EPIGRAM.
First in the grape the wine’s red hue,
Next in the bottle, glows:
But last, and most, and longest too,
O Cotta, in thy nose.
THE FARRAGO.
Nº. VII.
“MY AUNT PEG.”
In the Vicar of Wakefield, Dr. Goldsmith describes Burchell in company with a couple of courtesans, assuming the manners and language of ladies of quality. The penetrating humourist, at the close of every sentence from these frail damsels, boasting intimacy with high life, emphatically and poignantly exclaims, “Fudge.” When the ridiculous in manners, or the insipid in conversation and life, appears to Tom Toledo, whose nose is as curved as a fish-hook, by an inveterate habit of sneering, ’tis Tom’s way to baptize the oddity—My aunt Peg.
Now, whether my aunt Peg, like Tristram Shandy’s aunt Dinah, having been guilty of some back-slidings in her youth, has forfeited her right to respect from the family; or whether certain envious prudes, as is their wont, have leagued, and look prim against her, when she appears, is a question I cannot sagely solve. Certain it is, she is degraded from the rank of gentlewoman, and now keeps low and contemptible company.
My aunt Peg, like an English actress of scorched reputation, often exchanges the petticoats for the breeches, and disguised in male apparel, spouts farce and low comedy, at the Theatre Universal. Though she “has her exits and her entrances,” and “plays many parts,” yet critical spectators are always dissatisfied with her style of acting; her assumed, cannot mask her real character, and pit, box, and gallery, hiss “aunt Peg.”
Sauntering last term into a court of justice, I mingled with “the swinish multitude,” and figured to myself a union of law and eloquence, in the charge to the jurors from the bench. The person speaking, for I absurdly mistook him for the judge, resembling Sancho Panza in the island Barataria, rather than Buller, Hale, or Talbot, I plucked Toledo by the sleeve, and asked if his honour’s name were not Dogberry. By St. Mansfield, he deserves, when time and place shall serve, to be “set down for an ass.” It is no Judge, says Tom: that broad, and vacant starer is—my aunt Peg.
Dickey Dangle, the ladies’ man, plays three hours with my cousin Charlotte’s thimble, and fancies that he is courting her. A wag in my neighbourhood, a lover of pepper-pots, observing this frivolous “man of lath,” with an unthrobbing pulse, gazing sedately on the eyes of a fine girl, and praising her cherry lips, without a wish to press them, swears that he is the very fribble of Shakespeare; that
“This is he,
Who kissed away his hand in courtesy;
This is the ape of form, monsieur the nice,
——————WHOM LADIES CALL THEIR SWEET.”
And asks, in the phrase of Marlow, if I shall suffer my cousin to live with him and be his love. No. A contract of matrimony between two females is absurd, and not good in law; for doubtless Dickey is—my aunt Peg.
A literary friend, after a lonesome journey through a boorish quarter of the country, on his arrival at an inn, exults, when the waiter informs him, that the young fellow, entering the room, “has been to college.” The conversation naturally turns upon books. Do you relish the belles lettres? Oh yes, I read Rollin’s belles lettres last winter, and liked them mightily. The indignant traveller frowned—he was unconscious that a degree in arts was frequently conferred on—my aunt Peg.
When I was at the university—I beg that the world would suppose I mean Oxford, Edinburgh, or Aberdeen, and not our college of Cambridge, for which I have singular affection—if a lad were guilty of genius, a tribunal of tasteless tutors, professors, &c., would doom him to expulsion. What, said they, a man of genius in a college? It cannot, must not be.—Why Issachar, our strong ass, couching down between his two burdens, Greek on one side, and Mathematics on the other, will bray and break, bridle at the very sight of him. Yes, says Candor, their “worships and their reverences” are, in very deed,—my aunt Peg.
Half a century since, dame France was a stately old gentlewoman, proud of her pedigree, associating with men of rank, and keeping servants at a distance. But the devil, Reform, began to haunt her house, and she insisted that the table should be laid in the cellar, instead of the parlor. Some of her refractory domestics, who disobeyed this whimsical order, she turned out of doors, hung up others to the kitchen lamp with the jack line; and at length, assisted by a cruel dog of a joiner, she fixed a butcher’s cleaver into an old box, and fairly chopped the Steward’s head off.—Not one of her rational neighbours, who witnessed those mad deeds, but went away exclaiming,—Good lack! that such a noble lady should be vilely metamorphosed into—my aunt Peg.
For sources, see the end of the second installment ([pg. 405]).