The Canton mail. [volume] (Canton, Miss.) 18??-1882, 1875-06-26
After-Thonghts.

A writer says: How very often il
happens in conversation, al bernard
Barton remarks id one of his letters to
Crabbe, that the thing you might and
should have said occurs to you just a
little too late. He draws on his own
experience for the record of many long
and animated discussion with friend
after which he called to mind some pithy
argument that would have smashed his
opponents case, and which, afirms the
gentle Quaker poet, 81 should have
been almost sure to have had at my
fingers ends had been quietly arguing
the matter on paper in my own study. !"
Cowper complains that when he wrote q
letter to any but familiar friend, no
soonet had he despatched it than he was
sure to reoollect how much better he
could have made it. Horace Walpole
opens his epistle with the remark that
mere answers that are not made to let
ters 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. Van
ity, as we'll as vexation of spirit.
Little Henry Esmond, when pointed
out by saucy Trix to my Lord as essay
ing his prayers to mamma" could only
look very silly. If he invented half
dozen of speeches in teply, that was
months afterward as it was, he had
never asword in answer" Mr.. Thack-
eray's writings offer divers illustrations
of the same kind. There lis Mr.. Batch
elor, for instance, when impertinently
-quiszed 10 his face by that supercilious
Capt. Baker. "'Sirr says I; sir was
all I could say. The fact is, could
have replied with somethingremarkably
meat and cutting, which would have
transfixed the languid little jackanapes,
but, ysu see, only thought
OF my repartee some eight hours after
wsrl, when I vas lying, in bed, and
am sorry to own that agreaS humber of
my best bon nsots 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
thinks they rarely escape him. Southey
once assigned as the reason for his not
reading for the bar that he was so easily
disconnected that the right answer to
argument never Occurred to him i'm
mediately. 81 always find it at last,
but it comes too late blockhead who
speaks boldly can battle me-" A state
of mind figured in a modern poem:
"Speech, only quick to blush it's own delay,
Made me fool when fools had their own way,
And awkward-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 and
how, liking his ndivete she was entirely
disposed to praise him, having plenty
of praise in her heart, "but, alas no
word on my lips. Who has words at
the right moment? I ssammered out
some lame expressions and doubtless
hit on some neat and pithy eulogium
soon after his back was turned.
The good dame in one of Mrs. Cas-
kell's fctions 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 ones a little at
peace, that one can think there are
things one might have said-on ones own
side of the question" And so again
John Sercolaske, introduced by Philip
van Artevelde as our "sagacious friend"
than whom a better counsellor need
not be, if only he have full scope be-
forehand to ponder and devise what to
say; but task him on the sudden" a
simple enough question, and
"-Confounaed will he stand
Till ivelier tongues from enptier heads have
spoken;
Then on the morrow to . title known
W1sta In< mild hopa hoas, n aSaa