After the lines already quoted, our dying drummer breaks out into the following wonderful apostrophe:
Approach, ye sophs, who, in your northern den,
Wield, with both hands, your huge didactic pen;
Who, step by step, o’er Pindus’ up-hill road,
Drag slowly on your learning’s pond’rous load:
Though many a shock your perilous march encumbers,
Ere the stiff prose can struggle into numbers;
And you, at comets’ tails, who fondly stare,
And find a mistress in the lesser bear;
And you, who, full with metaphysics fraught,
Detect sensation starting into thought,
And trace each sketch by Memory’s hand design’d
On that strange magic lantern call’d the MIND;
And you, who watch each loit’ring empire’s fate;
Who heap up fact on fact, and date on date;
Who count the threads that fill the mystic loom,
Where patient vengeance wove the fate of Rome;
Who tell that wealth unnerv’d her soldier’s hand, }
That Folly urg’d the fate by traitor’s plann’d; }
Or, that she fell—because she could not stand: }
Approach, and view, in this capacious mind,
Your scatter’d science in one mass combin’d:
Whate’er tradition tells, or poets sing,
Of giant-killing John, or John the King;
Whate’er———
But we are apprehensive that our zeal has already hurried us too far, and that we have exceeded the just bounds of this paper. We shall therefore take some future opportunity of reverting to the character of this prodigious nobleman, who possesses, and deserves to possess, so distinguished a share in his master’s confidence. Suffice it to say, that our author does full justice to every part of his character. He considers him as a walking warehouse of facts of all kinds, whether relating to history, astronomy, metaphysics, heraldry, fortifications, naval tactics, or midwifery; at the same time representing him as a kind of haberdasher of small talents, which he retails to the female part of his family, instructing them in the mystery of precedence, the whole art of scented pomatums, the doctrine of salves for broken heads, of putty for broken windows, &c. &c. &c.
* * * * *
NUMBER II.
We now return to the dying drummer, whom we left in the middle of his eulogy on the Marquis of Buckingham.
It being admitted, that the powers of the human mind depend on the number and association of our ideas, it is easy to shew that the illustrious Marquis is entitled to the highest rank in the scale of human intelligence. His mind possesses an unlimited power of inglutition, and his ideas adhere to each other with such tenacity, that whenever his memory is stimulated by any powerful interrogatory, it not only discharges a full answer to that individual question, but likewise such a prodigious flood of collateral knowledge, derived from copious and repeated infusions, as no common skull would be capable of containing. For these reasons, his Lordship’s fitness for the department of the Admiralty, a department connected with the whole cyclopœdia of science, and requiring the greatest variety of talents and exertions, seems to be pointed out by the hand of Heaven;—it is likewise pointed out by the dying drummer, who describes in the following lines, the immediate cause of his nomination:—
On the great day, when Buckingham, by pairs
Ascended, Heaven impell’d, the K———’s back-stairs;
And panting breathless, strain’d his lungs to show
From Fox’s bill what mighty ills would flow:
That soon, its source corrupt, Opinion’s thread,
On India’s deleterious streams wou’d shed;
That Hastings, Munny Begum, Scott, must fall,
And Pitt, and Jenkinson, and Leadenhall;
Still, as with stammering tongue, he told his tale,
Unusual terrors Brunswick’s heart assail;
Wide starts his white wig from his royal ear,
And each particular hair stands stiff with fear,
We flatter ourselves that few of our readers are so void of taste, as not to feel the transcendant beauties of this description. First, we see the noble Marquis mount the fatal steps “by pairs,” i.e. by two at a time; and with a degree of effort and fatigue: and then he is out of breath, which is perfectly natural. The obscurity of the third couplet, an obscurity which has been imitated by all the ministerial writers on the India bill, arises from a confusion of metaphor, so inexpressibly beautiful, that Mr. Hastings has thought fit to copy it almost verbatum, in his celebrated letter from Lucknow. The effects of terror on the royal wig, are happily imagined, and are infinitely more sublime than the “steteruntque comæ” of the Roman poet; as the attachment of a wig to its wearer, is obviously more generous and disinterested than that of the person’s own hair, which naturally participates in the good or ill fortune of the head on which it grows. But to proceed.—Men in a fright are usually generous;—on that great day, therefore, the Marquis obtained the promise of the Admiralty. The dying drummer then proceeds to describe the Marquis’s well-known vision, which he prefaces by a compliment on his Lordship’s extraordinary proficiency in the art of lace-making. We have all admired the parliamentary exertions of this great man, on every subject that related to an art in which the county of Buckingham is so deeply interested; an art, by means of which Britannia (as our author happily expresses it)
Puckers round naked breasts, a decent trimming,
Spreads the thread trade, and propagates old women!