SON AND SHADE.
LITERARY REMINISCENCES.
No. IV.
“And are ye sure the news is true?
And are ye sure he’s weel?”—OLD SCOTCH SONG.
THE great Doctor Johnson—himself a sufferer—has pathetically described, in an essay on the miseries of an infirm constitution, the melancholy case of an Invalid, with a willing mind in a weak body. “The time of such a man,” he says, “is spent in forming schemes which a change of wind prevents him from executing; his powers fume away in projects and in hope, and the day of action never arrives. He lies down delighted with the thoughts of to-morrow; but in the night the skies are overcast; the temper of the air is changed; he wakes in languor, impatience, and distraction; and has no longer any wish but for ease, nor any attention but for misery.” In short the Rambler describes the whole race of Valetudinarians as a sort of great Bitumen Company, paving a certain nameless place, as some of the Asphalticals have paved Oxford Street, with not very durable good intentions. In a word, your Invalid promises like a Hogamy, and performs like a Pigamy.
To a hale hearty man, a perfect picture of health in an oaken frame, such abortions seem sufficiently unaccountable. A great hulking fellow, revelling as De Quincey used emphatically to say, “in rude BOVINE health,”—a voracious human animal, camel-stomached and iron-built, who could all but devour and digest himself like a Kilkenny cat,—can neither sympathise with nor understand those frequent failures and down-breakings which happen to beings not so fortunately gifted with indelicate constitutions. Such a half-horse half-alligator monster cannot judge, like a Puny Judge, of a case of feebleness. The broad-chested cannot allow for the narrow-breasted; the robust for the no-bust. Nevertheless, even the stalwart may sometimes fall egregiously short of their own designs—as witness a case in point.
Amongst my fellow passengers, on a late sea-voyage, there was one who attracted my especial attention. A glance at his face, another at his figure, a third at his costume, and a fourth at his paraphernalia, sufficed to detect his country: by his light hair, nubbly features, heavy frame, odd-coloured dressing-gown, and the national meerschaum and gaudy tobacco-bag, he was undeniably a German. But, besides the everlasting pipe, he was provided with a sketching apparatus, an ample note book, a gun, and a telescope; the whole being placed ready for immediate use. He had predetermined, no doubt, to record his German sentiments on first making acquaintance with the German Ocean; to sketch the picturesque craft he might encounter on its surface; to shoot his first sea-gull; and to catch a first glimpse of the shores of Albion, beyond the reach of the naked eye. But alas! all these intentions fell—if one may correctly say so with only sky and water—to the ground. He ate nothing—drank nothing—smoked nothing—drew nothing—wrote nothing—shot nothing—spied nothing—nay, he merely stared, but replied nothing to my friendly inquiry (I am ill at the German tongue and its pronunciation) “Wie befinden sea sick?”
Now, my own case, gentle reader, has been precisely akin to that of our unfortunate Cousin German. Like him I have promised much, projected still more, and done little. Like him, too, I have been a sick man, though not at sea, but on shore—and in excuse of all that has been left undone, or delayed, with other Performers, when they do not perform, I must proffer the old theatrical plea of indisposition. As the Rambler describes, I have erected schemes which have been blown down by an ill wind; I have formed plans, and been weather-beaten, like another Murphy, by a change in the weather. For instance, the Comic Annual for 1839 ought properly to have been published some forty days earlier; but was obliged, as it were, to perform quarantine, for want of a clean Bill of Health. Thus, too, the patron of the present Work who has taken the trouble to peruse certain chapters under the title of Literary Reminiscences, will doubtless have compared the tone of them with an Apology in Number Six, wherein, declining any attempt at an Auto-biography, a promise was made of giving such anecdotes as a bad memory and a bad hearing might have retained of my literary friends and acquaintance. Hitherto, however, the fragments in question have only presented desultory glimpses of a goose quill still in its green-gosling-hood, instead of any recollections of “celebrated pens.” The truth is that my malady forced me to temporise:—wherefore the kind reader will be pleased to consider the aforesaid chapters but as so many “false starts,” and that Memory has only now got away, to make play as well as she can.
Whilst I am thus closeted in the Confessional, it may be as well, as the Pelican said, to make a clean breast of it, and at once plead guilty to all those counts—and some from long-standing have become very Old Bailey counts—that haunt my conscience. The most numerous of these crimes relate to letters that would not, could not, or at least did not answer. Others refer to the receipt of books, and as an example of their heinousness it misgives me that I was favoured with a little volume by W. and M. Howitt, without ever telling them how-it pleased me. A few offences, concern engagements which it was impossible to fulfil, although doubly bound by principle and interest. Seriously I have perforce been guilty of many, many, and still many sins of omission: but Hope, reviving with my strength, promises, granting me life, to redeem all such pledges. In the mean time, in extenuation, I can only plead particularly that deprecation which is offered up, in behalf of all Christian defaulters every Sunday,—“We have left undone those things which we ought to have done,—And there is no HEALTH in us.”