Editor's Drawer.
That was a dignified and graceful entertainment which recently took place in the gay capital of France. Some two hundred of the “nobility and gentry,” including a sprinkling of English aristocracy, assembled in a prominent hall of the city, to see a Rat and Owl Fight! And while they were getting ready the combatants, which went by sundry fancy or favorite names, they had a poet in leash, who “improvised a strophe” for the occasion! Think of a “poet” apostrophizing, in studied measures, twelve rats and four old owls! But that's “the way they do things in France.”
They have another very sensible and dramatic amusement there, which they call the “Mat de Cocagne.” This is a long pole, of about eighteen inches diameter at the base, well polished and greased from top to bottom, with soft soap, tallow, and other slippery ingredients. To climb up this pole to the top is an eminent exploit, which crowns the victorious adventurer with a rich prize, and gains him the acclamations of ten thousand spectators. The “pretenders” strip off their upper gear altogether, and roll up their trowsers mid-thigh, and thus accoutred, present themselves at the bottom of the mast. Now just listen to a description of the operation, and reflections thereupon, and tell us whether you ever read any thing more “perfectly French.”
“The first who attempt the ascent look for no honor; their office is to prepare the way, and put things in train for their successors: they rub off the grease from the bottom, the least practicable part of the pole. In every thing the first steps are the most difficult, although seldom the most glorious; and scarcely ever does the same person commence an enterprise, and reap the fruit of its accomplishment. They ascend higher by degrees, and the expert climbers now come forth, the heroes of the list: they who have been accustomed to gain prizes, whose prowess is known, and whose fame is established since many seasons. They do not expend their strength in the beginning; they climb up gently, and patiently, and modestly, and repose from time to time; and they carry, as is permitted, a little sack at their girdle, filled with ashes to neutralize the grease and render it less slippery.
“All efforts, however, for a long time prove ineffectual. There seems to be an ultimate point, which no one can scan, the measure and term of human strength; and to overreach it is at last deemed impossible. Now and then a pretender essays his awkward limbs, and reaching scarce half way even to this point, falls back clumsily amidst the hisses and laughter of the spectators; so in the world empirical pretension comes out into notoriety for a moment only to return with ridicule and scorn to its original obscurity.
“But the charm is at length broken: a victorious climber has transcended the point at which his predecessors were arrested. Every one now does the same: such are men: they want but a precedent: as soon as it is proved that a thing is possible, it is no longer difficult. Our climber continues his success: farther and farther still; he is a few feet only from the summit, but he is wearied, he relents. Alas! is the prize, almost in his grasp, to escape from him! He makes another effort, but it is of no avail. He does not, however, lose ground: he reposes. In the mean time, exclamations are heard, of doubt, of success, of encouragement.
“After a lapse of two or three minutes, which is itself a fatigue, he essays again. It is in vain! He begins even to shrink: he has slipped downward a few inches, and recovers his loss by an obstinate struggle (‘applause!’—‘sensation!’), but it is a supernatural effort, and—his last. Soon after a murmur is heard from the crowd below, half raillery and half compassion, and the poor adventurer slides down, mortified and exhausted, upon the earth!
“So a courtier, having planned from his youth his career of ambition, struggles up the ladder, lubric and precipitous, to the top—to the very consummation of his hopes, and then falls back into the rubbish from which he has issued; and they who envied his fortune, now rejoice in his fall. What lessons of philosophy in a greasy pole! What moral reflections in a spectacle so empty to the common world! What wholesome sermons are here upon the vanity of human hopes, the disappointments of ambition, and the difficulties of success in the slippery paths of fortune and human greatness! But the very defeat of the last adventurer has shown the possibility of success, and prepared the way for his successor, who mounts up and perches on the summit of the mast, bears off the crown, and descends amidst the shouts and applause of the multitude. It is Americus Vespucius who bears away from Columbus the recompense of his toils!”
So much for climbing a greased pole in reflective, philosophical Paris!
Inquisitiveness has been well described as “an itch for prying into other people's affairs, to the neglect of our own; an ignorant hankering after all such knowledge as is not worth knowing; a curiosity to learn things that are not at all curious.” People of this stamp would rather be “put to the question” than not to ask questions. Silence is torture to them. A genuine quidnunc prefers even false news to no news; he prides himself upon having the first information of things that never happened. Yankees are supposed to have attained the greatest art in parrying inquisitiveness, but there is a story extant of a “Londoner” on his travels in the provinces, who rather eclipses the cunning “Yankee Peddler.” In traveling post, says the narrator, he was obliged to stop at a village to replace a shoe which his horse had lost; when the “Paul Pry” of the place bustled up to the carriage-window, and without waiting for the ceremony of an introduction, said:
“Good-morning, sir. Horse cast a shoe I see. I suppose, sir, you are going to—?”
Here he paused, expecting the name of the place to be supplied; but the gentleman answered:
“You are quite right; I generally go there at this season.”
“Ay—ahem!—do you? And no doubt you are now come from—?”
“Right again, sir; I live there.”
“Oh, ay; I see: you do! But I perceive it is a London shay. Is there any thing stirring in London?”
“Oh, yes; plenty of other chaises and carriages of all sorts.”
“Ay, ay, of course. But what do folks say?”
“They say their prayers every Sunday.”
“That isn't what I mean. I want to know whether there is any thing new and fresh.”
“Yes; bread and herrings.”
“Ah, you are a queer fellow. Pray, mister, may I ask your name?”
“Fools and clowns,” said the gentleman, “call me ‘Mister;’ but I am in reality one of the clowns of Aristophanes; and my real name is Brekekekex Koax! Drive on, postillion!”
Now this is what we call a “pursuit of knowledge under difficulties” of the most obstinate kind.
In these “leaking” days of wintry-spring, when that classical compound called “splosh,” a conglomerate of dirty snow and unmistakable mud, pervades the streets of the city, perhaps these “Street Thoughts by a Surgeon” may not be without some degree of wholesome effect upon the community:
“In perambulating the streets at this period, what a number of little ragamuffins I observe trundling their hoops! With what interest I contemplate their youthful sport; particularly when I regard its probable consequences! A hoop runs between a gentleman's legs. He falls. When I reflect on the wonderful construction of the skeleton, and consider to how many fractures and dislocations it is liable in such a case, my bosom expands to a considerate police, to whose ‘non-interference’ we are indebted for such chances of practice!
“The numerous bits of orange-peel which diversify the pavement, oftentimes attract my attention. Never do I kick one of them out of the way. The blessings of a whole profession on the hands that scatter them! Each single bit may supply a new and instructive page to the ‘Chapter of Accidents.’
“Considering the damp, muddy state of the streets at this time of the year, I am equally amazed and delighted to see the ladies, almost universally, going about in the thinnest of thin shoes. This elegant fashion beautifully displays the conformation of the ankle-joint; but to the practitioner it has another and a stronger recommendation. I behold the delicate foot separated scarcely by the thickness of thin paper from the mire. I see the exquisite instep, undefended but by a mere web. I meditate upon the influence of the cold and wet upon the frame. I think of the catarrhs, coughs, pleurisies, consumptions, and other interesting affections that necessarily must result from their application to the feet; and then I reckon up the number of pills, boluses, powders, draughts, mixtures, leeches, and blisters, which will consequently be sent in to the fair sufferers, calculate what they must come to, and wish that I had the amount already in my pocket!”
A world of satirical truth is here, in a very small compass.
There is a good story told recently of Baron Rothschild, of Paris, the richest man of his class in the world, which shows that it is not only “money which makes the mare go” (or horses either, for that matter), but “ready money,” “unlimited credit” to the contrary notwithstanding. On a very wet and disagreeable day, the Baron took a Parisian omnibus, on his way to the Bourse, or Exchange; near which the “Nabob of Finance” alighted, and was going away without paying. The driver stopped him, and demanded his fare. Rothschild felt in his pocket, but he had not a “red cent” of change. The driver was very wroth:
“Well, what did you get in for, if you could not pay? You must have known, that you had no money!”
“I am Baron Rothschild!” exclaimed the great capitalist; “and there is my card!”
The driver threw the card in the gutter: “Never heard of you before,” said the driver, “and don't want to hear of you again. But I want my fare—and I must have it!”
The great banker was in haste: “I have only an order for a million,” he said. “Give me change;” and he proffered a “coupon” for fifty thousand francs.
The conductor stared, and the passengers set up a horse-laugh. Just then an “Agent de Change” came by, and Baron Rothschild borrowed of him the six sous.
The driver was now seized with a kind of remorseful respect; and turning to the Money-King, he said:
“If you want ten francs, sir, I don't mind lending them to you on my own account!”
“Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,” says the Bible, “Thou hast ordained praise.” Whoso reads the following, will feel the force of the passage.
At an examination of a deaf and dumb institution some years ago in London, a little boy was asked in writing:
“Who made the world?”
He took the chalk, and wrote underneath the words:
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
The clergyman then inquired, in a similar manner
“Why did Jesus Christ come into the world?”
A smile of gratitude rested upon the countenance of the little fellow, as he wrote:
“This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners.”
A third question was then proposed, evidently adapted to call the most powerful feelings into exercise:
“Why were you born deaf and dumb, when I can both hear and speak?”
“Never,” said an eye-witness, “shall I forget the look of resignation which sat upon his countenance, when he again took the chalk and wrote:
“Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Thy sight!”
We find a piece of poetry in the “Drawer,” entitled “The Husband's Complaint,” and we quote a few stanzas from it to show, that there are elsewhere, sympathizers with all those unfortunate husbands, victims to German worsted, who are compelled to see pink dogs with green eyes gradually growing before them every day, or untamed African lions in buff, with vermilion eyeballs, glaring from the frame upon them.
“I hate the name of German wool,
In all its colors bright,
Of chairs and stools in fancy-work,
I hate the very sight!
The rugs and slippers that I've seen,
The ottomans and bags,
Sooner than wear a stitch on me,
I'd walk the streets in rags!”
“I've heard of wives too musical,
Too talkative, or quiet;
Of scolding or of gaming wives,
And those too fond of riot;
But yet, of all the errors known,
Which to the women fall,
Forever doing “fancy-work,”
I think exceeds them all!
“The other day, when I came home,
No dinner was for me;
I asked my wife the reason why,
And she said “One, two, three!”
I told her I was hungry,
And I stamped upon the floor,
She never looked at me, but said,
“I want one dark-green more!”
“Of course she makes me angry,
But she doesn't care for that;
But chatters while I talk to her,
“One white and then a black;
One green, and then a purple,
(Just hold your tongue, my dear,
You really do annoy me so),
I've made a wrong stitch here!”
“And as for confidential chat,”
With her eternal “frame,”
Though I should speak of fifty things,
She'd answer me the same:
'Tis, “Yes, love—five reds, then a black—
(I quite agree with you)—
I've done this wrong—seven, eight, nine, ten,
An orange—then a blue!”
“If any lady comes to tea,
Her bag is first surveyed;
And if the pattern pleases her,
A copy then is made;
She stares the men quite out of face,
And when I ask her why,
'Tis, “Oh, my love, the pattern of
His waistcoat struck my eye!”
“And if to walk I am inclined
(It's seldom I go out),
At every worsted-shop she sees,
Oh, how she looks about!
And says, “Bless me! I must 'go in,
The pattern is so rare;
That group of flowers is just the thing
I wanted for my chair!”
“Besides, the things she makes are all
Such “Touch-me-not” affairs,
I dare not even use a stool,
Nor screen; and as for chairs,
'Twas only yesterday I put
My youngest boy in one,
And until then I never knew
My wife had such a tongue!
“Alas, for my poor little ones!
They dare not move nor speak,
It's “Tom, be still, put down that bag,
Why, Harriet, where's your feet!
Maria, standing on that stool!!
It wasn't made for use;
Be silent all: three greens, one red,
A blue, and then a puce!”
“Oh, Heaven preserve me from a wife
With “fancy-work” run wild;
And hands which never do aught else
For husband or for child:
Our clothes are rent, our bills unpaid,
Our house is in disorder,
And all because my lady-wife
Has taken to embroider!”
Private subscriptions to a book, “for the benefit of the author,” is one way of paying creditors by taxing your friends. There have been some curious specimens of this kind of “raising the wind,” in this same big metropolis of Gotham, which have proved what is called at the West “a caution;” a caution which the victims found, to their mortification, that they needed beforehand. “All honor to the sex,” we say, of course, but not the same honor to all of the sex; for there have been instances, hereabout, of inveterate feminine book-purveyors, who have reflected little honor upon themselves, and less upon “the sex;” as certain public functionaries could bear witness—in fact, have borne witness, upon the witness-stand. There is a laughable instance recorded of a new method of giving a subscription, which we shall venture to quote in this connection. Many years ago, a worthy and well-known English nobleman, having become embarrassed in his circumstances, a subscription was set on foot by his friends, and a letter, soliciting contributions, was addressed, among others, to Lord Erskine, who immediately dispatched the following answer:
“My dear Sir John:
“I am enemy to subscriptions of this nature; first, because my own finances are by no means in a flourishing plight; and secondly, because pecuniary assistance thus conferred, must be equally painful to the donor and the receiver. As I feel, however, the sincerest gratitude for your public services, and regard for your private worth, I have great pleasure in subscribing—[Here the worthy nobleman, big with expectation, turned over the leaf, and finished the perusal of the note, which terminated as follows]: in subscribing myself,
“My dear Sir John,
“Yours, very faithfully,
“Erskine.”
Very bad spelling is sometimes the best, as in the case of the English beer-vender, who wrote over his shop-door:
“Bear sold here.”
Tom Hood, who saw it, said that it was spelled right, because the fluid he sold was his own Bruin!
Not less ingenious was the device of the quack-doctor, who announced in his printed handbills that he could instantly cure “the most obstinate aguews;” which orthography proved that he was no conjuror, and did not attempt to cure them by a spell.
It was Punch, if we remember rightly, who told the story, some years ago, of a man who loaned an umbrella to a friend, a tradesman in his street, on a wet, nasty day. It was not returned, and on another wet, disagreeable day, he called for it, but found his friend at the door, going out with it in his hand.
“I've come for my umbrella,” exclaimed the loan-or.
“Can't help that,” exclaimed the borrower; “don't you see that I am going out with it?”
“Well—yes—” replied the lender, astounded at such outrageous impudence; “yes; but—but—but what am I to do?”
“Do?” replied the other, as he threw up the top, and walked off; “do? do as I did: borrow one!”
One of the best chapters in “Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures,” is where that amiable and greatly-abused angel reproaches her inhuman spouse with loaning the family umbrella:
“Ah! that's the third umbrella gone since Christmas! What were you to do? Why, let him go home in the rain. I don't think there was any thing about him that would spoil. Take cold, indeed! He does not look like one o' the sort to take cold. He'd better taken cold, than our only umbrella. Do you hear the rain, Caudle? I say, do you hear the rain? Do you hear it against the windows? Nonsense; you can't be asleep with such a shower as that. Do you hear it, I say? Oh, you do hear it, do you? Well, that's a pretty flood, I think, to last six weeks, and no stirring [pg 568] all this time out of the house. Poh! don't think to fool me, Caudle: he return the umbrella! As if any body ever did return an umbrella! There—do you hear it? Worse and worse! Cats and dogs for six weeks—always six weeks—and no umbrella!
“I should like to know how the children are to go to school, to-morrow. They shan't go through such weather, that I'm determined. No; they shall stay at home, and never learn any thing, sooner than go and get wet. And when they grow up, I wonder who they'll have to thank for knowing nothing. People who can't feel for their children ought never to be fathers.
“But I know why you lent the umbrella—I know, very well. I was going out to tea to mother's, to-morrow;—you knew that very well; and you did it on purpose. Don't tell me; I know; you don't want me to go, and take every mean advantage to hinder me. But don't you think it, Caudle! No; if it comes down in buckets-full, I'll go all the more: I will; and what's more, I'll walk every step of the way; and you know that will give me my death,” &c., &c., &c.
The satire of the following lines, upon that species of sentimental song-writing which prevailed a few years ago to a much greater extent than at present, is somewhat broad; but any one who remembers the feeble and affected trash which has hitherto been set to music, and sung by lachrymose young ladies and gentlemen, will not consider it one whit too much deserved.
I.
“My lute hath only one sad tone,
It hath a mournful twang:
Its other strings are cracked and gone,
By one unlucky bang!
You ask me why I don't restore
Its early sweetness, and fresh cord it;
Oh, no! I'll play on it no more!
Between ourselves—I can't afford it!
II.
“You tell me that my light guitar
Is now as silent as the grave;
That on it now I play no bar,
Though once it thrill'd with many a stave
Alas! to strike it once again,
More power than I possess requires;
The effort would be worse than vain—
My light guitar has lost its wires!
III.
“My heart, my lute, my light guitar,
All broken as they be,
As like unto each other are,
As little pea to pea.
Come, heart; come, lute, guitar, and all,
In one lament ye all are blended!
Hang on your nails against the wall—
I can't afford to get you mended!”
Just fancy this touching song sung by a “nice young man,” with all the modern “shakes” and affetuoso accompaniments, and you will “realize” a fair hit at what was not long since a fashionable species of English ballad music.
“Speaking of music,” by-the-by, we are reminded of rather a sharp reply made by a celebrated nobleman in England to an enterprising musical gentleman, who was a good deal of an enthusiast in the art. “I have waited upon you, my lord, to ask for your subscription of twenty guineas to the series of six Italian concerts, to be given at ——'s Rooms. Knowing your lordship to be an admirer of the sweet—”
“You've been misinformed, sir. I am not much of an admirer of the school of ‘difficult music:’ on the contrary, I often wish, with Dr. Johnson, that ‘it was not only difficult, but impossible.’ ”
“But as a nobleman, as a public man, your lordship can not be insensible to the value of your honored name upon the subscription-list. Your eminent brother, the greatest of London's prelates, the most gifted, your honorable brother subscribed fifty guineas. Here, sir, is his signature upon this very paper which I hold in my hand.”
“Well,” replied “his lordship,” “I have no hesitation to state, that if I were as deaf as he is, I wouldn't mind subscribing myself! He's as deaf as a post, or as a dumb adder; and can not hear the sounds of your Italian charmers, charm they never so loudly. I have no such good luck.”
Thinking, doubtless, that trying to secure “his lordship's” patronage under such circumstances, and with such opinions, involved the pursuit of musical subscriptions “under difficulties,” the importunate solicitor, with a succession of low bows, left the apartment; and as he left “the presence” he thought he heard a low, chuckling laugh, but it didn't affect his risibles!
What a life-like “picture in little” is this by Hood of the “torrent of rugged humanity” that set toward an English poor-house, at sound of The Work House Clock! Remark, too, reader, the beautiful sentiment with which the extract closes:
“There's a murmur in the air,
And noise in every street;
The murmur of many tongues,
The noise of many feet.
While round the work-house door
The laboring classes flock;
For why? the Overseer of the P——
Is setting the work-house clock.
“Who does not hear the tramp
Of thousands speeding along,
Of either sex, and various stamp
Sickly, crippled, and strong;
Walking, limping, creeping,
From court and alley and lane,
But all in one direction sweeping,
Like rivers that seek the main?
“Who does not see them sally
From mill, and garret, and room,
In lane, and court, and alley,
From homes in Poverty's lowest valley
Furnished with shuttle and loom:
Poor slaves of Civilization's galley—
And in the road and footways sally,
As if for the Day of Doom?
Some, of hardly human form,
Stunted, crooked, and crippled by toil,
Dingy with smoke, and rust, and oil,
And smirched beside with vicious toil,
Clustering, mustering, all in a swarm,
Father, mother, and care-full child,
Looking as if it had never smiled;
The seamstress lean, and weary, and wan,
With only the ghosts of garments on;
The weaver, her sallow neighbor,
The grim and sooty artisan;
Every soul—child, woman, or man,
Who lives—or dies—by labor!
“At last, before that door
That bears so many a knock,
Ere ever it opens to Sick or Poor,
Like sheep they huddle and flock—
And would that all the Good and Wise
Could see the million of hollow eyes,
With a gleam derived from Hope and the skies
Upturned to the Work-House Clock!
“Oh! that the Parish Powers,
Who regulate Labor's hours,
The daily amount of human trial,
Weariness, pain, and self-denial,
Would turn from the artificial dial
That striketh ten or eleven,
And go, for once, by that older one
That stands in the light of Nature's sun,
And takes its time from Heaven!”
There is something very amusing to us in this passage, which we find copied upon a dingy slip of paper in the “Drawer,” descriptive of the “sweet uses” to which sugar is put in “Gaul's gay capital:”
“Here is the whole animal creation in paste, and history and all the fine arts in sucre d'orge. You can buy an epigram in dough, and a pun in a soda-biscuit; a ‘Constitutional Charter,’ all in jumbles, and a ‘Revolution’ just out of the frying-pan. Or, if you love American history, here is a United States frigate, two inches long, and a big-bellied commodore bombarding Paris with ‘shin-plasters;’ and the French women and children stretching out their little arms, three-quarters of an inch long, toward Heaven, and supplicating the mercy of the victors, in molasses candy. You see also a General Jackson, with the head of a hickory-nut, with a purse, I believe, of ‘Carroway Comfits,’ and in a great hurry, pouring out the ‘twenty-five millions,’ a king, a queen, and a royal family, all of plaster of Paris. If you step into one of these stores, you will see a gentleman in mustaches, whom you will mistake for a nobleman, who will ask you to ‘give yourself the pain to sit down,’ and he will put you up a paper of bon-bons, and he will send it home for you, and he will accompany you to the door, and he will have ‘the honor to salute you’—all for four sous!”
Few things are more amusing, to one who looks at the matter with attention, than the literary style of the Chinese. How inseparable it is, from the exalted opinions which “John Chinaman” holds of the “Celestial Flowery Land!” Every body, all nations, away from the Celestial Empire, are “Outside Barbarians.” And this feeling is not assumed; it is innate and real in the hearts of the Chinese, both rulers and ruled. A friend once showed us a map of China. China, by that map, occupied all the world, with the exception of two small spots on the very outer edge, which represented Great Britain and the United States! These “places” they had heard of, in the way of trade for teas, silks, etc., with the empire.
We once heard a friend describe a Chinese “chop,” on government-order. He was an officer on board a United States vessel, then lying in the harbor at Hong-kong. A great commotion was observable among the crowds of boats upon the water, when presently a gayly-decorated junk was observed approaching the vessel. She arrived at the side, when a pompous little official, with the air of an emperor, attended by two or three mandarins, was received on deck. He looked the personification of Imperial Dignity. He carried a short truncheon in his right hand, like Richard the Third; and with his “tail” (his own, and his followers') he strode toward the quarter-deck. Arrived there, he unrolled his truncheon, a small square sheet of white parchment, bearing a single red character, and held it up to the astonished gaze of the officers and crew! This was a “Vermilion Edict,” that terrible thing, so often fulminated by Commissioner Lin against the “Outside Barbarians;” and that single red character was, “Go away!” After the exhibition of which, it was impossible (of course!) to stay in the Chinese waters. Having shown this, the great Mandarin and his “tail” departed in solemn silence over the side of the ship. Of these “special edicts,” especially those touching the expulsion of the “smoking mud,” or opium, from the “Central Kingdom,” we may give the readers of the “Drawer” specimens in some subsequent number; there happening to be in that miscellaneous receptacle quite a collection of authentic Chinese State Papers, with translations, notes, and introductions, by a distinguished American savant, long a resident in the “Celestial Flowery Land.”