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Updated: June 11, 2025
If for one instant the strangers paused to study a beautiful, carved door, or to peer into the window of an antiquary's at blue and white jars, or to gaze up at the ferocious head of a Turk over a chemist's shop, or to laugh at a house with window-blinds painted in red and white diamonds, a crowd of flaxen heads collected round us, little hands fluttered over the dog's wrinkled head as butterflies flit about a clover blossom, baby laughter tinkled, and tiny shrieks cut the stillness of the sleepy, summer afternoon.
How unsubstantial is this projection of a man s existence, which can lie in abeyance for centuries and then be brushed up again and set forth for the consideration of posterity by a few dips in an antiquary's ink-pot! But I beard the voice of a woman singing some sad, old endless ballad not far off.
The resemblance was not much nearer than that of Polonius's cloud to a whale, or an owzel; it was sufficient, however, to set the Antiquary's brains to work.
Wanley, having discovered that although, according to the antiquary's will, his collection might not be dispersed, it might still possibly be bought, wrote to Harley and suggested that he should be the purchaser: "Sir Symonds D'Ewes, being pleased to honour me with a peculiar kindness of esteem, I have taken the liberty of inquiring of him whether he will part with his library; and I find that he is not unwilling to do so, and that at a much easier rate than I could think for.
Hector, swallowing his mortification, which he was peculiarly anxious to conceal from his uncle's satirical observation, readily entered into a conversation which was to turn the Antiquary's thoughts from Miss Wardour and the seal.
When they reached Monkbarns, the communicating to the ladies the events which had taken place at the castle, with the counter-information of how long dinner had waited before the womankind had ventured to eat it in the Antiquary's absence, averted these delicate topics of discussion.
But though she could not conceive the musician's covert meaning in these heraldic discourses, Sophy, with a justness of discrimination that must have been intuitive, separated from the more fantastic declamations of the grotesque genealogist that which was genuine and pathetic in the single image of the last descendant in a long and gradually falling race, lifting it up once more into power and note on toiling shoulders, and standing on the verge of age, with the melancholy consciousness that the effort was successful only for his fleeting life; that, with all his gold, with all his fame, the hope which had achieved alike the gold and the fame was a lying mockery, and that name and race would perish with himself, when the earth yawned for him beside the antiquary's grave.
Even Pulcinello, whom we familiarly call "Punch," may receive, like other personages of no great importance, all his dignity from antiquity; one of his Roman ancestors having appeared to an antiquary's visionary eye in a bronze statue; more than one erudite dissertation authenticates the family likeness; the nose long, prominent and hooked; the staring goggle eyes; the hump at his back, and at his breast; in a word, all the character which so strongly marks the Punch race, as distinctly as whole dynasties have been featured by the Austrian lip and the Bourbon nose.
Tyranny is his law, a cotton-bag his judgment-seat. But we pride ourselves that we are a respectable people-what more would you have us? The night is chilly without, in the fire-place of the antiquary's back parlor there burns a scanty wood fire. Tor has eaten his supper and retired to a little closet-like room overhead, where, in bed, he muses over what fell from Maria's lips, in their interview.
As for inducing Miss Gilder to give up her dream of a private dahabeah, I foresaw that it would be like persuading the youngest lioness in the Cairo Zoo to surrender her cherished wooden ball. But I began by giving Monny a present; a fine old turban-box of rare, red tortoise shell inlaid with mother of pearl, which I found at an antiquary's.
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