Most readers have heard the story of the connoisseur in the fine arts who said one day to a friend, "I wish you would come down and see a picture I bought last week. I'd like to have you give me your candid opinion of it. A friend of mine had the impudence to say this morning that it was not an original! I should like to hear another man say that it was not an original! But you come and see it, and tell me honestly what you think of its authenticity." It strikes us that a man would not be apt to give a very "candid" opinion under those circumstances. This freedom of opinion is not unlike the liberty of action said to have been granted by Col. M'Lane to the troops under his command, before going into winter-quarters at Valley Forge. They were suffering for provisions and clothing, and Congress had been repeatedly petitioned for that relief which it was not in their power to bestow. Under this state of things, Colonel M'Lane paraded his band of suffering soldiers, and thus addressed them: "Fellow-soldiers, you have served your country faithfully and truly. We've fought hard fights together against our common enemy. You are in a bad way for comfortable clothes, it is true, and it grieves my very heart to see you tracking your feet in blood on the frozen ground. But Congress can not help it, nor can General Washington or I. But if any of you wish to return home, you can go. Let such of you as would like to go home step out four paces in front—but the first man that steps out, if I don't shoot him my name is not M'Lane." It is perhaps needless to add, that not a solitary "volunteer" homeward was to be found.
[Editor's Easy Chair.]
After our more severe Editorial work is done—the scissors laid in our drawer, and the Monthly Record made as full as our pages will bear, of history, we have a way of throwing ourselves back into an old red-backed Easy Chair, that has long been an ornament of our dingy office, and indulging in an easy, and careless overlook of the gossiping papers of the day, and in such chit-chat with chance visitors, as keeps us informed of the drift of the town-talk, while it relieves greatly the monotony of our office hours.
We have before now sailed over seas with some rollicking, red-faced captain, who, after a good day's run with his yards well braced to the wind, would, as evening began to fall, and the breezes to lull, rig out his studding-sail booms, and set new bits of canvas to catch every puff of the dying zephyrs. In like manner, we, having made our course good, out of mere whim, add to our sail, and mean to catch up in these few additional pages, those lighter whiffs from the great world of opinion, which come floating to us, as we sit here in our Easy Chair.
Nor are we altogether bent on choosing mere gossip; but, rather, we shall be on the watch for such topics or incidents as give a handle to the conversation of the town; and instead of treating them in any such philosophic fashion, as most writing men think it necessary to do, we shall try and set them down with all that gloss, and that happy lack of sequence, which makes every-day talk so much better than every-day writing.
There are hundreds of monthly occurrences which go into the journals as mere skeletons of facts; and yet, if a body had but the art of embalming by language, that fleshy covering which the every-day talk is sure to wrap about them, they would prove (these facts, we mean) the cheerfullest companions in the world.
And this is just the thing that we shall try to do. If the Cubans, down in Havanna, shoot some fifty men, we shall not be content with entering it upon our record: we shall not take up what we consider (as the Daily Journals consider they do) some impregnable position, and thunder away at some one else who has an equally impregnable position of precisely the opposite character; but we shall try and get hold of the actual situation of this new provision for the town maw, in that great feeding-place of the town, viz.—Public Talk. We shall say who are the most voracious feeders, and may possibly comment, in an amiable humor, upon the different modes of consumption.
The French have a most happy way of commuting the dull coinage of every-day facts into the most mailable matter in the world: and as we sit in our Easy Chair, and catch up, as we sometimes do, a leaf of a Parisian journal, we find ourselves unconsciously creeping into the heart of some street-story, which, in any English journal, would have been the merest item of Police!
Take, for instance, a single one—entered on all the commercial sheets after this fashion: "We understand that a suicide was committed under deplorable circumstances, not long since, in the Rue St. George. It appears that a French gentleman, owing to pecuniary embarrassments, had long been melancholy, and last evening killed himself with the fumes of charcoal. It is reported that he had been twice married, and (horribile dictu) that he exhumed his first wife, previous to committing the fatal deed. He leaves a very respectable property."