Then, as for the tight trousers which had been introduced, what lover of decency would now venture to show his person in the nakedness of unprotected legs, like the unblushing Francs? People might revile the janissaries; but, at all events, they were decently clad men, wearing as much cloth and muslin about their dress as would clothe a whole orta of the poor starving-looking individuals of the new nizam. It might be very well to say, that the faith of the heart did not change with the cut of one's clothes; but it was plain that when once reform began, it was impossible to say where it might stop; and true Mussulmans might perhaps soon have to deplore its terrible effects, by seeing their wives walk about without veils, with their faces exposed to the gaze of man. The unclean beast would ere long be eaten with impunity from one end of the celestial empire to the other; whilst all the holy Prophet's injunctions against wine would be entirely set at nought;—all to follow the example of unclean, faithless, and corrupt Francs, upon whom be all curses poured!
Such were the subjects which I daily heard discussed among the Turks, and every word which entered into my ears, only confirmed the reports which had reached my own country. I therefore consulted with my friend the Franc merchant upon the easiest mode of getting to England, quickest in point of conveyance, and the most eligible in point of secrecy. He recommended me to go by land, and first to proceed to the capital of the Nemseh, or Germans, ascending the Balkan, descending into the plains of Wallachia, by first crossing the Danube, and then making my way to another chain of mountains culled Karpathos; which having crossed, I should soon find myself among the Majar, and then all in good time, meeting the Danube again, I should reach Vienna. This seemed mighty easy to the Franc merchant, but to me it appeared very much like scaling the six heavens to get at the seventh. However, I was on the Shah's business; and therefore, putting my firm faith in Allah, I allied myself with a party of Greek merchants, who were proceeding into Germany upon matters of business. We resolved to set off as soon as we should hear that no recent robberies had taken place on the road.
SONNET TO A FOG.
(WITH A CRITICAL NOTE.)
BY EGERTON WEBBE.
Hail to thee, Fog! most reverend, worthy Fog! Come in thy full-wigg'd gravity; I much Admire thee:—thy old dulness hath a touch Of true respectability. The rogue That calls thee names (a fellow I could flog) Would beard his grandfather, and trip his crutch. But I am dutiful, and hold with such As deem thy solemn company no clog. Not that I love to travel best incog.— To pounce on latent lamp-posts, or to clutch The butcher in my arms or in a bog Pass afternoons; but while through thee, I jog, I feel I am true English, and no Dutch, Nor French, nor any other foreign dog That never mixed his grog Over a sea-coal fire a day like this, And bid thee scowl thy worst, and found it bliss, And to himself said, "Yes, Italia's skies are fair, her fields are sunny; But, d—n their eyes! Old England for my money."
"And do you call this a sonnet, sir?" I hear some reader say, with his fingers resting on the twentieth line: "I hope I know what a sonnet is; why, sir, sonnet is the Greek for fourteen, to be sure; and your lines must always count just two over the dozen, or you make no sonnet of it; everybody knows this same."
Have patience, good reader, while I proceed to convict thee of impertinence. No man is so happy of an occasion of correcting others as he who has recently learnt something. Now, behold! I have recently learnt this,—that the Italian poets, when they want to be funny, and at the same time to sonnetteer, (new verb,) outrage the gentle proportions of Poetry's fairest daughter—her whose delicate form took captive the soul of Petrarch—by ignominiously affixing to her hinder parts that always unseemly appendage—a tail, which is no less a tail, and therefore no less disgraceful to her who wears it, for being called, in the more courtly language of those original conspirators, coda (from Latin cauda, observe;—see your dictionary.) This have I learnt, astonished reader, by poking into the Parnasso Italiano, as you may do, and there, beholding these prodigious baboon sonnets in full tail,—for verily they resemble not the true birth more than monkeys resemble men, and that is as much as to say they do resemble them—in such a manner as to make you laugh at the difference. But herein those Italian conspirators, who hatched the infernal plot, gained their end; they diverted their readers at the expense of poetical decency. Now, however, seeing that this second ("caudatus") species of the sonnet has a real and lively existence in the land that gave it birth; and seeing that we have freely imported from that land the other, the non-caudatus, species, (for I suppose all young ladies and gentlemen know to what country they are indebted for the fourteen-lined happiness,) it seems but fair that we should improve our national stock by bringing over the later breed, and applying it to the same uses as our neighbours.
The above is the first avowed specimen of the tailed sonnet, I believe, that has ever appeared in English; and I hope it may operate as a useful example to better poets, and induce them to clap tails continually to their sonnets, whenever they intend fun.[87] I say it is the first avowed specimen, because there exists one (unsuspected) among the poems of no less a man than John Milton, who found nothing admirable in any language but he quickly transplanted it. That most accomplished of modern poetical critics, Leigh Hunt, was the first who discovered the fact, and gave the alarm to Milton's editors; he showed very clearly that that short poem, "On the New Forcers of conscience under the Long Parliament," which is always published, ignorantly, among the miscellaneous pieces, is neither more nor less than a comic sonnet with the Italian tail to it. If the reader will take the trouble to look into his Milton, he will find that this poem down to the line,