But among other plunders of the
imagination, they are going to rob us of the unicorn. For two thousand
years and upwards, a short date in the history of human quarrel about
nothings, the sages of this world have been doubting and deciding on the
existence of this showy creature. Pliny would have sworn to his having all
but seen it, and he would have sworn that too, if any one had taken the
trouble to ask him. Kircher, and a few of the German naturalists, and
black-letter fools--every naturalist and black-letter man being more or
less a fool--dug up the question out of the pit of Teutonic dulness, and
ever since, every traveller beyond the Needles, has had his theory, which
was quite as good as his fact, and his fact, which was quite as good as
his theory.
The topic perished in Germany, being stifled under professor Bopp and
Sanscrit, Professor Semler and Scepticism, Professor Jahn and Jacobinism,
and the whole vast feather-bed suffocation of Professor Kotzebue and
Comedy. But in England it was endeared to us by associations "deep in
every truly British heart," as the chairmen of our tavern parties say over
their third bottle.
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