Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Putnam's Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science, and Art, Vol. 9: January to July, 1857
Quite the reverse of this impassioned and fastidious devotee of liberty, was the next emigre. Calm, slow, and pas sive, like Hamlet's friend, he took the good and ill with equal thanks and, instead of being on the qui rice for changes, or troubled about the future, the great difficulty was, to reuse him to exertion. So long as his receipts as a teacher provided him with the dollar a week, for the weekly rent of his attic, and enough more to pay for bread and milk twice a day, and a heaping dish of maccaroni d la Napolitaine, at noon, he would read, and lounge, and speculate on metaph sical questions, on the sun ny side 0 the street, and ponder the Christian fathers at the Astor library. This indifference, so unusual with his race, at first surprised me, until I dis covered that, from boyhood to middle life, he had belonged to a Benedictine fraternity in one of the islands of the Mediterranean. The waves of revolution at length reached the walls of his con vent, and swept him forth, as it were by a mechanical impulse, until, one fine spring morning, he found himself in bustling, wide-awake Gotham, with no robe, cell, refectory, or other sublunary convenience, such as, heretofore, had been provided; the hair had grown over his shaved occiput, but the dependent, inefficient habits of the monk remain ed; he was erudite, but unpractical, versed in Latin authors, but ignorant of the world placid as a summer lake, but as unfit as a child to fight his way in the new world.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
