aidens, the maltreated
widows, the poor old hoary grandfathers, who have been locked up in the
dungeons these scores and scores of years, writhing under the tyranny
of that ruffian! Ah ye knights of the pen! May honor be your shield,
and truth tip your lances! Be gentle to all gentle people. Be modest to
women. Be tender to children. And as for the Ogre Humbug, out sword, and
have at him.

ON TWO ROUNDABOUT PAPERS WHICH I INTENDED TO WRITE.*

* The following paper was written in 1861, after the
extraordinary affray between Major Murray and the money-
lender in a house in Northumberland Street, Strand, and
subsequent to the appearance of M. Du Chaillu's book on
Gorillas.

We have all heard of a place paved with good intentions--a place which I
take to be a very dismal, useless, and unsatisfactory terminus for many
pleasant thoughts, kindly fancies, gentle wishes, merry little quips and
pranks, harmless jokes which die as it were the moment of their birth.
Poor little children of the brain! He was a dreary theologian who
huddled you under such a melancholy cenotaph, and laid you in the vaults
under the flagstones of Hades! I trust that some of the best actions we
have all of us committed in our lives have been committed in fancy. It
is not all wickedness we are thinking, que diable! Some of our thoughts
are bad enough I grant you. Many a one you and I have had here below.
Ah mercy, what a monster! what crooked horns! what leering eyes! what a
flaming mouth! what cloven feet, and what a hideous writhing tail! Oh,
let us fall down on our knees, repeat our most potent exorcisms, and
overcome the brute. Spread your black pinions, fly--fly to the dusky
realms of Eblis, and bury thyself under the paving-stones of his hall,
dark genie! But ALL thoughts are not so. No--no. There are the pure:
there are the kind: there are the gentle. There are sweet unspoken
thanks before a fair scene of nature: at a sun-setting below a glorious
sea: or a moon and a host of stars shining over it: at a bunch of
children playing in the street, or a group of flowers by the hedge-side,
or a bird singing there. At a hundred moments or occurrences of the
day good thoughts pass through the mind, let us trust, which never
are spoken; prayers are made which never are said; and Te Deum is sung
without church, clerk, choristers, parson, or organ. Why, there's my
enemy: who got the place I wanted; who maligned me to the woma