Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB
[ocr errors]

cleugh is a liule superstitious or so; and set off to give his daughter away in April, as none but bad wives are married in May amongst the Scotch, you know."I don't know, indeed, only I do wish we had something new.' "Have you read Barry Cornwall?" "I can't." "Why so?" "Because I've read Shakespeare, and Beaumont and Fletcher too, and Massinger and Shirley, and I don't love translutions . . . ."-"Óf what "" of old wine into new bottles." "Well, then, there's Mill man just published, can you read him?" "I can read his poetry, if you mean that; but he's a devilish poor dramatist." "How so?" "Because I can never tell John from Simon, or Simon from Eleazar. Now you may understand Shakespeare, though you should have no names to the separate speeches in the piece." "Well, this is the longest speech I have heard you make this morning. Don't despair. The sun's coming out, and the vapours and blue devils will disappear. Will you take a ride?" 'What does Horace say ?-atrox cura 'something-Oh dear!" (yawning) That Care mounts behind the horseman?" "Just so, but infinitely better expressed. Oh, apropos, have you got through Maria Edgeworth's Ennui " "No." "Do you ever read books through? I exclaimed, and absolutely started from my chair. "That depends upon the authors more than myself, I believe." "Yes, to be sure," plied; "but I do wish we had something new. I would give as great a reward to the inventor as that monarch of old-but you know the story." Yes, yes,” replied my friend, "don't put yourself to any unnecessary exertion of lungs on my account." "I wish," I replied, "I could behave as disinterestedly towards you; but if you would just have the charity to step to our friend's in Conduit-street, tell him the distressed condition we are in, and implore him, as he values his literary existence, to send us something more cheering and reviving to the spirit than what his brother Bibliopoles have lately afford ed us the weary, stale, flat and unprofitable' lucubrations of brains thrice filtered; imitations imitated, in the modern play-wright fashion, until the perilous stuff weighs upon the soul like the atmosphere of a foggy day. Tell him, the despair of two hungry-minded Dilettantes is not to be trifled with; that we must be fed with materials less frivolous and vexatious than our provision

[ocr errors]

I re

[ocr errors]

magazines have of late months supplied us with, otherwise we cannot stand the summer's campaign, and by any exer tions hold on till the Coronation we must literally fly for it, and bury ourselves in the country." At this serious representation of grievances, instead of sympathizing with my situation, 'my friend assumed an ironical gravity of countenance, and begged to know whether he should return with the Old Monthly Magazine in his pocket. The look of horror with which I answered him, was a sufficient test of the goodness of his joke, and he seemed to enjoy it. Then you would perhaps prefer the dramatic beauties of Gold and Northhouse." "You are pleased to be merry, sir," I replied, drawing up, and half turning aside; "I should by no means prefer them." You will be satisfied with nothing less than The London Magazine, I presume, then.” "That is as hereafter may appear. don't like to trust to a flash in the pan when it blows up the Gun-powder Magazine in the North (of which by the bye there is no danger), I shall begin to read it." Aye, there you have hit it; you' shall have at Blackwood without delay,' and my friend was suddenly sheering

66

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

off. "I beg your pardon," I replied, laying hands on him, "do no such unadvised thing. So far from giving any exclusive preference, suppose I were to begin in Blackwood's own style to pronounce it an inflammable composition of malice and ribaldry, and to prefer your returning with the last twopenny Indicator' of the Cockney Monarch himself, the redoubted enemy of Scotch supremacy and tories, who evidently fear while they pretend to despise him. Then give me no more of this new Scotch haggis, this olla podrida, in which the thistle and nettle are too lavishly scattered for the milder and more legitimate taste of English manners and good feeling. If animal spirits were an excuse for running riot at all you meet, if scurrility were comparable to wit, these blustering Juvenals, the progeny of St. Andrew, would speedily become fashionable; but the very caustic on which they fed is consumed, and the fear which they now indulge is, that they shall die for want of strong aliment.

"A plague upon your Magazines ! I say. Can't they fly through the country without falling foul of one another, and gratifying the pugilistic propensity of the nation by an exhibition of fistycuffs, at which the newsmen, and the

printer's devils themselves, are seen to blush? One, forsooth,challenges the public to examine whether he has not more in him than all the rest put together. Another accuses his brother of plagiary, in running away with his name, and maintains that it is not his-that London is a proper name, and not common to all men, or Magazines. Bd, in a timorous shy way, reflects upon Bn, and thinks, like the great serpent, to stifle the young Her cules quickly in his cradle; while B

-n, perceiving his drift, boldly gripes him by the neck till, we presume, in the next number he will howl again. The more wary Scotchman squares and makes mouths, and is fonder of sparring in gloves with his Boriana and the Fancy, than coming to plain and close English fighting; or like his fellowcountryman in robbing a gentleman's garden-the first object he beheld on putting his head over the wall, was the master, who demanding of Sawney where he was going, Back again, an't please your honour.'

"But whichever proves the most ugly customer to the other, and shews the most wind and science in the end, is none of our affair; so a truce, my dear friend, to your confounded Magazines, and let us have something more fashionable, more lady-like and new. While you are away, I'll try to turn over this Portfolio of a Man of Letters, and practise Mrs. Hamilton's theory of 'attention whether you like it or no,' tracing the progress of genius from the garret down to the saloon, where you perceive the work now lies; and if you promise to make haste, I'll acquaint you with the result of my researches when you return." My friend proceeded, as he said, on his FORAGING EXPEDITION, but, as I took it, on a forlorn hope; while I very magnanimously BEGAN AT THE BEGINNING of the Memoirs of the celebrated in which he pathetically describes the first pains of authorship as more keen and intolerable than any thing "that war or women have," and thus continues:

"With a half unfinished sheet before me, of which my remorseless editor had in fact exacted the completion before I had commenced it, I sat in that hopeless and desponding attitude which distrest authors know so well how to assume, (half ludicrous, and half affecting,) with an exhausted brain, and a weary hand slowly scraping my way to the concluding sentence. "No, this is too

much,' I exclaimed, (though I had not half done my daily task) it would make a Scythian weep, or thaw the eyes of the great Russian Czar, to see a hack, infinitely lower than a slave, pulling thus at his brains, that, with the tenacity of bird-lime, only seem to stick together faster and faster. Would I had fortunately been made a Welsh curate, with a family of twelve children, and a salary of 60l. per annum, or turned out, as my father advised me, on Salisbury-plain, with a spade on my shoulders, to shape my way through the world, so I had never been attacked with this hereditary disease, which has done infinitely more mischief in families than that more unjustly termed the evil. To the cacoëthes scribendi which seized me when I was at school, in consequence of the honour of being promoted to the head of my class, do I attribute the misfortunes of my after-life. It came on me with a strange craving after something I could not define, but of which I have since experienced the hollow nature, in the successive disappointments which have attended my youth in attempting to indulge it. O, Goldsmith! how often have I envied the happiness of thy poor Ned Burton from misery freed,'

Who long was a bookseller's hack;
Who led such a damnable life here below

That I don't think he'll wish to come back.'" There here occurred an "hiatus valde deflendus," as if the writer had suddenly fallen into slumber or despair, and which I could not but regret, as I already began to feel interested in ascertaining the process by which he had raised himself from such a humiliating and ludicrous condition to the distinguished eminence which he now enjoys. If such is the complaint of our celebrated historian, I exclaimed, how carefully should the candidates for literary fame weigh the consequences of crossing the lettered Rubicon, and declaring war against the bibliopolitan powers, who hold the destinies of authors in their grasp, and like a neat shopman, with a twist of the finger, can send the scale of their customers bump to the ground. Unfortunate race! dependant upon that very dubious possession of brains for the chance of prolonged existence! O, ye unfledged brood of contributors, wings of the flying Monthly Mercuries, that bear the riches of knowledge and amusement proudly through the land, to you I appeal-how, in the name of twenty (printers') devils, do you plume your feathers on a thick gloomy morning of Novem

ber, trimming a farthing candle, and coughing at the fog that envelopes you about noon, with wits bound, and fingers aching at the delay of inditing something smart and pithyish? In the North this must be dreadful indeed; and we thus frequently see those fine animal spirits that rose in the summer solstice, gradually falling with the quicksilver of the barometer in the stormy and lowering days. From my soul I pity you; for with all its horrors of vacancy, and intervals of uncertainty, and even despair of occupation between visit and visit, this fashionable but weary life of mine must be tolerable to yours. Yet, after all, I should half like to try it, if it would be any relief to long hours; Heavens, it must be such a fillip to nature, such a rouser! absolutely to write for one's bread. Lord, how a man would lay it on, and toil up the hill of fame. Rats, in similar circumstances, eat through stone walls, and what might not he achieve? If it were not for a certain vacancy of ideas, and an unaccountable horror of scribbling, I think I'd try it; but then, zounds, I must train for it like the Fancy; and starve perhaps, to bring to a proper writing temperature. There's the rub :

me

"To starve or not to starve? that is the question: "Whether 'tis nobler in the body to suffer "The stings and spasms of outrageous hunger?"

I had here almost worked myself up to a sensation; and springing from my settee, stamped my foot upon the floor, and trod upon a great tom-cat sleeping before the fire, who, giving a dreadful yell, bounced out of the room, mad with pain and anger, in the very face of my friend, who was that moment returning from his expedition. "Zounds!" he exclaimed, turning quick round: " I hope you are not bitten, my dear friend?" I cried, "the cat is not mad, except with pain, and a little frightened or so." I gradually soothed him, and finding he was not hurt, began, with an unusual degree of animation, to inquire into the success of his perambulation. "Confound the cat!" he replied; "such a meeting's as shocking as a bailiff opening your own house door to you. What the deuce did you quarrel with the cat for?-were you so very far gone that you had no other amusement to take to? I wish you were a bookseller's hack; they would soon find other employment for "Do you?" I replied. "Done. I'll sell myself, and get rid of all my time, if they 'II promise to keep me constantly NEW MONTHLY MAG:-No. 78.

you.

[ocr errors]

employed, for (don't repeat it) I'm getting confounded sick of Brookes's and the theatres. Only I should like to engage in something piquant and cockneysh, beyond the dull monotony of pens' that of late besets us." "What say you to an article on sticks, or shops? or rats and mice, and such small deer?" answered my friend: “any thing will do, if you'll only cram it hard enough down our gentle public's throat, without giving it time to consider. Eureka then, just imported fresh, and smelling of the sea, the most novel and delightful thing imaginable, the most rare and exquisite essence of polite scandal, full of variety, that sips of all, but feeds on nothing long-the only copy in England, more valuable than a court dress to the ladies, and teaching the most minute elegantic elegantiarum of life, from the last step in a new quadrille, to the supreme art of flirting a fan, or fanning a flirt, if you had rather Le Livre de Quatre Couleurs · a literary God-send, I assure you. Le voila. How deuced envious Baldwin or Blackwood would be if they knew of it." "Come, let me clutch thee then," I cried, "thou hast a lively and entertaining physiognomy of a title-page, and I think I shall love thee. Settle yourself in that easychair, my dear friend, and seize the pen, the pen that Julia gave me,' and I will dictate the contents to you like another Cæsar, though it should be in four different tongues, and in a cameleon-coloured type. Let us begin with the preface, I'll translate." "Go on then, I scorn to yield; so translate away, and GARE GALLICISMS AND STOPS, and warn the reader to leave off when he sleeps, and close our variegated book.”.

THE PREFACE.

Party-colour is so much the favourite one of the day, that our book shall make no apology for taking its place in the boudoir of the belles and blue stockings of a refined age. It will not interfere with the sale of Rees's Encyclopedia, but it will more easily be carried in your pocket. The minds of politicians, that vary like the weather-glass, need not be startled at the sight of a picture which represents them to the life; and the most delicate spirits, that shrink like a sensitive plant at a touch, will not be offended with the moral of it. The lover may behold himself in the various metamorphoses which he assumes; and the friend, in the disguise of truth, see

VOL. XIV. “

F

here the emblem of his duplicity. Why should not our humours be as variable as our climate? Our different tastes are as arbitrarily imposed upon us as our faces, and there is room enough for them both in the world. Does not every thing inspire us with a love of change? The sun in eclipse, the moon in her phases, the heavens in varying clouds; then the year in its various sea sons; the sea in tides; the earth with flowers; the birds in song and plumage; even our philosophers by their systems, our ministers by projects, and our authors by their paradoxes, support itbesides coquettes with their frivolity, lovers in folly, all men in their character, and every woman in her humour. Shall we here be unjust enough to omit the new-cut Dandy. Certainly not; or if we do, it is only that we may give him an article to himself. The very pink of finical variety, he carries it spick and span new, just plucked from the garden of fashion, upon his doublet. In his ogle, in his attitudes, in his strut, as in his sentiments and language, all is equally superlative, exquisite, and even girlish; but the worst of him is, that he can never sit long enough for you to take his picture. At one moment he flings himself sulkily into a soft arm-chair, the next he is cutting a quadrille. You may hear him now railing against the fair, just before he prepares to offer up the incense of his flattery. He is thrown into an extacy at the sight of a new straitlaced and padded coat; but hardly is it on, when he quarrels with the collar, and orders a false one of double the size. He tries the newest style of every fashionable trimmer of the sconce, and has even the vanity to suggest to him some extraordinary fresh touch of the scissors. He rings a peal of bells to bring his people about him, and when they run to attend, he can't for the soul of him tell exactly what he wants. He drives 20 miles an hour in his tilbury to reach his country-house, merely in order to give orders to have his bays at the door by five o'clock, to run against time for a dinner in town. He sports a scented white cambric handkerchief, and pretends to grow sick of the perfume. If you speak to him, he very leisurely assumes his ogle-glass, to reconnoitre before he answers you. He gives order to his bookseller peremptorily, to forward him the Magazines the day before they are out, in order to anticipate the follies of the month, and for this he is charged five shillings a number. Let other pub

lishers take the hint, and give us a douçeur for the information. When the chambermaid is ready to lace his stays for a blow-out or a scrouge in the evening, he declares he must first take a turn in the other world a little horizontal refreshment-and goes to bed. If he has to sit down to write, he is immediately seized with a peripatetic fit, and proceeds to measure his chamber with a full clothyard stride. Then, like our friend By he'll twitch and laugh with one side of his face, and look grave with the other. Between staring and frowning, he caricatures his own physiognomy exceed ingly well, and leaves you in doubt whether he be more like a cameleon, a monkey, or Proteus himself. But it is in other fashionable modes, that the art of novelty is more conspicuously shewn. What a reformation have ten years made in our style of dress and writing, dancing and eating! There is always a heavy tax laid upon the true dilettanti of fashion: every individual attitude and motion is un tribut à la mode; and they have run the polite gauntlet through hunch-backs and high shoulders, stiff necks and stooping ones, from a bow to the ground to the familiar nod, until all the changes of the fashionable, bells were rung, and they had recourse, both in dressing and writing, to the plainness, and simplicity of nature again, out of sheer despair of something novel and piquant. This is observable in our new style of adorning our bodies and our books; in our poetry, sermons, and modern lectures, which possess the singular merit of placing nature in a fresh point of view, and conjuring up old fashions in a new dress of their own.We next come to other objects which are no less variable and interesting-our venerable modern Philosophers, who are weary of following up the discoveries of their ancestors, and strike out new paths for themselves-becoming amorous of chemical affinities and galvanic animation, and finding more attractions and repulsions than nature ever dreamed of in her most prolific moments of antipathy or love: now, like Joshua, stopping the sun, and whirling the earth round its axis; now impugning the system of Sir Isaac Newton, with some famous hypothesis, and next flattering us with the doctrine of innate ideas, which are soon to become acquired: when these too are argued away, and mankind run great risk of being reasoned out of their souls and wits together..

So much for Scotch metaphysics.

I had hitherto proceeded with that rapidity of diction which sets a common pen at defiance, and frequently extorted from my friend exclamations of wonder, highly gratifying to my new character of contributor to the periodical press. "Stop," he exclaimed, "if you are not quite destitute of humanity, and let us take breath. My fingers are literally growing together, and ache as if they would come off. I will just go submit our article to editorial inspection, learn the newest short-hand in practice, and then, like an accomplished bruiser after the last lesson of his science, challenge

you to the combat once more. Our
next set-to will be more easy and enter-
taining, and discover infinite variety of
play, to the polite edification of the spec-
tators. To the fairest portion we pro-
mise an exhibition of the various and
true properties and uses of that refresh-
ing and ingenious article called a fan,
and we trust the Book of Four Colours
will unfold more fashionable mysteries
than are dreamed of in four ball-nights
running. My friend departed, and I
am now fast dropping into a fine obli-
vious sleep.
B. T.

ELLEN FITZARTHUR, A METRICAL TALE.

IT is long since we have discarded the petulant prejudice which, when our **mind was all as youthful as our blood," influenced us to turn from every anonymous publication with cold disdain, gratuitously attributing to its modest author a lurking consciousness of insignificance, the justice of which we were as little solicitous to examine as to doubt. Anonymous poetry, more especially, experienced our most unqualified reprobation; and we fear, that though corrected from this illiberality of judgment ourselves, it is still too generally prevalent in the reading world. We trace to the dreaded fastidiousness which renders a name so essential to the reception of a new work, the harmless expedient of assuming a fictitious designation, to which many self-distrusting young authors have had recourse, in order, whilst virtually preserving their incognito, to satisfy the unmeaning squeamishness of the public, and to relieve their mental offspring from that portion, at least, of the danger of neglect, which would result from the failure of ostensible parentage. To us, we must own, the chance of being pleased by a first production appears nearly equal, whether it be printed anonymously, or with a name, either real or suppositious, of which we never heard before. "What's in a name," untried, unknown, undreamed-of, till beheld for the first time in the title-page of a new work? Experience of his talents can alone render Mr. A. superior in estimation to Mr. B. or Mr. C. And when we meet an unpractised novice, perfectly ready to blazon forth, with neither fear nor wit, his full designation in front of a dashing coup-' d'essai, we rather shrink from, than are attracted to, the perusal of his performance; and feel, that instead of having

gained upon our respect by his courage, he has lost upon our good-will by his self-sufficiency, and considerably diminished the interest which we are always disposed to take in behalf of unpretending diffidence.

The poem before us, unowned, unpatronized, and stealing as it were, bashfully into the world, with scarcely the assistance of due newspaper announcement to make it known, must plead our excuse for these reflections, the very natural result of fear, that a production so every way calculated to touch the heart, and gratify the taste, should sink into oblivion without even experiencing the common justice of obtaining a hearing, and of being condemned upon proof. To obviate this, as far as our weak endeavours will extend, we are anxious to disseminate an1 acquaintance with its purity of senti ments, its chaste simplicity, and affecting tenderness, amongst our readers. We shall, for this purpose, give a summary of its fable, and draw, somewhat largely, upon its pages for illustration of the merits which we have ascribed to it.

The Tale, a completely domestic one, opens in Malwood Vale, an imaginary spot, we believe, where

"the shades of night
Were peacefully descending;

And closing with the closing light,
The peasant's toil was ending."

A husbandman's return to his family is cheerfully described; his wife's alacrity to welcome him, his children's ca resses, his homely comforts, are briefly, but animatedly, set before us

"One climbs into his arms-another
Clings smiling round his knee
A third is lifted by its mother
Its father's face to see:

1

The cradled innocent, his youngest treasure,
Holds out its dimpled arms, and crows for pleasure

« ZurückWeiter »