When I began to carry out my conception and to write
in my assumed character, I found myself in a strait between two perils.
On the one hand, I was in danger of being carried beyond the limit of my
own opinions, or at least of that temper with which every man should
speak his mind in print, and on the other I feared the risk of seeming
to vulgarize a deep and sacred conviction. I needed on occasion to rise
above the level of mere _patois_, and for this purpose conceived the
Rev. Mr. Wilbur, who should express the more cautious element of the New
England character and its pedantry, as Mr. Biglow should serve for its
homely common-sense vivified and heated by conscience. The parson was to
be the complement rather than the antithesis of his parishioner, and I
felt or fancied a certain humorous element in the real identity of the
two under a seeming incongruity. Mr. Wilbur's fondness for scraps of
Latin, though drawn from the life, I adopted deliberately to heighten
the contrast. Finding soon after that I needed some one as a mouth-piece
of the mere drollery, for I conceive that true humor is never divorced
from moral conviction, I invented Mr.
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