M.
RANDOM SKETCHES.
NO. III.—BLOWING MEN.
What makes men blow? “I’ll be blowed if I know.” Such might be the answer in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand; and the object of this paper is to invite that thousandth individual who is versed in the philosophy of blowing to come forth and settle the question.
Every body knows why butchers blow, and flute-players, and glass-blowers, &c., and why some men puff at auctions; but the question is, why, without any conceivable motive either of business or pleasure, certain men, while circulating through the streets of Dublin perhaps on a breezeless day, have been seen to distend their cheeks, and discharge a great volume of breath into the face of the serene and unoffending atmosphere.
One of the introductory chapters in Tom Jones is devoted to proving that authors always write the better for being acquainted with the subjects on which they write. If this position be true (as I believe it is), I may seem deserving of a blowing up for venturing on my present theme. However, my object (as I have already hinted) in this, as in my first sketch, is rather to court than to convey information. If my brief notices of Fox and Smut contained in said sketch could at all serve to promote the study of catoptrics, I would not consider the time it cost me misspent. (And, by the bye, Mr Editor, I know somebody who, if he chose, could inform your readers how he once saw one of his own cats actually assisting at a surgical operation!) In like manner, if the following meagre result of my attempt towards developing the philosophy of blowing should excite inquiry on a subject never, I believe, broached before, I would feel very thankful for any information anent it that might reach me through the medium of the Irish Penny Journal.
Blowing men form a small, a very small, part of the community. During some forty years’ experience of the Dublin flags, I have met with only four specimens of this genus. Yet limited as is the number of my specimens, I am constrained to distribute them into two classes—one consisting of three individuals, the other, of the remaining one. My first-class men blew all alike—right “ahead,” as the Americans say; my fourth man protruded his chin, and breathed rather than blew somewhat upwards, as if he wanted to treat the tip of his nose to a vapour-bath.
What characteristics, then, did my triad of blowers possess in common, and from what community of idiosyncrasy did they agree in a practice unknown to the generality of mankind? The latter question I avow my inability to answer: on the former I can perhaps throw a little twilight. The principal man among them in point of rank—a late noble and facetious judge—was by far the most inveterate blower in the class: his puff was perpetual, like the mahogany dye of his boot-tops. One point of resemblance I have traced between the peer and his two compeers: he was a proud man. In proof of this allegation I have the evidence of his own avowal:—“I’m the first peer of my family, but I’m as proud as the old nobility of England.” Of the other pair, one I know to be proud, the other I believe to be so. Here then is one element—PRIDE: another I conceive to be WEALTH. My first-class blowers were all rich men: nay, the youngest among them never ventured on blowing, to the best of my belief, till he had gotten a good slice of a quarter of a million whereof his uncle died possessed. I was standing one day at the door of a bookseller’s shop in Suffolk Street, deeply intent upon nothing, when my gentleman passed by on the opposite side. My eyes, ready for any new object, idly followed him, and as he crossed to Nassau Street he blew. The offer was fair enough for a beginner, but it would not do—he wanted fat. No man much under the episcopal standard of girth should think of blowing: of this I feel a perfect conviction.
As for my solitary second-class man, the unique character of his blowing, or breathing, may have been but an emanation of his unique mind. He was, as the song says, “werry pecooliar”—an extensive medical practitioner among the poor, though not a medical man—the editor of an agricultural journal, though unacquainted with farming—a moral man, yet the avowed admirer of the lady of an invalid whose expected death was to be the signal for their union: the death came, but the union was never effected.
Groping then, as I do, in the dark, I would with great diffidence submit, that certain individuals, being encumbered with PRIDE, WEALTH, and FAT, are hence, somehow, under both a mental and physical necessity of blowing: why all individuals thus encumbered do not adopt the practice, is matter for consideration. As a further clue to investigation I may add, that although the union of the above three qualifications in one individual is by no means peculiar to Dublin, yet in Dublin alone have I ever seen men blow, and that none of my quaternion of blowing men was of Milesian descent: one was of Saxon, another of Scottish race, and the remaining two were sprung from Huguenots.