LEIBGEBER’S DINNER SPEECH.
“I think I may venture to say that of all the Christians and persons of name and title seated at this table, not one was made into one with such wonderful difficulty as I was. My mother, a native of Gascony, was on her way to Holland, by sea, from London, where she had left my father as diocesan of a German community. But, never since there has been such a thing on the face of the earth as a councillor of the German empire, did the German Ocean rage and insurge so terrifically as upon the occasion in question when it was my mother’s lot to be crossing it. Pour all hell, hissing lakes of brimstone, boiling copper, splattering devils, and all, into the cold ocean, and observe the crackling, the roaring, and the seething of the hell-flames and ocean-waves contending, till one of these hostile elements swallow up the other, and you have a faint (but, at dinner-time, a sufficient) idea of the infernal storm in which I came upon the sea, and into the world. When I tell you that the main braces, the topsail sheets, and the main topgallant stays (to say nothing of the crossjack braces and fore topgallant halyards, which were in a worse state still)—and when, moreover, the mizen topsail, and the foretop mast staysail rigging, and the flying jib (to say nothing of the spanker)—when things so accustomed to the sea as these (I say) felt as if their last hour was come, it was a real ocean miracle that a creature so tender as I was at that time should have managed to commence his first. I had about as much flesh on my body then as I have fat now, and may have weighed, at the outside, about four Nürnberg pounds, which (if we may credit the authority of the best anatomical theatres) is at the present moment about the weight of my brain alone. Besides which, I was the merest of beginners. I had seen absolutely nothing of the world, except this infernal gale. I was a creature, not so much of few years as of none at all (though everybody’s life commences some nine months sooner than the parish registers indicate), excessively tender and delicate—having been (in opposition to all the rules of hygiene) kept much too warm, swaddled, and coddled during these very first nine months in question, when I ought rather to have been undergoing a preparation of some kind to enable me to bear the chill atmosphere of this world. And thus, quarter-grown, a tender flower-bud, liquidly soft as first love, when I made my appearance during a storm such as was raging (I added one or two feeble squeaks, with some difficulty, to its roar), what was to be expected was, that I should be extinguished altogether, even before it calmed down. People didn’t like the idea of my going without something in the shape of a name—without some little vestige of Christianity of some kind—out of this world, which is a place whence we do carry away even less than we bring into it with us. But the grand difficulty experienced was that of standing godfather, in a rolling, plunging vessel, which pitched everything and everybody higgledy-piggledy that wasn’t made fast. The chaplain was (luckily) lying in a hammock, and he baptized down out of thence. My godfather was the boatswain, who held me for five whole minutes; but inasmuch as he couldn’t, without help, stand steady enough to enable the chaplain to touch my brow with the water without missing me, he was held by the barber’s mate, who was made fast to a marine, who was made fast to a boatswain’s mate, who was made fast to the master-at-arms, who sat upon the knee of an old bluejacket, who held on to him like grim death.
“However, neither the ship nor the child (as I afterwards ascertained) came to any detriment; but you all see, do you not, that, hard as it is for any one amid the storms of life, to become, and continue, a Christian, or to get a name—be it in a directory, in a literary gazette, in a herald’s college, or upon a medal—yet there are few who have had the same difficulty as I have had in acquiring the mere first elements of a name—the groundwork, the binomial root, of a Christian name, whereon, at a subsequent period, the other great name might be engrafted—and to get hold of a faint smattering of Christianity, as much as a catechumen and candidate as yet in a speechless and sucking condition might be capable of. There is but one thing more difficult to make; the greatest princes and heroes can only do it once in their lives—the mightiest geniuses—even the three electors of the Church, the Emperor of Germany himself, with all their united efforts, can’t do more, were they to sit for years, stamping in the mint with all the latest improvements in coining machinery.”
The whole of the company entreated him to explain what this was that was so hard to frame.
“’Tis a crown prince,” he answered, quietly; “even a reigning sovereign finds it no easy matter to produce an appanaged prince—but, let him try as he will, even in the best days of his life, he can never produce more than one specimen of a crown prince; for a Seminarist of that sort is none of your accessory-works, but the prime mover, the regulator, the striking and driving-wheel of the whole nation. On the other hand, gentry, counts, barons, chamberlains, staff-officers, and above all, common people and subjects of the altogether every-day sort—to be brief, a scurvy crew of that description—a generatio æquivoca—can be brought into being by a prince with such wonderful ease that he creates these lusus naturæ and virgin swarms, or protoplasmata, in considerable numbers even in his earlier days, although in riper years he may not manage to turn out an heir to his throne. Yet, after so much preliminary drill, so many trial-shots, one would have taken one’s oath the other way!”