Графични страници
PDF файл
ePub

scorn and vanity-which are in fact much the same; for contempt is nothing but egotism turned sour-for the requisite supply, I say, of our social wants (Reviews, Anecdotes of Living Authors, Table-talk, and such like provender,) it will suffice if I hereby confess, that with rare exceptions these friends of mine were all born and bred before the birth of Common Sense by the obstetric skill of Mr Locke, nay, prior to the first creation of intellectual Light in the person of Sir Isaac Newton-which latter event (we have Mr Pope's positive assurance of the fact) may account for its universal and equable diffusion at present, the Light not having had time to collect itself into individual luminaries, the future suns, moons, and stars of the mundus intelligibilis. This, however, may be hoped for on or soon after the year 1870, which, if my memory does not fail me, is the date apocalyptically deduced by the Reverend G. S. Faber, for the commencement of the Millennium.

But though my prudential reserve on these points must subtract from my forces numerically, this does not abate my reliance on the sufficing strength of those that remain. No! with confidence and secular pride I affirm, there is no age you could suggest, the characteristic of which is not to be found in the present-that we are the quintessence of all past ages, rather than an age of our own. You recommend, you say, the Dark Ages; and that the present boasts to be the contrary. Indeed? I appeal then to the oracle that pronounces Socrates the most enlightened of men, because he professed himself to be in the dark. The converse, and the necessary truth of the converse, are alike obvious: Besides, as already hinted, in time all light must needs be in the dark, as having neither reflection nor absorption; yet may, nevertheless, retain its prenomen without inconsistency, by a slight change in the last syllable, by a mere-for "ed" read "ing." For whatever scruples may arise as to its being an enlightened age, there can be no doubt that it is an enlightening one-an era of enlighteners, from the Gas Light Company to the dazzling Illuminati in the Temple of Reasonnot forgetting the diffusers of light from the Penny-Tract-Pedlary, nor the numberless writers of the small,

but luminous works on arts, trades, and sciences, natural history, and astronomy, all for the use of children from three years old to seven, interwoven with their own little biographies and nursery journals, to the exclusion of Goody Two Shoes, as favouring superstition, by one party; and of Jack the Giant-killer, as a suspicious parody on David and Goliah, by the other.

Far, far around, where'er my eye-balls

stray,

By Lucifer! 'tis all one milky way!
Or, as Propria Quæ Maribus, speaking
(more prophetico, et proleptice,) of the
Irradiators of future (i. e. our) Times
long ago observed, they are common,
quite a common thing!

Sunt commune. Parens, Authorque; In-
fans, Adolescens ;

Dux; Exlex; bifrons; Bos, Fur, Sus atque Sacerdos.

to have made out my position. But if So far, at least, you will allow me by a dark age you mean an age concerning which we are altogether in the dark; and as, in applying this to our own, the Subject and Object, we and the age become identical and commutable terms; I bid adieu to all reasoning by implication, to all legerdemain of inferential logic, and at once bring notorious facts to bear out my assertion. Could Hecate herself, churning the night-damps for an eyesalve, wish for an age more in the dark respecting its own character, than we have seen exemplified in our next-door neighbour, the Great Nation, when, on the bloodless altar of Gallic freedom, she took the oath of peace and good-will to all mankind, and abjured all conquests but those of reason? Or in the millions throughout the continent, who believed her? Or than in the two component parties in our own illustrious isle, the one of whom hailed her revolution as "a stupendous monument of human wisdom and human happiness ;" and the other calculated on its speedy overthrow by an act of bankruptcy, to be brought about or accelerated by a speculation in assignats, corn, and Peruvian bark? Or than in the more recent constitutional genius of the Peninsula

What time it rose, o'er-peering, from be

hind,

The mountainous experience, high up.
Of Gallic legislation-
heaped

and "taught by others' harms," a very ungallic respect for the more ancient code, vulgarly called the Ten Commandments, left the lands as it found them, content with excluding their owners-owners of four parts out of five, at least, the church and nobility-from all share in their representation? Or when the same genius, the emblem and vice-gerent of the present age in Spain, poising the old indigenous loyalty with the newlyimported state-craft, secured to the monarch the revenue of a caliph, with the power of a constable? But Piedmont! but Naples-the Neapolitans! the age of patriotism, the firm, the disinterested the age of good faith and hard fighting-of liberty or death! -yea! and the age of newspapers and speeches in Britain, France, and Germany-the uncorrupted I mean; (and the rest, you know, as mere sloughs, rather than a living and component part, need not be taken into the calculation)-were of the same opinion! A dream for Momus to wake out of with laughing!

But enough! You are convinced on this point, at least you retract your objection. And now what else? Does my history require, in the way of correspondency, a time of wonders, a revolutionary period? Does it demand a non-descript age? Should it, above all (as I myself admit that it should,) be laid in an age "without a name, and which, therefore, it will be charity in me to christen by the name of the Polypus? An age, where the inmost may be turned outside-and "Inside out and outside in," I at one time intended for the title of my history-where the very tails, inspired by the spirit of independence, shoot out heads of their own? (Thanks, with three times three, to Ellis and Trembley, the first historiographers of the Polypus realm, for this beautiful emblem and natural sanction of the SOVEREIGNTY OF THE PEOPLE!) All, all are to be found in the age we live in-whose attributes to enumerate would exhaust the epithets of an Orphic hymn, and beggar the Gradus ad Parnassum!-All, all, and half besides the feasability of which I first learnt during the last war, at two public dinners severally given, one by Scottish, and the other by Irish patriots, where each assigned to their countrymen three-fourths of our whole naval

and military success. In each case, a priori, the thing was possible, nay, probable; at each meeting the assertion passed nem. con. though there were eye-witnesses, if not pars-maximists present-and both were so much in earnest, that I could not find it in my heart to disbelieve either. But this is a digression. Or it may be printed as a parenthesis. All close thinkers, you know, are apt to be parenthetic.

One other point, and I conclude. You are a mighty man for parallel passages, Dick! a very ferret in hunting out the pedigree and true parentage of a thought, phrase, or image. So far from believing in equivocal generation, or giving credit to any idea as an Autochthon, i. e. as self-sprung out of the individual brain, or natale solum, whence (like Battersea cabbages, Durham mustard, Stilton cheese, &c.) it took its market name, I verily suspect you of the heresy of the PræAdamites! Nay, I would lay a wager that the Thesis for your Doctor's Degree, should you ever descend from your correctorship of typical errata to that of misprints in the substance, would be: quod fontes sint nullibi. In self-defence, therefore, by warrantable anticipation,-a pregnant principle, Richard! by virtue of which, (as you yourself urged at the time) the dema gogues that threw open the election of the Mayor of Garrett, hitherto vested in the blackguards of Brentford exclusively, to the blackguards of the country at large, exposed us to an invasion from the aristocracies of Tunis and Algiers! N.B. Clarendon and the Quarterly are of the same opinionprospectively, I say, for informers, and informatively for the reader, Í make known the following:

Some ten or twelve years ago, as the Vassals of the Sun, i. e. the Bodies, count their time, being in the world of spirits, as above mentioned, and in the Parnassian quarter, in literary chit-chat with Lucian, Aristophanes, Swift, Rabelais, and Moliere, over a glass of green gooseberry wine, (since the departure of the last-named spirit, articles of French produce have been declared contraband in the spiritual Parnassia)-I read them a rough preexistent, or as we say here, copy, of Maxilian. When who should be standing behind my chair, and peeping over my shoulder, (I had a glimpse of his

face when it was too late, and I never saw a more Cervantic one) but a spirit from Thought-land, (North Germany I should say) who, it seems, had taken a trip thither, during the furlow of a magnetic crisis, into which his Larva had been thrown by Nic, senior, M. D.* and a Mesmerist still in great practice. Well! there would have been no harm in this, for in such cases it was well known, that the spirit, on its return to the body, used to forget all that had happened to it during its absence, and became as ignorant of all the wondrous things it had seen, said, heard and done, as Balaam's ass. Γίνεται δ ̓ αὖ ὄνος ὁ ὄνος ἐξαγγελιζόμενος. But unluckily, and only a few months before, Mr Van Ghert, (who, as privy counsellor to the King of the Netherlands, ought to have known better) had, by metaphysical skill, discovered the means of so softening the waxen tablet in the patient's cranium, that it not only received, but retained, the impression from the movements of the soul, during her trance, re-suggesting them to the patient sooner or later, sometimes as dreams, and sometimes as original fancies. Thus it chanced, that the great idea, and too many of the sub-ideas, of my ideal work awoke, in the consciousness of this Prussian or Saxon, Frederic Miller is the

[ocr errors][merged small]

nality had suffered on more than one former occasion, was part in fault! But, be this as it may, so it chanced, however, that before I had put a single line on paper, (my time being, indeed, occupied in determining which of ten or twelve pre-existents I should transcribe first) out came the surreptitious duplicate, with such changes in names, scene of action, thought, images, and language, as the previous associations, and local impressions of the unweeting plagiarist had clothed my ideas in. But what I take most to heart, it so nearly concerning the credit of Great Britain, is, that it came out in another country, and in high Dutch ! I foresee what my anticipator's compatriots will say that admitting the facts as here related, yet the Anselmus is no mere transcript or version, but at the lowest a free imitation of the Maxilian: or rather that the English and German works are like two paintings by different masters from the same sketch, the credit of which sketch, secundum leges et consuetudines mundi corpuscularis, must be assigned to the said Frederic Miller by all incarnate spirits, held at this present time in their senses, and as long as they continue therein; but which I shall claim to myself, if ever I get out of them. And so farewell, dear Corrector! for I must now adjust myself to retire bowing, face or frontispiece, towards THE READER, with the respect due to so impartial and patient an Arbiter from the AUTHOR.

MAXILIAN.

Flight I.

It was on a Whitsunday afternoon the clocks striking five, and while the last stroke was echoing in the now empty churches-and just at the turn of one of the open streets in the outskirts of Dublin-that a young man, swinging himself round the corner, ran full butt on a basket of cakes and apples, which an old barrow-wife was offering for sale; and with such force, that the contents shot abroad, like the

water-rays of a trundled mop, and furnished extempore-on the spur of the occasion, as we say-a glorious scramble to the suburban youngsters, that were there making or marring this double holiday. But what words can describe the desperate outburst, the blaze of sound, into which the beldam owner of the wares exploded! or the "boil and bubble" of abuse and imprecation, with which the neigh

See "Archiv des thierischen Magnetismus," edited by Professor Eschenmiyer and Co. I mentioned one of Dr Nic's cases, with a few of Doctors Kicser's and Nasse's, and of Mr Van Ghert's, to Lemuel Gulliver; but I found him strangely incredulous. He (he said) had never seen any thing like it. But what is that to the pur pose? What does any one man's experience go for, in proving a negative at least? I could not even learn from him, that he had ever met with a single Meteorolithe, or sky-stone, on its travels from the volcanos of Jupiter, or the moon, to our earth.

bour gossips, starting from their gingerbread and whisky stands, and clustering round him, astounded the ears and senses of the ill-starred aggressor! A tangle-knot of adders, with all its heads protruded towards him, would not have been more terrific. Reeling with surprise and shame, with the look and gesture of a child, that, having whirled till it was giddy-blind, is now trying to stop itself. he held out his purse, which the grinning scold with one snatch transferred to her own pocket. At the sight of this peaceoffering, the circle opened, and made way for the young man, who instantly pursued his course with as much celerity as the fulness of the street, and the dread of a second mishap, would permit. The flame of Irish wrath soon languishes and goes out, when it meets with no fuel from resistance. The rule holds true in general. But no rule is of universal application; and it was far from being verified by the offended principal in this affray. Unappeased, or calling in her fury only to send it out again condensed into hate, the implacable beldam hobbled after the youth, determined that though she herself could not keep up with him, yet that her curses should, as long at least as her throat and lungs could supply powder for their projection. Alternately pushing her limbs onward, and stopping not so much to pant as to gain a fulcrum for a more vehement scream, she continued to pursue her victim with "vocal shafts," as Pindar has it, or ὡς πρῖνος ἐμπρησθεις i. e. spitting fire like a wet candle-wick, as Aristophanes !

And well if this had been all-an intemperance, a gust of grazy cankered old age, not worth recording. But, alas! these jets and flashes of execration no sooner reached the ears of the fugitive, but they became articulate sentences, the fragments, it seemed, of some old spell, or wicked witchrhyme :

Ay!-run, run, run,
Off flesh, off bone!

Thou Satan's son,

Thou Devil's own!

Into the glass
Pass

The glass! the glass,
The crystal glass!

Though there is reason to believe that this transformation of sound, like the burst of a bomb, did not take ef

fect till it had reached its final destination, the youth's own meatus auditorius; and that for others, the scold's passionate outcry did not verbally differ from the usual outcries of a scold in a passion: Yet there was a something in the yell and throttle of the basket-woman's voice so horrific, that the general laugh, which had spread round at the young man's expense, was suspended. The passengers halted, as wonder-struck; and when they moved on, there was a general murmur of disgust and aversion.

The student MAXILIAN-for he it was, and no other, who, following his nose, without taking counsel of his eyes, had thus plunged into conflict with the old woman's wares-though he could attach no sense or meaning to the words he heard, felt himself, nevertheless, seized with involuntary terror, and quickened his steps, to get as soon as possible out of the crowd, who were making their way to the pleasure-gardens, the Vauxhall of the Irish metropolis, and whose looks and curiosity converged towards him. His anxious zig-zag, however, marked the desire of haste, rather than its attainment: and still as he pushed and winded through the press of the various gay parties, all in holiday finery, he heard a whispering and murmuring, "The poor young man! Out on the frantic old hag!" The ominous voice and the wicked looks which the beldam seemed to project, together with the voice and we are all, more or less, superstitious respecting looks— had given a sort of sentimental turn to this ludicrous incident. The females regarded the youth with increasing sympathy: and in his well-formed countenance, (to which the expression of inward distress lent an additional interest,) and his athletic growth, they found an apology, and, for the moment, a compensation, for the awkwardness of his gait, and the more than most unfashionable cut of his clothes.

It can never be proved, that no one of the Seven Sleepers was a tailor by trade; neither do I take on myself to demonstrate the affirmative. But this I will maintain, that a tailor, disenthralled from a trance of like duration, with confused and fragmentary recollections of the fashions at the time he fell asleep, blended with the images hastily abstracted from the dresses that

passed before his eyes when he first reopened them, might, by dint of conjecture, have come as near to a modish suit, as the ambulatory artist had done, who made his circuit among the recesses of Macgillicuddy's Reeks, and for whose drapery the person of our luckless student did at this present time perform the office of Layman.* A pepper-and-salt frock, that might be taken for a greatcoat,-but whether docked, or only out-grown, was open to conjecture; a black satin waistcoat, with deep and ample flaps, rimmed with rose-colour embroidery; green plush smallclothes, that on one limb formed a tight compress on the knee joint, and on the other buttoned midway round the calf of a manly and well-proportioned leg. Round his neck a frilled or laced collar with a ribbon round it, sufficiently alien indeed from the costume below, yet the only article in the inventory and sum total of his attire that harmonized, or, as our painters say, was in some keeping with the juvenile bloom, and [mark, gentle Reader! I am going to raise my style an octave or more]-and ardent simplicity of his face; or with the auburn ringlets that tempered the lustre of his ample forehead !-Like those fleecy cloudlets of amber, which no writer or lover of sonnets but must some time or other, in some sweet Midsummer Night's Dream of poetic or sentimental sky-gazing, have seen astray on the silver brow of the celestial Dian! Or as I myself, once on a time, in a dell of lazy Sicily, down a stony side † of which a wild vine was creeping tortuous, saw the tendrils of

the vine pencilling with delicate sha→ dows the brow of a projecting rock of purest Alabaster, that here gleamed through from behind the tendrils, and here glittered as the interspace.

Yes, gentle Reader !-the diction, similes, and metaphors, of the preceding paragraph, are somewhat motley and heterogene. I am myself aware of it. But such was the impression it was meant to leave. A harmony that neither existed in the original, nor is to be found in any portraiture thereof, presents itself in the exact correspondence of the one to the other. My friend Panourgos, late of the Poultry Counter, but at present in the King's Bench,- -a descendant of the Rabelaisean Panurge, but with a trick of Friar John in his composition-acted on this principle. He sent an old coat to be dyed; the dyer brought it home blue and black: he beat the dyer black and blue : and this, he justly observed, produced a harmony. Discordia concors!-the motto, gentle Reader! prefixed by the masters of musical counterpoint, to the gnarled and quarrelsome notes which the potent fist of the Royal Amazon, our English Queen Bess, boxed into love and good neighbourhood on her own virginals. Besides, I wished to leave your fancy a few seconds longer in the tyring-room. And here she comes! The whole figure of the student-She has dressed the character to a hair. You have it now complete before your mind's eye, as if she had caught it flying.

And in fact, with something like the feeling of one flying in his sleep,

The jointed image, or articulated doll, as large, in some instances, as a full-grown man or woman, which artists employ for the arrangement and probation of the drapery and attitudes of the figures in their paintings, is called Layman. POSTSCRIPT. Previously to his perusal of the several particulars of the student's tout-ensemble, I am anxious to inform the reader, that having looked somewhat more heedfully into my documents, I more than suspect that the piece, since it came from the hands of the Sartor of Macgillicuddy, had been most licentiously interpolated by genii of more mischievous propensities-the boni socii of the Etruscan and Samothracian breed; the "Robin Good Fellows" of England; the "Good Neighbours" of North Britain; and the "Practical Jokers" of all places, but of special frequency in clubs, schools, and universities.

The author asks credit for his having, here and elsewhere, resisted the temptation of substituting "whose" for "of which"-the misuse of the said pronoun relative "whose," where the antecedent neither is, nor is meant to be represented as, personal or even animal, he would brand, as one among the worst of those mimicries of poetic diction, by which imbecile writers fancy they elevate their prose-would, but that, to his vexation, he meets with it, of late, in the compositions of men that least of all need such artifices, and who ought to watch over the purity and privileges of their mothertongue with all the jealousy of high-priests, set apart by nature for the pontificate. Poor as our language is, in terminations and inflections significant of the genders, to destroy the few it possesses, is most wrongful.

« ПредишнаНапред »