Hermotimus, or the Rival Philosophies (81)

The youth’s uncle was there, a rustic person without any notion of your refinements; and by way of stilling the storm, Come, come, sir, says he, you need not make such a fuss because we have bought words of you and not yet settled the bill. As to what you have sold us, you have got tt still; your stock of learning is none the less; and in what I really sent the boy to you for, you have not improved him a bit; he has carried off and seduced neighbour Echecrates’s daughter, and there would have been an action for assault, only Echecrates ts a poor man; but the prank cost me a couple of bundred. And the other day he struck bis mother; she had tried to stop him when he was smuggling wine out of the house, for one of his club-dinners, I suppose. As to temper and conceit and impudence and brass and lying, he was not half so bad twelve months ago as he is now. That 1s where I should have liked him to profit by your teaching; and we could have done without bis knowing the stuff he reels off at table every day: 'a

crocodile [*] seized hold of a baby,’ says he, ‘and promised to give tt back if its father could answer’—the Lord knows what; or how, ‘day[*] being, night cannot be’; and sometimes his worship twists round what we say somehow or other, till there we are with horns? on our beads! We just laugh at it—most of all when be stuffs up bis ears and repeats to himself what he calls temperaments and conditions and conceptions and impressions, and a lot more like that. And he tells us God is not in heaven, but goes about in everything, wood and stone and animals—the meanest of them, too; and if his mother asks him why he talks such stuff, he laughs at her and says if once he gets the ‘stuff’ pat off, there will be nothing to prevent him from being the only rich man, the only king, and counting every one else slaves and offscourings.