"Thus I once knew a little boy who had an ambi- tion to be a letter carrier and, finding in a cedar chest in the attic a great bundle of love letters that his mother had been preserving since the days of her courtship, he packed them in a leather school satchel and distributed them from house to house throughout the neighborhood."
Alliterative attempts are almost always ambigu- ous, and any arrangement adopted assumes an ap- pearance altogether abnormal.
"The atrocious crime of being a young man, which
the honorable gentleman has with such spirit and de-
cency charged upon me, I shall neither attempt to
palHate nor deny; but content myself with wishing
that I may be one of those whose follies may cease
with their youth, and not of that number who are
ignorant in spite of experience." Every schoolboy
has declaimed this sonorous Johnsonesque version of
Pitt's reply to Walpole. Not everybody has learned
that it is what is now known as a "fake" — the work
of Dr. Johnson- founded on some note or statement
of the actual speech, but written, as Johnson said, "in
a garret in Exeter street." Of course the mock hu-
mility of the fine sentiment is in reality bounce and
buncombe. The "towering confidence of twenty-
one" became the subject of Johnson's sarcasm in an-
other place. His shrewd and merciless common
sense could not tolerate either any boasting or any
invidiousness on the subject of age at either end of
life.
