And from that time the queen never lost an opportunity of serving my mother and her family, and it is to her I owe the favor and patronage of the minister Colbert.
"And now, children," said Perrault, "how do you like my last fairy tale?"
[From Dickens's Household Words.]
THE EFFORTS OF A GENTLEMAN IN SEARCH OF DESPAIR.
Mr. Blackbrook lived in a world of his own. It was his pleasure to believe that men were phantoms of a day. For life he had the utmost contempt. He pronounced it to be a breath, a sigh, a fleeting shadow. His perpetual theme was, that we are only here for a brief space of time. He likened the uncertainty of existence to all the most frightful ventures he could conjure up. He informed timid ladies that they were perpetually on the edge of a yawning abyss; and warned little boys that their laughter might be turned to tears and lamentation, at the shortest notice. Mr. Blackbrook was a welcome guest in a large serious circle. From his youth he had shown a poetic leaning, of the most serious order. His muse was always in deep mourning—his poetic gum oozed only from his favorite grave-yard.
He thought "L'Allegro" Milton's worst performance; and declared that Gray's "Elegy in a Country Church-yard" was too light and frivolous. His life was not without its cares; but, then, he reveled in his misfortunes. He was always prepossessed with a man who wore a hatband. The owl was his favorite bird. A black cat was the only feline specimen he would admit to his sombre apartment; and his garden was stocked with yew-trees. He reveled in the charm of melancholy—he would not, if he could, be gay. His meditations raised him so great a height above his family, that little sympathy could exist between them. Eternity so engaged him, that his brothers and sisters—mere phantoms—did not cost him much consideration. His youthful Lines to the Owl, in the course of which he called the bird in question "a solemn messenger," "a dread image of the moral darkness which surrounds us," "a welcome voice," and "a mysterious visitant," indicated the peculiar turn of his mind. His determination to be miserable was nothing short of heroic. In his twenty-second year a relation left him a modest fortune. His friends flocked about him to congratulate him; but they found him in a state of seraphic sorrow, searching out a proper rhyme to the urn in which he had poetically deposited the ashes of his benefactor. On looking over the lines he had distilled from his prostrate heart, his friends, to their astonishment, discovered that he had alluded to the bequest in question in the most contemptuous strain:
Why leave to one thy velvet and thy dross,
Whose wealth is boundless, and whose velvet's moss?
So ran his poetic commentary. His boundless wealth consisted of intellectual treasures exclusively, and the sweet declaration that moss was his velvet, was meant to convey to the reader the simplicity and Arcadian nature of his habits. The relation who had the assurance to leave him a fortune, was dragged remorselessly through fifty lines as a punishment for his temerity. Yet, in a fit of abstraction, Mr. Blackbrook hurried to Doctors' Commons to prove the will; hereby displaying his resignation to the horrible degree of comfort which the money assured to him. It was not for him, however, to forget that life was checkered with woe, that it was a vale of tears—a brief, trite, contemptible matter. The gayety of his house and relations horrified him; they interfered, at every turn, with his melancholy mood. He sighed for the fate of Byron or Chatterton! Why was he doomed to have his three regular meals per diem; to lie, at night, upon a feather-bed, and the recognized layers of mattresses; to have a new coat when he wanted one; to have money continually in his pocket, and to be accepted when he made an offer of marriage? The fates were obviously against him. One of his sisters fell in love. How hopefully he watched the course of her passion! How fondly he lingered near, in the expectation, the happy expectation, of a lovers' quarrel. But his sister had a sweet disposition—a mouth made to distill the gentlest and most tender accents. The courtship progressed with unusual harmony on both sides. Only once did fortune appear to favor him. One evening, he observed that the lovers avoided each other, and parted coldly. Now was his opportunity; and in the still midnight, when all the members of his household were in bed, he took his seat in his chamber, and, by the midnight oil, threw his soul into some plaintive lines "On a Sister's Sorrow." He mourned for her in heart-breaking syllables; likened her lover to an adder in an angel's path; dwelt on her quiet gray eyes, her stately proportions, and her classic face. He doomed her to years of quiet despair, and saw her fickle admirer the gayest of the gay. He concluded with the consoling intelligence, that he would go hand in hand with her along the darkened passage to the grave. His sister, however, did not avail herself of this proffered companionship, but chose rather to be reconciled, and to marry her lover.
Mr. Blackbrook found some consolation for this disappointment in the composition of an epithalamium of the most doleful character on the occasion of his sister's marriage, in the course of which he informed her that Jove's thunderbolts might be hurled at her husband's head at any period of the day; that we all must die; that the bride may be a widow on the morrow of her nuptials; and other equally cheerful truths. Yet at his sister's wedding-breakfast, Mr. Blackbrook coquetted with the choice parts of a chicken, and drowned his sorrow in a delectable jelly.