I now conclude, submissively craving “a word and a blow” from any of the readers or writers of the Irish Penny Journal who may be able to give them to me in the shape of facts or fancies likely to lend to the full solution of a question which has been for years my torment, namely—“What makes men blow?”
G. D.
Heaping up Wealth.—It is often ludicrous as well as pitiable to witness the miserable ends in which the heaping up of wealth not unusually terminates. A life spent in the drudgery of the counting-house, warehouse, or factory, is exchanged for the dignified ease of a suburban villa; but what a joyless seclusion it mostly proves! Retirement has been postponed until all the faculties of enjoyment have become effete or paralysed. “Sans eyes, sans teeth, sans taste, sans everything,” scarcely any inlet or pulsation remains for old, much less new pleasures and associations. Nature is not to be won by such superannuated suitors. She is not intelligible to them; and the language of fields and woods, of murmuring brooks, mountain tops, and tumbling torrents, cannot be understood by men familiar only with the noise of crowded streets, loaded vans, bustling taverns, and postmen’s knocks. The chief provincial towns are environed with luckless pyrites of this description, who, dropped from their accustomed sphere, become lumps and dross in a new element. Happily their race is mostly short; death kindly comes to terminate their weariness, and, like plants too late transplanted, they perish from the sudden change in long-established habits, air, and diet.
An Old Newspaper.—There is nothing more beneficial to the reflecting mind than the perusal of an old newspaper. Though a silent preacher, it is one which conveys a moral more palpable and forcible than the most elaborate discourse. As the eye runs down its diminutive and old-fashioned columns, and peruses its quaint advertisements and bygone paragraphs, the question forces itself on the mind—where are now the busy multitudes whose names appear on these pages?—where is the puffing auctioneer, the pushing tradesman, the bustling merchant, the calculating lawyer, who each occupies a space in this chronicle of departed time? Alas! their names are now only to be read on the sculptured marble which covers their ashes! They have passed away like their forefathers, and are no more seen! From these considerations the mind naturally turns to the period when we, who now enjoy our little span of existence in this chequered scene, shall have gone down into the dust, and shall furnish the same moral to our children that our fathers do to us! The sun will then shine as bright, the flowers will bloom as fair, the face of nature will be as pleasing as ever, while we are reposing in our narrow cell, heedless of every thing that once charmed and delighted us!
Printed and published every Saturday by Gunn and Cameron, at the Office of the General Advertiser, No. 6, Church Lane, College Green, Dublin.—Agents:—R. Groombridge, Panyer Alley, Paternoster Row, London; Simms and Dinham, Exchange Street, Manchester; C. Davies, North John Street, Liverpool; J. Drake, Birmingham; Slocombe & Simms, Leeds; Frazer and Crawford, George Street, Edinburgh; and David Robertson, Trongate, Glasgow.