The fourth game sets up a desirable rivalry with monkeys and asses. Who shall chatter the fastest? Who the loudest shall bray?
----"Three cat-calls be the bribe
Of him whose chatt'ring shames the monkey tribe:
And his this drum, whose hoarse heroic base
Drowns the loud clarion of the braying ass."
So numerous are the monkey-mimics that the claims of the chatterers cannot be adjusted—
Hold (cried the Queen) a cat-call each shall win;
Equal your merits! equal is your din!
But that this well-disputed game may end,
Sound forth, my Brayers, and the welkin rend."
Sir Richard Blackmore, with his six epics and sundry other poems, brays louder and longer than the most leathern or brazen of the other throats; Chancery Lane and Westminster Hall taking prominent part in the reverberating orchestra. The place is to be ranked amongst the famous echo-descriptions, and beats Drayton's and Wordsworth's hollow.
The fifth game is DIVING.
"This labor past, by Bridewell all descend,
(As morning pray'r and flagellation end)
To where Fleet-ditch, with disemboguing streams
Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames,
The king of dykes! than whom, no sluice of mud
With deeper sable blots the silver flood.
'Here strip, my children! here at once leap in,
Here prove who best can dash through thick and thin,
And who the most in love of dirt excel,
Or dark dexterity of groping well:
Who flings most filth, and wide pollutes around
The stream, be his the Weekly Journals bound;
A pig of lead to him who dives the best;
A peck of coals a-piece shall glad the rest.'
"In naked majesty Oldmixon stands,
And, Milo-like, surveys his arms and hands;
Then sighing thus, 'And am I now threescore?
Ah, why, ye Gods! should two and two make four?'
He said, and climb'd a stranded lighter's height,
Shot to the black abyss, and plung'd downright:
The senior's judgment all the crowd admire,
Who but to sink the deeper rose the higher.
"Next Smedley div'd; slow circles dimpled o'er
The quaking mud, that clos'd and op'd no more.
All look, all sigh, and call on Smedley lost;
Smedley in vain resounds through all the coast.
"Then ** essay'd; scarce vanish'd out of sight,
He buoys up instant, and returns to light;
He bears no tokens of the sabler streams,
And mounts far off among the swans of Thames.
"True to the bottom, see Concanen creep,
A cold, long-winded, native of the deep;
If perseverance gain the diver's prize,
Not everlasting Blackmore this denies:
No noise, no stir, no motion canst thou make,
Th' unconscious stream sleeps o'er thee like a lake.
"Next plung'd a feeble, but a desperate pack,
With each a sickly brother at his back:
Sons of a day! just buoyant on the flood,
Then number'd with the puppies in the mud.
Ask ye their names? I could as soon disclose
The names of these blind puppies as of those.
Fast by, like Niobe, (her children gone,)
Sits Mother Osborne, stupify'd to stone!
And monumental brass this record bears,
'These are, ah no! these were the Gazetteers!'
"Not so bold Arnall; with a weight of scull
Furious he drives, precipitately dull.
Whirlpools and storms in circling arm invest,
With all the might of gravitation blest.
No crab more active in the dirty dance,
Downward to climb, and backward to advance,
He brings up half the bottom on his head,
And loudly claims the Journal and the Lead.
"The plunging Prelate, and his pond'rous Grace,
With holy envy gave one layman place.
When lo! a burst of thunder shook the flood,
Slow rose a form in majesty of Mud;
Shaking the horrors of his sable brows,
And each ferocious feature grim with ooze.
Greater he looks, and more than mortal stares;
Then thus the wonders of the deep declares.
"First he relates how, sinking to the chin,
Smit with his mien, the mud-nymphs suck'd him in;
How young Lutetia, softer than the down,
Nigrina black, and Merdamente brown,
Vy'd for his love in jetty bow'rs below,
As Hylas fair was ravish'd long ago.
Then sung, how shown him by the Nut-brown maids
A branch of Styx here rises from the shades,
That tinctured as it runs with Lethe's streams,
And wafting vapors from the land of dreams,
(As under seas Alpheus' secret sluice
Bears Pisa's offering to his Arethuse)
Pours into Thames; and hence the mingled wave
Intoxicates the pert, and lulls the grave:
Here brisker vapours o'er the Temple creep;
There, all from Paul's to Aldgate drink and sleep.
"Thence to the banks where rev'rend bards repose,
They led him soft; each rev'rend bard arose;
And Milbourn chief, deputed by the rest,
Gave him the cassock, surcingle, and vest.
'Receive (he said) these robes, which once were mine,
Dulness is sacred in a sound divine.'
He ceas'd, and spread the robe; the crowd confess
The rev'rend flamen in his lengthen'd dress.
Around him wide a sable army stand,
A low-born, cell-bred, selfish, servile band,
Prompt or to guard or stab, to saint or damn,
Heav'n's Swiss, who fight for any god, or man.
"Through Lud's fam'd gates, along the well-known Fleet,
Rolls the black troop, and overshades the street,
Till show'rs of sermons, characters, essays,
In circling fleeces whiten all the ways:
So clouds replenish'd from some bog below,
Mount in dark volumes, and descend in snow."
The last of the contests offers one or two difficulties. The goddess will appoint her Supreme Judge in the Court of Criticism, and she ordains a trial of qualifications. This is the manner of ordeal. A dull piece in prose, and a dull piece in verse, is to be read aloud. The auditor who remains the longest awake carries the election. The two preparations of Morphine exhibited, are a sermon of H—ley's (Henley or Hoadley?) and Blackmore's Prince Arthur. Six candidate heroes present themselves, three from the University, and three from the Inns of Court. Some explanation seems to be required of an arrangement which allots extraordinarily high promotion in the State of Dulness to a real and prodigious effort of mental energy. What explanation can be given? Are the affairs of Dulness conducted, in some respects, by the same rules which obtain in the Commonwealth of Wit? Is it held there, as here, that the first step to be taken, in order to forming a judgment of any book, is to read it? Was it prudently considered that the dullest of critics can read only as long as his eyes are open? and that the function of judge must incessantly bring under his cognisance papaverous volumes, with which only a super-human endowment of vigilance could hope successfully to contend? so that the goddess is driven, by the necessity of the game, to admit within the circuit of her somnolent sway, a virtue to which she is naturally and peculiarly hostile? Or are we mistaken in supposing that vigour of mind really qualifies for hearing a dull book through? Is it dulness itself that the most ably listens to dulness? We are out of our element, we presume, for we arrive at no satisfactory solution.
Be all this as it may, the method of competition fails of accomplishing its end; and the chair, after all, is left vacant. Not that the divinity has in the least misjudged the way of operation proper to her beloved tomes; but she has miscalculated the strength of her sons. Every dull head of the congregated multitude—of the illustrious competitors—and of the two officiating readers, bows overcome. There is, perforce, an end; and the chair is yet open to the whole kingdom.