It will not greatly puzzle the reader, we may presume, to conjecture what this adroit movement on the part of the pick-pocket ultimately led to; nor will he fail to recognize in the following limning a portrait of more than one character of these times. Mr. Glibly is entertaining Mr. Trevor with a running commentary upon some of the prominent personages who enter the theatre:
'There,' said he pointing, is a Mr. Migrate; a famous clerical character, and as strange an original as any this metropolis affords. He is not entitled to make a figure in the world either by his riches, rank, or understanding; but with an effrontery peculiar to himself he will knock at any man's door, though a perfect stranger, ask him questions, give him advice, and tell him he will call again to give him more on the first opportunity. By this means he is acquainted with every body, but knows nobody; is always talking, yet never says any thing; is perpetually putting some absurd interrogation, but before it is possible he should understand the answer, puts another. His desire to be informed torments himself and every man of his acquaintance, which is almost every man he meets: yet, though he lives inquiring, he will die consummately ignorant. His brain is a kind of rag shop, receiving and returning nothing but rubbish. It is as difficult to affront as to get rid of him: and though you fairly bid him begone to-day, he will knock at your door, march into your house, and if possible keep you answering his unconnected, fifty times answered queries to-morrow. He is the friend and the enemy of all theories and of all parties: and tortures you to decide for him which he ought to choose. As far as he can be said to have opinions, they are crude and contradictory in the extreme; so that in the same breath he will defend and oppose the same system. With all this confusion of intellect, there is no man so wise but he will prescribe to him how he ought to act. He has been a great traveller, and continually abuses his own countrymen for not adopting the manners and policy of other nations. He pretends to be the universal friend of man, a philanthropist on the largest scale, yet is so selfish that he would willingly see the world perish, if he could but secure paradise to himself. This is the only consistent trait in his character. In the same sentence, he frequently joins the most fulsome flattery and some insidious question, that asks the person whom he addresses if he do not confess himself to be both knave and fool. Delicacy of sentiment is one of his pretensions, though his tongue is licentious, his language coarse, and he is occasionally seized with fits of the most vulgar abuse. He declaims against dissimulation, yet will smilingly accost the man whom——'Ha! Migrate! How do you do? Give me leave to introduce you to Mr. Trevor, a friend of mine, a gentleman and a scholar; just come from Oxford. Your range of knowledge and universal intimacy with men and things, may be useful to him; and his erudite acquisitions, and philosophical research, will be highly gratifying to an inquirer like you. An intercourse between you must be mutually pleasing and beneficial, and I am happy to bring you acquainted.' This, addressed to the man whom he had been satirizing so unsparingly, was inconceivable! The unabashed facility with which he veered from calumny to compliment, and that too after he had accused the man whom he accosted of dissimulation, struck me dumb. I had perhaps seen something like it before, but nothing half so perfect in its kind. It doubly increased my stock of knowledge; it afforded a new instance of what the world is, and a new incitement to ask how it became so?'
A single passage more, which will have especial interest for the correspondent to whom we are indebted for the capital sketch of 'Love-Making in Boarding-Houses,' must close our excerpts. A maiden of an uncertain age is making a 'dead set' at our hero:
'She was sure I must find myself a great favorite; I was a favorite with every body; and, for her part, she did not wonder at it. 'Not but it is a great pity,' added she, aside, 'that you are such a rake, Mr. Trevor.' This repeated charge very justly alarmed my morality, and I very seriously began a refutation. But in vain. 'I might say what I would; she could see very plainly I was a prodigious rake, and nothing could convince her to the contrary. Though she had heard that your greatest rakes make the best husbands. Perhaps it might be true, but she did not think she could be persuaded to make the venture. She did not know what might happen, to be sure; though she really did not think she could. She could not conceive how it was, but some how or another she always found something agreeable about rakes. It was a great pity they should be rakes, but she verily believed the women loved them, and encouraged them in their seducing arts. For her part, she would keep her fingers out of the fire as long as she could: but, if it were her destiny to love a rake, what could she do? Nobody could help being in love, and it would be very hard indeed to call what one cannot help, a crime.'
We must commend the cogent arguments in favor of national theft, contained in the article on 'International Copy-right' in preceding pages, to the attention of the reader. It strikes us as one of the most tenable positions yet taken by the opponents of an exceedingly 'impolitic' literary measure. By the by; a new 'American Copy-right Club' has been recently established, with William Cullen Bryant and Gulian C. Verplanck, Esquires, for its president and vice-president; and for its secretaries and executive committee, several of the most prominent advocates of the proposed law to be found in our midst; including, we are glad to perceive, Mr. Puffer Hopkins Mathews, who has labored more abundantly than they all in the good cause, but with little success hitherto, we regret to be obliged to add. His metropolitan lecture last winter could scarcely have realized his own expectations; though it was not difficult to meet those of the public. A friend of ours who repaired early to the Tabernacle, with a ticket bearing a number above twelve hundred, found not three-score auditors in that capacious edifice. It is equally certain, that the following 'unkindest cut of all' at Mr. Mathews's international copy-right essays, which reaches us in the last number of the 'Dublin University Magazine,' embodies the opinion generally entertained of those efforts on this side the Atlantic: 'While on the subject of America, we would wish to add a line of a certain Cornelius Mathews, who writes pamphlets and delivers lectures in New-York, on the subject of an international copy-right law. Such is the complex involution of his style; such the headlong impetuosity with which tropes, figures, and metaphors run down, jostle, and overturn each other, that we have puzzled ourselves in vain to detect his meaning or the gist of his argument. Giants, elephants, 'tiger-mothers,' and curricles; angels, frigates, baronial castles, and fish-ponds, 'dance through his writings in all the mazes of metaphorical confusion;' and however desirous we may feel that a law of copy-right might protect British authors from American piracy, yet as one of the craft we boldly say: 'Non defensoribus istis! non tali auxilio!' Let the question be put forward manfully and intelligibly; let it not be a piece of Indian jugglery, performed by Cornelius Mathews, but the plain and simple acknowledgement that literary property is property, and as such has its rights, sacred and inviolable.' We have quoted this passage for the purpose of showing that our own opinion of Mr. Mathews's rambling thoughts and disjointed style finds abundant confirmation wherever his 'writings' are forced into temporary notice. * * * 'Served you right!' Carelessness like your's deserved just such a result. You'll not be guilty of a similar act of folly very soon, ''tan't likely:'
I am down in the mouth, I am out at the pockets!
Ah, me! I've no pockets at all;
And all I have left, is a braid and a locket;
That's all!
It was rather solemn; quite touching, alas!
As she got on a stool to be higher,
I acted, no doubt, the entire jack-ass—
Yes, entire!
Arms and lips came together, and staid, as I reckon,
With as much as you please of a linger,
Till a finger was seen at the window to beckon,
A finger!
We'd forgotten the shutters!—the world was forgot,
Till we saw that sign, from her father,
Which was rather a poser, just then, was it not?
'Twas, rather!