A Plea for Old Cap Collier

A Plea for Old Cap Collier

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A Plea for Old Cap Collier by Irvin S. Cobb

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A Plea for Old Cap Collier

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Book Excerpt

being considered for president of Yale--no, Harvard. He would know too much to be president of Yale.

Then there was the familiar instance of the Spartan youth who having stolen a fox and hidden it inside his robe calmly stood up and let the animal gnaw his vitals rather than be caught with it in his possession. But, why? I ask you, why? What was the good of it all? What object was served? To begin with, the boy had absconded with somebody else's fox, or with somebody's else fox, which is undoubtedly the way a compiler of school readers would phrase it. This, right at the beginning, makes the morality of the transaction highly dubious. In the second place, he showed poor taste. If he was going to swipe something, why should he not have swiped a chicken or something else of practical value?

We waive that point, though, and come to the lack of discretion shown by the fox. He starts eating his way out through the boy, a messy and difficult procedure, when merely by biting an aperture in the tunic h

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A frequently funny essay on the advantages of trash literature over the real thing. The author is stuck in an oceanside hotel with nothing to read, and picks up and old Fifth Reader. It leads him to reminisce about the required and forbidden reading of his childhood.
It is similar to Twain's, Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences, though Twain's scalpel is sharper.