Dear Dyer, -- Mr. Rogers and Mr. Rogers's friends are perfectly assured that you never intended any harm by an innocent couplet, and that in the revivification of it by blundering Barker you had no hand whatever. To imagine that, at this time of day, Rogers broods over a fantastic expression of more than thirty years' standing, would be to suppose him indulging his "Pleasures of Memory" with a vengeance. You never penned a line which for its own sake you need, dying, wish to blot. You mistake your heart if you think you _can_ write a lampoon. Your whips are rods of roses. [1] Your spleen has ever had for its objects vices, not the vicious, -- abstract offences, not the concrete sinner. But you are sensitive, and wince as much at the consciousness of having committed a compliment as another man would at the perpetration of an affront. But do not lug me into the same soreness of conscience with yourself.
I maintain, and will to the last hour, that I never writ of you but _con amore_; that if any allusion was made to your near-sightedness, it was not for the purpose of mocking an infirmity, but of connecting it with scholar-like habits, -- for is it not erudite and scholarly to be somewhat near of sight before age naturally brings on the malady? You could not then plead the _obrepens senectus_. Did I not, moreover, make it an apology for a certain _absence_, which some of your friends may have experienced, when you have not on a sudden made recognition of them in a casual street-meeting; and did I not strengthen your excuse for this slowness of recognition by further accounting morally for the present engagement of your mind in worthy objects? Did I not, in your person, make the handsomest apology for absent-of-mind people that was ever made? If these things be not so, I never knew what I wrote or meant by my writing, and have been penning libels all my life without being aware of it.
Sign in to unlock this title
Sign in to continue reading, it's free! As an unregistered user you can only read a little bit.
