; but one sometimes
wonders where in that coarse age, when queens and ladies talked
familiarly, as women would blush to talk now, and when the broad, coarse
wit of the Merry Wives of Windsor was gotten up to suit the taste of a
virgin queen,--one wonders, I say, when women were such and so, where he
found those models of lily-like purity, women so chaste in soul and
pure in language that they could not even bring their lips to utter a
word of shame. Desdemona cannot even bring herself to speak the coarse
word with which her husband taunts her; she cannot make herself believe
that there are women in the world who could stoop-to such gros