Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 1

by John Wilson

"Like some tall Palm her noiseless fabric grew!"

Nay, not noiseless—for the deafest wight that ever strove to hear with his mouth wide open, might have sworn that he heard the sound of ten thousand hammers. Neither grew she like a Palm—but like a Banyan-tree. Ever as she threw forth branches from her great unexhausted stem, they were borne down by the weight of their own beauty to the soil—the deep, black rich soil in which she grew, originally sown there by a bird of Paradise, that dropt the seed from her beak as she sailed along in the sunshiny ether—and every limberest spray there again taking root, reascended a stately scion, and so on ceaselessly through all the hours, each in itself a spring-season, till the figurative words of Milton have been fulfilled,—

—"Her arms
Branching so broad and long, that in the ground
The bended twigs take root, and daughters grow
About the mother tree, a pillar'd shade
High overarch'd, and echoing walks between;
There oft the Ettrick Shepherd, shunning heat,
Shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing herds
At loopholes cut through thickest shade."

But, alas! for the Odontist! He, the "Deliciæ generis Humani," is dead. The best of all the Bishops of Bristol is no more. Mansel had not a tithe of his wit—nor Kaye a tithe of his wisdom. And can it be that we have not yet edited "His Remains!" "Alas! poor Yorick!" If Hamlet could smile even with the skull of the Jester in his hands, whom when a princely boy he had loved, hanging on his neck many a thousand times, why may not we, in our mind's eye seeing that mirthful face "quite chap-fallen," and hearing as if dismally deadened by the dust, the voice that "so often set our table on a roar!" Dr Parr's wig, too, is all out of frizzle; a heavier shot has dishevelled its horsehair than ever was sent from the Shepherd's gun; no more shall it be mistaken for owl a-blink on the mid-day bough, or ptarmigan basking in the sun high up among the regions of the snow. It has vanished, with other lost things, to the Moon; and its image alone remains for the next edition of the celebrated treatise "De Rebus Deperditis," a suitable and a welcome frontispiece, transferred thither by the engraver's cunning from the first of those Eight Tomes that might make the Trone tremble, laid on the shoulders of Atlas who threatens to put down the Globe, by the least judicious and the most unmerciful of editors that ever imposed upon the light living the heavy dead—John Johnson, late of Birmingham, Fellow of the Royal Society, and of the Royal College of Physicians, whose practice is duller than that of all Death's doctors, and his prescriptions in that preface unchristianly severe. ODoherty, likewise, has been gathered to his fathers. The Standard-bearer has lowered his colours before the foe who alone is invincible. The Ensign, let us not fear, has been advanced to a company without purchase, in the Celestials; the Adjutant has got a Staff appointment. Tims was lately rumoured to be in a galloping consumption; but the very terms of the report, about one so sedentary, were sufficient to give it the lie. Though puny, he is far from being unwell; and still engaged in polishing tea-spoons and other plated articles, at a rate cheaper than travelling gypsies do horn. Prince Leopold is now King of the Belgians—but we must put an end in the Tent to that portentous snore.

"Arise, awake, or be for ever fallen!"

Ho—ho! gentlemen—so you have had the precaution to sleep in your clothes. The sun, like Maga, is mounting higher and higher in heaven; so let us, we beseech you, to breakfast, and then off to the Moors.

"Substantial breakfast!" by Dugald Dhu, and by Donald Roy, and by Hamish Bhan—heaped up like icebergs round the pole. How nobly stands in the centre that ten-gallon Cask of Glenlivet! Proud is that Round to court his shade. That twenty-pound Salmon lies beneath it even as yesterday he lay beneath the cliff, while a column of light falls from him on that Grouse-Pie. Is not that Ham beautiful in the calm consciousness of his protection? That Tongue mutely eloquent in his praise? Tap him with your knuckles, tenderly as if you loved him—and that with all your heart and soul you do—and is not the response firm as from the trunk of the gnarled oak? He is yet "Virgin of Proserpina"—"by Jove" he is; no wanton lip has ever touched his mouth so chaste; so knock out the bung, and let us hear him gurgle. With diviner music does he fill the pitcher, and with a diviner liquidity of light than did ever Naiad from fount of Helicon or Castaly, pour into classic urn gracefully uplifted by Grecian damsel to her graceful head, and borne away, with a thanksgiving hymn, to her bower in the olive-grove.

All eggs are good eating; and 'tis a vulgar heresy which holds that those laid by sea-fowl have a fishy taste. The egg of the Sew-mew is exceeding sweet; so is that of the Gull. Pleasant is even the yolk of the Cormorant—in the north of England ycleped the Scarth, and in the Lowlands of Scotland the Black Byuter. Try a Black Byuter's egg, my dear boy; for though not newly laid, it has since May been preserved in butter, and is as fresh as a daisy after a shower. Do not be afraid of stumbling on a brace of embryo Black Byuters in the interior of the globe, for by its weight we pronounce it an egg in no peril of parturition. You may now smack your lips, loud as if you were smacking your palms, for that yellow morsel was unknown to Vitellius. Don't crush the shell, but throw it into the Etive, that the Fairies may find it at night, and go dancing in the fragile but buoyant canoe, in fits of small shrill laughter, along with the foam-bells over the ebb-tide Rapids above Connal's raging Ferry.

The salmon is in shivers, and the grouse-pie has vanished like a dream.

"So fades, so languishes, grows dim, and dies,
All that this world is proud of!"