This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1895 Excerpt: ...of your modern agriculturists, relating their own facts and swearing against each other like ships' crews. O! it is the relation of the facts--not the facts, friend! Speculative men are wont to be condemned by the general. But who more speculative than Sir Walter Raleigh, and he, even he, brought in the potato to Europe. Good heavens! let me never eat a roasted potato without dwelling on it, and detailing its train of consequences. Likewise, too, dubious to the philosopher, but to be clapped chorally by the commercial world, he, this mere wild speculatist, introduced tobacco. For a nation to make peace only because it is tired of war, and, as it were, in order just to take breath, is in direct subversion of the end and object of the war which was its sole justification. 'T is like a poor way-sore foot-traveller getting up behind a coach that is going the contrary way to his. The eye hath a twofold power. It is, verily, a window through which you not only look out of the house, but can look into it too. A statesman and diplomatist should for this reason always wear spectacles. Worldly men gain their purposes with worldly men by that instinctive belief in sincerity. Hence (nothing immediately and passionately contradicting it) the effect of the "with unfeigned esteem," "entire devotion," and the other smooth phrases in letters, all, in short, that sea-officers call oil, and of which they, with all their bluntness, well understand the use. The confusion of metaphor with reality is one of the fountains of the many-headed Nile of credulity, which, overflowing its banks, covers the world with miscreations and reptile monsters, and feeds by its many mouths the sea of blood. A ready command of a limited number of words is but a playing cat-cradl...