Chapter 24 - Page 2

of Samoa was alive, and therefore we
say it was he. But which of the writhing sections of a ten times
severed worm, is the worm proper?

For myself, I ever regarded Samoa as but a large fragment of a man,
not a man complete. For was he not an entire limb out of pocket? And
the action at Teneriffe over, great Nelson himself--physiologically
speaking--was but three-quarters of a man. And the smoke of Waterloo
blown by, what was Anglesea but the like? After Saratoga, what
Arnold? To say nothing of Mutius Scaevola minus a hand, General Knox
a thumb, and Hannibal an eye; and that old Roman grenadier, Dentatus,
nothing more than a bruised and battered trunk, a knotty sort of
hemlock of a warrior, hard to hack and hew into chips, though
much marred in symmetry by battle-ax blows. Ah! but these warriors,
like anvils, will stand a deal of hard hammering. Especially in the
old knight-errant times. For at the battle of Brevieux in Flanders,
my glorious old gossiping ancestor, Froissart, informs me, that ten
good knights, being suddenly unhorsed, fell stiff and powerless to
the plain, fatally encumbered by their armor. Whereupon, the rascally
burglarious peasants, their foes, fell to picking their visors; as
burglars, locks; or oystermen, oysters; to get at their lives. But
all to no purpose. And at last they were fain to ask aid of a
blacksmith; and not till then, were the inmates of the armor
dispatched. Now it was deemed very hard, that the mysterious state-
prisoner of France should be riveted in an iron mask; but these
knight-errants did voluntarily prison themselves in their own iron
Bastiles; and thus helpless were murdered there-in. Days of chivalry
these, when gallant chevaliers died chivalric deaths!

And this was the epic age, over whose departure my late eloquent and
prophetic friend and correspondent, Edmund Burke, so movingly
mourned. Yes, they were glorious times. But no sensible man, given to
quiet domestic delights, would exchange his warm fireside and
muffins, for a heroic bivouac, in a wild beechen wood, of a raw gusty
morning in Normandy; every knight blowing his steel-gloved fingers,
and vainly striving to cook his cold coffee in his helmet.