ty
slow to take fire. These young fellows catch up with the world's ideas
one after another,--they have been tamed a long while, but they find
them running loose in their minds, and think they are ferae naturae.
They remind me of young sportsmen who fire at the first feathers they
see, and bring down a barnyard fowl. But the chicken may be worth
bagging for all that, he said, good-humoredly.

X

Caveat Lector. Let the reader look out for himself. The old Master,
whose words I have so frequently quoted and shall quote more of, is a
dogmatist who lays down the law, ex cathedra, from the chair of his own
personality. I do not deny that he has the ambition of knowing something
about a greater number of subjects than any one man ought to meddle
with, except in a very humble and modest way. And that is not his way.
There was no doubt something of, humorous bravado in his saying that the
actual "order of things" did not offer a field sufficiently ample for
his intelligence. But if I found fault with him, which would be easy
enough, I should say that he holds and expresses definite opinions
about matters that he could afford to leave open questions, or ask the
judgment of others about. But I do not want to find fault with him. If
he does not settle all the points he speaks of so authoritatively, he
sets me thinking about them, and I like a man as a companion who is not
afraid of a half-truth. I know he says some things peremptorily that
he may inwardly debate with himself. There are two ways of dealing
with assertions of this kind. One may attack them on the false side and
perhaps gain a conversational victory. But I like better to take them
up on the true side and see how much can be made of that aspect of
the dogmatic assertion. It is the only comfortable way of dealing with
persons like the old Master.

There have been three famous talkers in Great Britain, either of whom
would illustrate what I say about dogmatists well enough for my purpose.
You cannot doubt to what three I refer: Samuel the First, Samuel the
Second, and Thomas, last of the Dynasty. (I mean the living Thomas and
not Thomas B.)

I say the last of the Dynasty, for the conversational dogmatist on the
imperial scale becomes every year more and more an impossibility. If he
is in intelligent company he will be almost sure to find some one who
knows more about some of the subjects he generalizes upon than any
wholesale thinker who handles knowledge by