“FELON LITERATURE.”
One of the most stinging reproofs of perverted literary taste, evidently aimed at Newgate Calendar literature, appeared in the form of a valentine, in No. 31 of Punch, in 1842.
The valentine itself reminds one of Churchill’s muse; and it needs no finger to tell where its withering satire is pointed:—
“THE LITERARY GENTLEMAN.
“Illustrious scribe! whose vivid genius strays
’Mid Drury’s stews to incubate her lays,
And in St. Giles’s slang conveys her tropes,
Wreathing the poet’s lines with hangmen’s ropes;
You who conceive ’tis poetry to teach
The sad bravado of a dying speech;
Or, when possessed with a sublimer mood,
Show “Jack o’Dandies” dancing upon blood!
Crush bones—bruise flesh, recount each festering sore—
Rake up the plague-pit, write—and write in gore!
Or, when inspired to humanize mankind,
Where doth your soaring soul its subjects find?
Not ’mid the scenes that simple Goldsmith sought,
And found a theme to elevate his thought;
But you, great scribe, more greedy of renown,
From Hounslow’s gibbet drag a hero down.
Imbue his mind with virtue; make him quote
Some moral truth before he cuts a throat.
Then wash his hands, and soaring o’er your craft—
Refresh the hero with a bloody draught:
And, fearing lest the world should miss the act,
With noble zeal italicize the fact.
Or would you picture woman meek and pure,
By love and virtue tutor’d to endure,
With cunning skill you take a felon’s trull,
Stuff her with sentiment, and scrunch her skull!
Oh! would your crashing, smashing, mashing pen were mine,
That I could “scorch your eyeballs” with my words,
“My Valentine.”
DEATH BED REVELATIONS.
Men before they die see and comprehend enigmas hidden from them before. The greatest poet, and one of the noblest thinkers of the last age, said on his death-bed:—“Many things obscure to me before, now clear up and become visible.”