Cressida.--So do all men, unless they are drunk, sick, or have no legs.

 

    TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. 

 

Charles Morton, whom we have somewhat abruptly introduced to our readers, and exhibited for two or three chapters, without much explanation, was the only surviving child of a wealthy merchant in one of the sea-ports in the southern part of Massachusetts. He had received a liberal education, as a collegiate course of studies is at present, and in many instances most absurdly, called. Morton could, however, lay a just claim to be called liberally educated. He went to college without contemplating to pursue either of the three learned professions, but merely to acquire a more intimate acquaintance with the classics, history, belles lettres, and mathematics, than it was then supposed he could obtain elsewhere. People begin to think differently at the present period, and have a faint sort of notion that a boy can become qualified for the every day duties of life, or for practice in the three professions, without having received a diploma from a college, exclusively controlled in all its attitudes and relations by one particular sect of religion, or passing four years of "toil and trouble" in another university, where he is kept wallowing and smothering in the darkness of metaphysics or the more abstruse and higher! branches of mathematics; both sciences as utterly useless to him in any situation of life as a knowledge of the precise language that the devil tempted Eve in, and which some ecclesiastical writers have laboured to prove was High Dutch. I have been several times to different parts of the East Indies, and on more than one voyage have kept a reckoning out and home, assisted in taking lunar observations and those for determining the time and variation of the compass, and without knowing any more of algebra, fluxions, or conic sections, than a dog knows about his father.

 

After Morton had had the sacred A. B. "tailed on" to his name at a grand sanhedrim of solemn blacked-gowned fools, sagely called a commencement, because a youngster there finishes his studies, he felt a strong desire to visit "the round world and them that dwell therein," and, like many New England youth, not only then but within my own observation and time, and before the signature of the august "praeses" was dry on his sheep-skin diploma, was entered as an under graduate in a college of a somewhat different description--the forecastle of a large brig bound on a trading voyage up the Mediterranean--a school not one whit inferior to old Harvard itself for morality, and one where a man, with his eyes and ears open, might acquire information fifty times more valuable than any that could be drilled into him at any learned seminary whatever--a knowledge, namely, of the world and of human nature.

 

This habit, if it can be called one, of exchanging the quiet of a college room for the bustle and privations of a sea-life, is not near so prevalent now as it was several years since; and yet I have known many instances, and have repeatedly met, in merchantmen and men of war, men who have received a collegiate education, and have known one case, on board of an English line-of-battle ship, the Superb, of a dissenting minister, a foretopman, who could clear away a foul topsail-clewline, or explain an obscure passage in Scripture, with equal facility and address, and was both a smart seaman and a smart preacher:

 

 

"As some rats, of amphibious nature,

Are either for the land or water."

 

 

It is a pity our professional men do not travel more, especially clergymen, who, though generally learned men, are not deep in the knowledge of their own species. Of course I do not apply this remark to the Methodist clergy; as their vagabond life makes them but too well acquainted with the weaknesses of one portion of the human race, while the alarming and arbitrary dominion they thereby acquire over the minds, bodies, and estates of both sexes, is beautifully illustrated in the trial, not many years since, of a reverend gentleman of oil of tansy and hay-stack celebrity.

 

Morton's first voyage was rather a long one, but it introduced him to the most interesting portion of the world, the nations bordering upon the Mediterranean, while his knowledge of the Latin language was of no small advantage to him in acquiring a knowledge of the Spanish and Italian--an advantage that he certainly did not think of, when he was plodding through Virgil and Horace, Cicero and Tacitus. He returned from his first voyage a thorough practical seaman, and more than tolerably acquainted with European languages. He rose in his profession, and might at the time we introduced him have commanded a ship; but a sudden desire to go at least one whaling voyage seized him, and a whaling he accordingly went. In person Morton was above the middling height, some inches above it, in short he had attained the altitude of five feet eight inches--my own height to a fraction. Like most young men born in New England, and who choose a seafaring life, his frame had acquired a robustness and solidity, his countenance a healthy brown, his chest a depth, and his shoulders a breadth, that are each and all considered--and with justice--by the present generation, as irrefragable proofs and marks of vulgarity. But folks thought otherwise thirty years since, and, however incredible it may appear, there are actually now in existence a great many painters, sculptors, anatomists, and perhaps as many as a dozen women, who persist............