October 29.
October in London.
On looking into the “Mirror of the Months,” we find “a lively portraiture” of the season.—“October is to London what April is to the country; it is the spring of the London summer, when the hopes of the shopkeeper begin to bud forth, and he lays aside the insupportable labour of having nothing to do, for the delightful leisure of preparing to be in a perpetual bustle. During the last month or two he has been strenuously endeavouring to persuade himself that the Steyne at Brighton is as healthy as Bond-street; the pavé of Pall Mall no more picturesque than the Pantiles of Tunbridge Wells; and winning a prize at one-card-loo at Margate, as piquant a process as serving a customer to the same amount of profit. But now that the time is returned when ‘business’ must again be attended to, he discards with contempt all such mischievous heresies, and reembraces the only orthodox faith of a London shopkeeper—that London and his shop are the true ‘beauteous and sublime’ of human life. In fact, ‘now is the winter of his discontent’ (that is to say, what other people call summer) ‘made glorious summer’ by the near approach of winter; and all the wit he is master of is put in requisition, to devise the means of proving that every thing he has offered to ‘his friends the public,’ up to this particular period, has become worse than obsolete. Accordingly, now are those poets of the shopkeepers, the inventors of patterns, ‘perplexed in the extreme; since, unless they can produce a something which shall necessarily supersede all their previous productions, their occupation’s gone.—It is the same with all other caterers for the public taste; even the literary ones. Mr. Elliston, [or his fortunate successor, if one there be,] ‘ever anxious to contribute to the amusement of his liberal patrons, the public,’ is already busied in sowing the seeds of a new tragedy, two operatic romances, three grand romantic melo-dramas, and half a dozen farces, in the fertile soil of those poets whom he employs in each of these departments respectively; while each of the London publishers is projecting a new ‘periodical,’ to appear on the first of January next; that which he started on the first of last January having, of course, died of old age ere this!”
Beginning of “Fires.”
In October, fires have fairly gained possession of their places, and even greet us on coming down to breakfast in the morning. Of all the discomforts of that most comfortless period of the London year which is neither winter nor summer, the most unequivocal is that of its being too cold to be without a fire, and not cold enough to have one. A set of polished fire-irons, standing sentry beside a pile of dead coals imprisoned behind a row of glittering bars, instead of mending the matter, makes it worse; inasmuch as it is better to look into an empty coffin, than to see the dead face of a friend in it. At the season in question, especially in the evening, one feels in a perpetual perplexity, whether to go out or stay at home; sit down or walk about; read, write, cast accounts, or call for the candle and go to bed. But let the fire be lighted, and all uncertainty is at an end, and we (or even one) may do any or all of these with equal satisfaction. In short, light but the fire, and you bring the winter in at once; and what are twenty summers, with all their sunshine (when they are gone,) to one winter, with its indoor sunshine of a sea-coal fire?[404]
Mr. Leigh Hunt, who on the affairs of “The Months” is our first authority, pleasantly inquires—“With our fire before us, and our books on each side, what shall we do? Shall we take out a life of somebody, or a Theocritus, or Dante, or Ariosto, or Montaigne, or Marcus Aurelius, or Horace, or Shakspeare who includes them all? Or shall we read an engraving from Poussin or Raphael? Or shall we sit with tilted chairs, planting our wrists upon our knees, and toasting the up-turned palms of our hands, while we discourse of manners and of man’s heart and hopes, with at least a sincerity, a good intention, and good nature, that shall warrant what we say with the sincere, the good-intentioned, and the good-natured?”—He then agreeably brings us to the mantlepiece. “Ah—take care. You see what that old looking saucer is, with a handle to it? It is a venerable piece of earthenware, which may have been worth, to an Athenian, about twopence; but to an author, is worth a great deal more than ever he could—deny for it. And yet he would deny it too. It will fetch his imagination more than ever it fetched potter or penny-maker. Its little shallow circle overflows for him with the milk and honey of a thousand pleasant associations. This is one of the uses of having mantlepieces. You may often see on no very rich mantlepiece a representative body of all the elements, physical and intellectual,—a shell for the sea, a stuffed bird or some feathers for the air, a curious piece of mineral for the earth, a glass of water with some flowers in it for the visible process of creation,—a cast from sculpture for the mind of man;—and underneath all, is the bright and ever-springing fire, running up through them heavenwards, like hope through materiality.”