nature of all sweet things,-of beauty, of youth, of life, of all those fair shows of the world, of which music seems to be the voice, and of whose transitory nature it reminds us most when it is most beautiful, because it is then that we most regret our mortality. We do not, it is true, say this to ourselves. We are not conscious of the reason; that is to say, we do not feel it with knowingness; but we do feel it, for the tears are moved. And how many exquisite criticisms of tears and laughter do not whole audiences make at plays, though not one man in fifty shall be able to put down his reasons for it on paper? XLVII.-DANCING AND DANCERS. WHILE Tory genius boasts of its poetic Wilson, and ornithology of another, and the fine arts of Wilson "the English Claude," the minor graces insist upon having their Wilson too in the person of the eminent Mr. Thomas Wilson, author of several dramatic pieces, and inductor of ladies and gentlemen into the shapely and salutary art of dancing. This old, though doubtless at the same time ever-young acquaintance of ours, who has done us the honour for several years past of making us acquainted with his movements, and inviting us to his balls, which it has not been our good fortune to be able to attend, always sends us, with his invitations, a placard of equal wit and dimensions, in which he takes patriotic occasion to set forth the virtues of his art. He does not affect to despise its ordinary profits, income-wards. That would be a want of candour, unbefitting the entireness of his wisdom. On the contrary, dancing being a liberal art, he is studious to inculcate an equally liberal acknowledgment on the part of those who are indebted to it. But being a man of a reflective turn of leg, and great animal spirits, he omits no opportunity of showing how good his art is for the happiness as well as the graces of his countrymen-how it renders them light of spirit as well as body, shakes melancholy out of their livers, and will not at all suffer them to be gouty. Nay, he says it is their own faults if they grow old. We hardly dare to introduce, abruptly, the remarks on this head which form the commencement of his present year's Exposé. But the energy of Mr. Wilson's philanthropy forces its way through his elegances; the good to be done is a greater thing in his mind, even than the graces with which he invests it; and in answer to his question, "Why don't everybody dance?" he says in a passion of sincerity which sweeps objection away with it,-"Because the English prefer the pleasures of the table and sedentary amusements, with their gout, apoplexy, shortness of breath, spindle-shanks, and rum-puncheon bellies," (pardon us, O Bacchus of Anacreon!) "to the more wholesome and healthy recreation of dancing. If you ask a person of fifty (says he) to take a dance, the usual reply is, 'My dancing days are gone by; it's not fit amusement for people of my time of life,' and such like idle cant: for idle cant it really is, as these pretences are either made as excuses for idleness, or to comply with the usual fastidious customs of the day. They manage things better in France, as Yorick says; for it would be quite as difficult, amongst that polite and social people, to find a person of fifty who did not dance, as it is in gloomy, cold, calculating Old England, to find one who has good sense enough to laugh at these fastidious notions, with a sufficient stock of social animal spirits to share in this polite and exhilarating amusement. Moreover, if we wanted a sanction to continue to dance as long as we are able, I could here give a list (had I room) of a hundred eminent persons who did not consider it a disgrace to dance, even at a very advanced age; amongst the number, Socrates, one of the wisest men and greatest philosophers that ever lived, used to dance for his exercise and amusement when he was upwards of seventy. Read this, ye gourmands and cardplayers of fifty; and if you are wise, an would leave the gout and a thousand other ills beside you, come and sport a toe with me, at 18, Kirby-street Hatton-garden: For you'll meet many there, who to doctors ne'er go, Truly, we fear that the tip-end of Mr. Wilson's indignant bow strikes hard upon many a venerable gout; and that these dancing philosophers of Kirby-street have the advantage of a great many otherwise sage people who take pills instead of exercise, and think to substitute powders and lotions for those more ancient usages, yclept the laws of the universe. Such, as Mr. Wilson tells us, was the philosophy of Socrates. There can be no doubt of it; it was the philosophy of all his countrymen, the Greeks, with whom dancing formed a part of their very worship, and who had figures accordingly, fit to go to church and thank Heaven with. Bacchus himself, with them, was a dancer, and a slender-waisted young gentleman. Such was also the philosophy of Mr. Wilson's brother poet, Soame Jenyns, a lively old gentleman of the last century, who wrote a poem on the "Art of Dancing," from which Mr. Wilson should give us some extracts in his next placard; (we wish we had it by us ;) and what is curious, and shows how accustomed these saltatory sages are to consider the interests of the whole human being, spiritual as well as bodily, Mr. Jenyns had a poetical precursor on that subject, who was no less a personage than a My grave lord-keeper led the brawls; Sir Christopher bequeathed his name to Hatton-garden; so that Mr. Wilson resides in a fit neighbourhood, and doubtless has visions of cavaliers and maids of honour in ruffs, "sporting their toes" through his dreams by night. locks; an Anacreon in broad-cloth. Some W. Well, horseback is a kind of dancing. W. Well, walking is dancing too; that is to say, good walking. You know, my dear sir, people are said to "walk a minuet." Seer. But they say dancers are not good walkers. W. How! Dancers not good walkers!! It is true, I must allow in candour, that some professional dancers are apt to turn out their toes a little too much; but not all, my dear sir-not the best: and, as to dancers in general, I will affirm, meo periculo, as the philosopher says, they walk exquisitely-à merveille. Come and see my dancers walking into the ball-room, or my new dance of the "Rival Beauties;" "thirty young ladies," sir, all moving to the sweet and peaceful battle at once. See how they walk, my dear sir. You would never forget it. Seer. I shall never forget it, as it is, Mr. Wilson. I see it, in imagination, painted in the beautiful red letters of your placard, and do not wonder that you are a man in request for Richmond parties, and records of it in verse. Here Mr. Wilson finishes the dialogue with a bow to which it would be bad taste and an anti-climax to reply. There is a final and triumphant silence of eloquence, to which nothing can be said. To return to the matter of age. There can be no doubt that dancers of fifty are a very different sort of quinquagenarians from sitters of fifty, and that men of the same age often resemble each other in no other respect. "The same is not the same." Some people may even be said to have begun life over again, at Our artist's vindication of the juvenility of a time when the dissipated and the sullen are dancers at fifty, reminds us of a pleasant real- preparing to give it up. It is not necessary ization we experienced the other day of a to mention such cases as those of Old Parr. stage joke-nay, of a great improvement on it, Marmontel-a man of letters, of taste and -a Romance of Real Life! In one of Colman's fancy, and therefore, it is to be presumed, of farces, an old man hearing another called old, no very coarse organisation-married at fiftyand understanding he was only forty, exclaims six, and, after living happily with a family "Forty! quite a boy!" We heard this opinion born to him, died at the age of seventy-seven. pronounced upon a man of sixty by an old gen-But, though a man of letters, and living at a tleman, who, we suppose, must be eighty, or thereabouts. It was in an omnibus, in which he was returning from a City dinner, jovial and toothless, his rosy gills gracing his white period when there was great license of manners, to which his own had formed no very rigid exception he had led, upon the whole, a natural life, and was temperate. Besides, 30 at a DANCING AND DANCERS. Nature is very indulgent to those who do not violently contradict her with artificial habits, excesses of the table, or sullen thoughts. She hates alike the extremes, not of cheerfulness, but of Comus and of Melancholy. A venerable peer of Norfolk, now living, married and had an heir born to his estate venerable age, which nobody thought of treating with jests of a certain kind; for he also had been a denizen of the natural world, and was as young, with good sense and exercise, as people of half his age younger than many. We remember the face -far of envying respect and astonishment with which the news son of was received by wit and honour about town" a perdeceased,) in whose company we happened to be at the moment, and who might have been (now his son three or four times over. 66 Query-at what age must a person take to venerable manners, and consent to look old if he does not feel so? Mr. Wilson will say, When he is forced to leave off dancing." And there is a definite notion in that. If any one, therefore, wishes to have precise ideas on this point, and behave himself as becomes his real, not his chronological time of life, we really think he cannot do better than study in Kirbystreet, or at Willis's, and learn to know at what age it becomes him to be reverend, or how long he may continue laughing at those who remonstrate with him because they hobble. Linnæus, in his Travels, gives an account-ludicrous in the eyes of us spectators of the staid and misgiving manners of people at the same time of life-of two Laplanders who accompanied him on some occasion-we forget what, but who carried bundles for him, and had otherwise reason for being tired, the way being long. One of them was fifty, the other considerably older; yet what did these old boys at the close of their journey, but, instead of sitting down and resting themselves, begin laughing and running about after one another, like a couple of antediluvian children, as if they had just risen! They wanted nothing but pinafores, and a mother remonstrating with them for not coming and having their hairs combed. of life when he is twenty, and (as lives go) he is so; though, when he comes to be twenty, A boy of ten thinks he shall be in the prime then to thirty-five, then to forty; and when, at length, he is forced to own himself no longer he shoves off his notion of the prime to thirty, young, he is at once astonished to think he has been young so long, and angry to find himself no younger. This would be hardly fair upon the indulgence of Nature, if Nature supplied us with education as well as existence, and the world itself did not manifestly take time to come to years of discretion. In the early ages of the world, the inability to lead artificial lives was the great cause of longevity; as in future ones, it is to be hoped, the appreciation of the natural life will bring men round night, and to sit after dinner " to it. It would have put the pastoral, patriarthe milk! chal people sadly out, to keep late hours at pushing about" Nature, in the mean time, acts with her usual good-natured instinct, and makes the best of a bad business; rather, let us say, produces it in order to produce a better, and to of the ill-health of modern times and the rich enable us to improve upon her early world. delicacy of its perceptions; so that we might She has even something good to say in behalf improving, even when she least appears to be be warranted in supposing that she is ever good pattern in some respects for that which so; and that your pastoral longevity, though a is to come, had but a poor milk-and-water mediate strugglers. At all events, the meameasure of happiness, compared with the wine and the intellectual movement of us intersure, somehow or other, may be equal-and the difference only a variety of sameness. And Nature, after all, still incites us to look forthere is as much comfort in that reflection, ward; and, whether it be for the sake of real and a great difficulty solved in it. Only or of apparent change, forward we must look, the true mode of keeping all our faculties in and look heartily, taking care to realise all action-all the inevitable thoughts given to the happiness we can, as we go. This seems this grave reflection we conclude our present dance under Mr. Wilson's patronage, gravely man, of past, present, and future; and with art, to all lovers of health, grace, and socias well as gaily recommending his very useful Most people are astonished, perhaps, as they advance beyond the period of youth and middle life, at not finding themselves still older; and if they took wise advantage of this astonishment, they would all live to a much greaterality. age. It is equally by not daring to be too young, nor consenting to be too old, that men keep themselves in order with Nature, and in heart with her. We kill ourselves before our time, with artificial irregularities and melancholy resentments. with late hours, and the table, and want of We hasten age exercise; and hate it, and make it worse when it comes, with bad temper and inactive regrets. Why do not people oftener get up dances at home, XLVIII. TWELFTH NIGHT. A STREET PORTRAIT. SHAKSPEARE'S PLAY. RECOLLECTIONS OF A TWELFTH NIGHT. CHRISTMAS goes out in fine style, with Twelfth Night. It is a finish worthy of the time. Christmas Day was the morning of the season; New Year's Day the middle of it, or noon; Twelfth Night is the night, brilliant with innumerable planets of Twelfth-cakes. The whole island keeps court; nay, all Christendom. All the world are kings and queens. Everybody is somebody else; and learns at once to laugh at, and to tolerate, characters different from his own, by enacting them. Cakes, characters, forfeits, lights, theatres, merry rooms, little holiday-faces, and, last not least, the painted sugar on the cakes, so bad to eat but so fine to look at, useful because it is perfectly useless except for a sight and a moral,all conspire to throw a giddy splendour over the last night of the season, and to send it to bed in pomp and colours, like a Prince. And not the least good thing in Twelfth Night is, that we see it coming for days beforehand, in the cakes that garnish the shops. We are among those who do not "like a surprise," except in dramas (and not too much of it even there, nor unprepared with expectation). We like to know of the good things intended for us. It adds the pleasure of hope to that of possession. Thus we eat our Twelfth-cake many times in imagination, before it comes. Every pastry-cook's shop we pass, flashes it upon us. Coming Twelfth-cakes cast their shadows before; if shadows they can be called, which shade have none; so full of colour are they, as if Titian had invented them. Even the little ragged boys, who stand at those shops by the hour, admiring the heaven within, and are destined to have none of it, get, perhaps, from imagination alone, a stronger taste of the beatitude, than many a richly-fed palate, which is at the mercy of some particular missing relish, -some touch of spice or citron, or a "leetle more egg. We believe we have told a story of one of those urchins before, but it will bear repetition, especially as a strong relish of it has come upon us, and we are tempted to relate it at greater length. There is nothing very wonderful or epigrammatic in it, but it has to do with the beatific visions of the pastry-shops. Our hero was one of those equivocal animal-spirits of the streets, who come whistling along, you know not whether thief or errand-boy, sometimes with bundle and sometimes not, in corduroys, a jacket, and a cap or bit of hat, with hair sticking through a hole in it. His vivacity gets him into scrapes in the street, and he is not ultra-studious of civility in his answers. If the man he runs against is not very big, he gives him abuse for abuse at once; if otherwise, he gets at a convenient distance, and then halloos out, "Eh, stupid!" or "Can't you see before you?" or "Go, and get your face washed." This last is a favourite saying of his, out of an instinct referable to his own visage. He sings "Hokee-pokee" and a "Shiny Night," varied occasionally with an uproarious "Rise, gentle Moon," or "Coming through the Rye." On winter evenings, you may hear him indulging himself, as he goes along, in a singular undulation of howl ;-a sort of gargle,—as if a wolf were practising the rudiments of a shake. This he delights to do more particularly in a crowded thoroughfare, as though determined that his noise should triumph over every other, and show how jolly he is, and how independent of the ties to good behaviour. If the street is a quiet one,and he has a stick in his hand (perhaps a hoop-stick), he accompanies the howl with a run upon the gamut of the iron rails. He is the nightingale of mud and cold. If he gets on in life, he will be a pot-boy. At present, as we said before, we hardly know what he is; but his mother thinks herself lucky if he is not transported. Well; one of these elves of the pavé-perplexers of Lord Mayors, and irritators of the police-was standing one evening before a pastry-cook's shop-window, flattening his nose against the glass, and watching the movements of a school-boy who was in the happy agony of selecting the best bun. He had stood there ten minutes before the boy came in, and had made himself acquainted with all the eatables lying before him, and wondered at the slowness, and apparent indifference, of jaws masticating tarts. His interest, great before, is now intense. He follows the new-comer's eye and hand, hither and thither. His own arm feels like the other's arm. He shifts the expression of his mouth and the shrug of his body, at every perilous approximation which the chooser makes to a second-rate bun. He is like a bowler following the nice inflections of the bias; for he wishes him nothing but success; the occasion is too great for envy; he feels all the generous sympathy of a knight of old, when he saw another within an ace of winning some glorious prize, and his arm doubtful of the blow. At length the awful decision is made, and the bun laid hands on. "Yah! you fool," exclaims the watcher, bursting with all the despair and indignation of knowing boyhood, "you have left the biggest !" Twelfth-cake and its king and queen are in honour of the crowned heads who are said to have brought presents to Jesus in his cradle -a piece of royal service not necessary to be believed in by good Christians, though very proper to be maintained among the gratuitous decorations with which good and poetical hearts willingly garnish their faith. "The Magi, or Wise Men, are vulgarly called (says a note in Brand's Popular Antiquities,' quarto edition by Ellis, p. 19) the three kings of Collen (Cologne). The first, named Melchior, an aged man with a long beard, offered gold; the second, Jasper, a beardless youth, offered frankincense; the third, Balthaser, a black or Moor, with a large spreading beard, offered myrrh." This picture is full of colour, and has often been painted. The word Epiphany (Emipavila, superapparitio, an appearance from above), alludes to the star which is described in the Bible as guiding the Wise Men. In Italy, the word has been corrupted into Beffania, or Beffana, (as in England it used to be called, Piffany); and Beffana, in some parts of that country, has come to mean an old fairy, or Mother Bunch, whose figure is carried about the streets, and who rewards or punishes children at night by putting sweetmeats, or stones and dirt, into a stocking hung up for the purpose near the bed's head. The word Beffa, taken from this, familiarly means a trick or mockery put upon any one: to such base uses may come the most splendid terms ! Twelfth Day, like the other old festivals of the church of old, has had a link of connexion found for it with Pagan customs, and has been traced to the Saturnalia of the ancients, when people drew lots for imaginary kingdoms. Its observation is still kept up, with more or less ceremony, all over Christendom. In Paris, they enjoy it with their usual vivacity. The king there is chosen, not by drawing a paper as with us, but by the lot of a bean which falls to him, and which is put into the cake; and great ceremony is observed when the king or the queen "drink;" which once gave rise to a jest, that occasioned the damnation of a play of Voltaire's. The play was performed at this season, and a queen in it having to die by poison, a wag exclaimed with Twelfth Night solemnity, when her Majesty was about to take it, "The queen drinks." The joke was infectious; and the play died, as well as the poor queen. : Many a pleasant Twelfth Night have we passed in our time; and such future Twelfth Nights as may remain to us shall be pleasant, God and good-will permitting for even if care should be round about them, we have no notion of missing these mountain-tops of rest and brightness, on which people may refresh themselves during the stormiest parts of life's voyage. Most assuredly will we look forward to them, and stop there when we arrive, as though we had not to begin buffeting again the next day. No joy or consolation that heaven or earth affords us will we ungratefully pass by; but prove, by our acceptance and relish of it, that it is what it is said to be, and that we deserve to have it. "The child is father to the man ;" and a very foolish-grown boy he is, and unworthy of his sire, if he is not man enough to know when to be like him. What! shall he go and sulk in a corner, because life is not just what he would have it? Or shall he discover that his dignity will not bear the shaking of holiday merriment, being too fragile and likely to tumble to pieces? Or lastly, shall he take himself for too good and perfect a person to come within the chance of contamination from a little ultra life and Wassail-bowl, and render it necessary to have the famous question thrown at his stately and stupid head "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" This passage is in "Twelfth Night," the last play (be it never forgotten)* which Shakspeare is understood to have written, and which shows how in his beautiful and universal mind the belief in love, friendship and joy, and all good things, survived his knowledge of all evil,— affording us an everlasting argument against the conclusions of minor men of the world, and enabling the meanest of us to dare to avow the same faith. Here is another lecture to false and unseasonable notions of gravity, in the same play, "I protest (quoth the affected steward Malvolio) I take these wise men that crow so at these set kind of fools, to be no better than the fools' zanies. "Oh (says the Lady Olivia), you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distempered appetite. To be generous, guiltless, and of free disposition, is to take those things for bird-bolts, that you deem cannon-bullets." This is the play in which are those beautiful passages about music, love, friendship, &c., which have as much of the morning of life in them as any that the great poet ever wrote, and are painted with as rosy and wet a pencil : "If music be the food of love," &c. "I hate ingratitude more in a man,' says the refined and exquisite Viola, "Than lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness, Or any taint of vice, whose strong corruption Inhabits our frail blood." And again, "In nature there's no blemish, but the mind [that is to say, the faults of the mind ;] None can be call'd deform'd but the unkind." The play of "Twelfth Night," with proper good taste, is generally performed, at the theatres, *This opinion of Malone's has been ably set aside by Mr. Knight. The spirit of the Shakspearian wisdom still however remains. |