Pinakidia — 1902 historical reading

Pinakidia Historical reading from James A. Harrison’s 1902 Complete Works, volume XIV. This is a later collected edition, not the first periodical printing. The selected historical work sections are preserved locally; modern website commentary and double-bracketed corrections are excluded. Paragraph and verse-line boundaries are retained, with simplified typography. No independent word-by-word proofreading is claimed. PINAKIDIA. [Southern Literary Messenger, August, 1836.] UNDER the head of Random Thoughts, Odds and Ends, Stray Leaves, Scraps, Brevities, and a variety of similar titles, we occasionally meet, in periodicals and elsewhere, with papers of rich interest and value — the result, in some cases, of much thought, and more research, expended, however, at a manifest disadvantage, if we regard merely the estimate which the public are willing to set upon such articles. It sometimes occurs that in papers of this nature may be found a collective mass of general, but more usually of classical erudition, which if dexterously besprinkled over a proper surface of narrative, would be sufficient to make the fortunes of one or two hundred ordinary novelists in these our good days, when all heroes and heroines are necessarily men and women of “extensive acquirements.” But, for the most part, these “Brevities,” etc., are either piecemeal cullings at second hand, from a variety of sources hidden or supposed to be hidden, or more audacious pilferings from those vast storehouses of brief facts, memoranda, and opinions in general literature, which are so abundant in all the principal libraries of Germany and France. Of the former species, the Koran of Lawrence Sterne is, at the same time, one of the most consummately impudent and silly; and it may well be doubted whether a single paragraph of any merit in the whole of it may not be found, nearly verbatim, in the works of some one of his immediate cotemporaries. If the Lacon of Mr. Colton is any better, its superiority consists altogether in a deeper ingenuity in disguising his stolen wares, and in that prescriptive right of the strongest which, time out of mind, has decided upon calling every Napoleon a conqueror, and every Dick Turpin a thief. Seneca; Machiavelli;(1) Balzac, the author of “La Manière de bien Penser”; Bielfeld, the German, who wrote, in French, “Les Premiers Traits de L’Erudition Universelle”; Rochefoucault; Bacon; Bolingbroke; and especially Burdon, of “Materials for Thinking” memory, possess, among them, indisputable claims to the ownership of nearly everything worth owning in the book. Of the latter species of theft, we see frequent specimens in the continental magazines of Europe, and occasionally meet with them even in the lower class of periodicals in Great Britain. These specimens are usually extracts, by wholesale, from such works as the “Bibliothèque des Memorabilia Literaria,” the “Recueil des Bonnes Pensées,” the “Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses,” the “Literary Memoir” of Sallengré, the “Mélanges Littéraires” of Suard and André, or the “Pièces Intéressantes et peu Connues” of La Place. D’Israeli's “Curiosities of Literature,” “Literary Character,” and “Calamities of Authors,” have, of late years, proved exceedingly convenient to some little American pilferers in this line, but are now becoming too generally known to allow much hope of their good things being any longer appropriated with impunity. Such collections, as those of which we have been speaking, are usually entertaining in themselves, and for the most part, we relish everything about them save their pretensions to originality. In offering, ourselves, something of the kind to the readers of the Messenger, we wish to be understood as disclaiming in a great degree every such pretension. Most of the following article is not(1) original, and will be readily recognized as such by the classical and general reader — some portions of it may have been written down in the words, or nearly in the words, of