eral
of the states as a text-book!

But if his falsehoods are distressing, his innocence and his ignorance
are enough to make one burn the book and despise the author. In one
place he was so appalled at the sudden spectacle of a murdered man,
unveiled by the moonlight, that he jumped out of the window, going
through sash and all, and then remarks with the most childlike
simplicity that he "was not scared, but was considerably agitated."
It puts us out of patience to note that the simpleton is densely
unconscious that Lucrezia Borgia ever existed off the stage. He is
vulgarly ignorant of all foreign languages, but is frank enough to
criticize, the Italians' use of their own tongue. He says they spell the
name of their great painter "Vinci, but pronounce it Vinchy"--and then
adds with a naivete possible only to helpless ignorance, "foreigners
always spell better than they pronounce." In another place he commits
the bald absurdity of putting the phrase "tare an ouns" into an
Italian's mouth. In Rome he unhesitatingly believes the legend that St.
Philip Neri's heart was so inflamed with divine love that it burst
his ribs--believes it wholly because an author with a learned list of
university degrees strung after his name endorses it--"otherwise," says
this gentle idiot, "I should have felt a curiosity to know what Philip
had for dinner." Our author makes a long, fatiguing journey to the
Grotto del Cane on purpose to test its poisoning powers on a dog--got
elaborately ready for the experiment, and then discovered that he had no
dog. A wiser person would have kept such a thing discreetly to himself,
but with this harmless creature everything comes out. He hurts his foot
in a rut two thousand years old in exhumed Pompeii, and presently, when
staring at one of the cinder-like corpses unearthed in the next square,
conceives the idea that maybe it is the remains of the ancient Street
Commissioner, and straightway his horror softens down to a sort of
chirpy contentment with the condition of things. In Damascus he visits
the well of Ananias, three thousand years old, and is as surprised and
delighted as a child to find that the water is "as pure and fresh as if
the well had been dug yesterday." In the Holy Land he gags desperately
at the hard Arabic and Hebrew Biblical names, and finally concludes to
call them Baldwinsville, Williamsburgh, and so on, "for convenience of
spelling."

We have thus spoken freely of this man's stupefy