Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 July 1875 — After-Thoughts. [ARTICLE]

After-Thoughts.

A writer says: How very often it happens in conversation, as Bernard Barton remarks in one of his letters to Crabbe, that the thing you might and would and should have said occurs to you just a little too late. He draws ou his own experience for the record of manv a long and animated discussion with a friend* after which he called to mind some pithy argument that would have smashed his opponent’s case, and which, affirms the gende Quaker poet, “ I should have been almost sure to have had at my fingers’ ends had I been quietly arguing the matter on paper in my own study.” Cowper complains that when he wrote a letter to any but a familiar friend, no sooner had he dispatched it than he was sure to recollect how much better he could have made it. Horace Walpole opens his epistle with the remark that mere answers that sure not made to letters immediately are like good things which people recollect they might have said had they but thought of them in time; that is very insipid, and the apropos very probably forgotten. Vanity, as well as vexation of spirit. Little Henry Esmond, when pointed out by saucy Trix to my Lord as “ saying his prayers to mamma, ’ could only look very silly. If he invented a half dozen of speeches in reply, that was months afterward ; “ as it was, he had never a word in answer.” Mr. Thaekeraris writings offer divers illustrations of the same kind. There is Mr. Batchelor, for instance, when impertinently quizzed to his face by that supercilious Captain Baker. “ ‘Sir!’ says I; ‘ sir’ was all I could say. The fact is, I could have replied with" something remarkably neat and cutting, which would have transfixed the languid little jackanapes, • * * but, you see, I only thought of my repartee some eight, hours afterward, when I was lying in bed. and I am soijy to own that a great numl>er of my best bon mots have been made in that way.” Dr. Holmes suggestively records on the subject of mistakes and slips in writing

that he never finds them out until they are stereotyped, and then he thinks they rarely escape him. Southey once assigned as the reason for his not reading for the bar that he was*, so easily disconcerted; that the right answer to an argument never occurred to him immediately. “ I always find it at last, but it comes too late; a blockhead who speaks boldly can baffle me7 T A state of mind figitred in a modern poem : Speech, only quick to blush its own delay, Made me « fool, when fools hud their own way, And uwkward-silent when conceit was loud. Charlotte Bronte relates how Mr. Thackeray met her at the door at the close of one of his readings, and frankly asked her what she thought of it; iuid how, liking his naivete , she was entirely disposed to E raise him, having plenty of praise in her eart, “but, alas! no word on my lips. Who has words at the right moment? I stammered out some lame expressions”— and doubtless hit on some neat and pithv eulogium soon after his back w r as turned. The good dame in one of Mrs. Haskell's fictions is speaking for thousands when she says of the rector and his wife that they “ both talk so much as to knock one down, like; and it’s not till they have gone and one’s a little at peace that one can think there are things one might have said on one’s own side of the question.” And so agai* John Sereolaske, introduced by Philip van Artevelde as our ‘‘sagacious friend”—than whom a better counselor need not be, if only' he have full scope beforehand to ponder and devise what to say; “ but ask him on the sudden” a simple enough question, and— Confounded will he stand Till livelier tongues from emptier heads have spoken; Then on the morrow to a tittle know What should have been his answer.