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TRELAWNY'S LETTERS 123
we should have no history worth reading.
After all, men, and women too for that matter,
have got to stand on their own feet. We are
not our grandmothers' keepers. No one will
think at all the worse of Mr. Smith because
some lively diarist has hinted that his great
maiden aunt was no such thing : neither will
any one think much the worse of the old lady.
Besides, it is easy for Mr. Smith to say that
the diarist was a liar who couldn't possibly
have known anything about it. The past
belongs to the present,
and the dead are in
some sort public property. It is not well,
we think, that history should be impoverished,
and an instrument of culture blunted, out of
regard for the feelings of stray nephews and
nieces, and we commend to editors and
biographers the saying of that undergraduate
"
who to his friend's complaint Hi, Johnnie,
you've shot my father," replied, with a truly
British sense of give and take
" Never mind,
have a shot at mine."
Poor Claire became devout in old age and
provoked a comprehensive growl from Shelley's
untamed friend :
" I am not one of that great
sect whose vanity, credulity, and superstition
makes them believe in God the devil souls
and immortality." Yet with what cheerful
wisdom he laughs away the fancy, which
threatened to become an obsession, that