January 2011

Older people in Arlington, Vermont, have a special interest in the last house you pass as you leave our village to drive to Cambridge. It was built and lived in for many years by our first, local skilled cabinetmaker. In the early days nearly every house had one or a few good pieces of professionally made furniture, brought up from Connecticut on horseback or in an oxcart. These were highly treasured. But the furniture made here was, for the first generation after 1764, put together by men who just wanted chairs, beds, and a table for the family meals—and those as fast as they could be slammed into shape.

For many years Silas Knapp lived in that last house practicing his remarkable skill. Nearly every house of our town acquired in those years one or two pieces of his workmanship. They are now highly prized as “early Nineteenth-Century locally made antiques.”

It was June 15, 1817, and up at West Point newly elected President James Monroe, staunch friend of the Military Academy, was in a towering rage. The place was in poor shape, its curriculum had unraveled, examinations were unknown, and discipline was non-existent. The acting superintendent, Captain Alden Partridge, Corps of Engineers, seemed to be running a “Dotheboys Hall” of sorts, where favoritism governed and cadets were being graduated without reference either to academic standing or military ability.

Fifty years ago winter was still pretty much the season of discontent. Time out of mind poets had abused and libeled it. They said that winter brought snarling gusts to nibble the juiceless leaves. They charged that plague and pestilence came with it. Every mile was two in winter. It tamed man, woman and beast. He who passed a winter’s day escaped an enemy. A sad tale was best for winter.

Some capricious and discontented artists have affected to consider portrait-painting as unworthy of a man of genius. Some critics have spoken in the same contemptuous manner of history. Johnson puts the case thus: The historian tells either what is false or what is true: in the former case he is no historian: in the latter he has no opportunity for displaying his abilities: for truth is one: and all who tell the truth must tell it alike.

In the year 1629 there appeared on the streets of London a pamphlet “printed for Michael Sparke, dwelling in Greene-Arbor, at the sign of the Blue Bible.” The pamphlet, in the English of the day, bore the title: The Booke of Meery Riddles, together with proper Questions and witty Prouerbs to make pleasant pastime, no lesse usefull than behoouefull for any yong man or child to know if he be quick-witted, or no.

Reverend and dear Sir,

I received your kind letter of Jan’y 28, and am glad you have at length received the portrait of Gov’r Yale from his Family, and deposited it in the College Library. He was a great and good Man, and had the Merit of doing infinite Service to your Country by his Munificence to that Institution. The Honour you propose doing me by placing mine in the same Room with his, is much too great for my Deserts; but you always had a Partiality for me, and to that it must be ascribed. I am however too much obliged to Yale College, the first learned Society that took Notice of me and adorned me with its Honours, to refuse a Request that comes from it thro’ so esteemed a Friend. But I do not think any one of the Portraits you mention, as in my Possession, worthy of the Place and Company you propose to place it in. You have an excellent Artist lately arrived. If he will undertake to make one for you, I shall cheerfully pay the Expence; but he must not delay setting about it, or I may slip thro’ his fingers, for I am now in my eighty-fifth year, and very infirm …

High Moment

edited by Wallace Brockway. Simon & Schuster. $3.50.

A collection of stories about the moments of crisis in a number of great men’s lives, told by notable authors. Louis Kronenberger tells how Gibbon was inspired to write The Decline and Fall ; Irwin Edman how Socrates chose to become a martyr to freedom of thought; Claude Bowers about Jefferson’s part in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions; C. S. Forester how Napoleon invited trouble, indeed disaster, by ignoring such military inventors as Fulton and a certain Lieutenant Henry Shrapnel. There are sixteen pieces in all.

Struggle for the Border

by Bruce Hutchinson. Longmans, Green & Co. $6.

An important and interesting survey of the conflicts, many of them little understood, which took place over the centuries on the Canadian-American border before it acquired its present peaceful reputation.

Defeat at Sea: