Ponkapog Papers

Thomas Bailey Aldrich wrote Ponkapog Papers, which the opening note calls miscellaneous notes and essays. The opening note speaks of the modesty with which Ponkapog assumes to being even a village, and calls the little Massachusetts settlement, nestled under the wing of the Blue Hills, one with no illusions concerning itself. The text says that while Pepys was filling those small octavo pages with his perplexing cipher he never once suspected that he was adding a photographic portrait of himself to the world's gallery of immortals.

The writer says that in the process of dusting the study, the other morning, the maid replaced an engraving of Philip II. of Spain up-side down on the mantel-shelf. A piece headed Writers and Talkers says that, as a class, literary men do not shine in conversation. A passage on Robert Herrick says he is a great little poet, that the brevity of his poems, for he wrote nothing de longue haleine, would place him among the minor singers, and that his workmanship places him among the masters.