THE COSMOPOLITE.
WET WEATHER.
(For the Mirror.)
"John's temper depended very much upon the air; his spirits rose and fell with the weather-glass."—ARBUTHNOT.
No one can deny that the above is a floating topic; and we challenge all the philosophy of ancients or moderns to prove it is not. After the memorable July 15, (St. Swithin,) people talk of the result with as much certainty as a merchant calculates on trade winds; and in like manner, hackney-coachmen and umbrella-makers have their trade rains. Indeed, there are, as Shakespeare's contented Duke says, "books in the running brooks, and good in every thing;"[2] and so far from neglecting to turn the ill-wind to our account, we are disposed to venture a few seasonable truisms for the gratification of our readers, although a wag may say our subject is a dry one.
In England, the weather is public news. Zimmerman, however, thinks it is not a safe topic of discourse. "Your company," says he, "may be hippish." Shenstone, too, says a fine day is the only enjoyment which one man does not envy another. All this is whimsical enough; but doubtless we are more operated on by the weather than by any thing else. Perhaps this is because we are islanders; for talk to an "intellectual" man about the climate, and out comes something about our "insular situation, aqueous vapours, condensation," &c. Then take up a newspaper on any day of a wet summer, and you see a long string of paragraphs, with erudite authorities, about "the weather," average annual depth of rain, &c.; and a score of lies about tremendous rains, whose only authority, like that of most miracles, is in their antiquity or repetition. In short, water is one of the most popular subjects in this age of inquiry. What were the first treatises of the Useful Knowledge Society? Hydrostatics and Hydraulics. What is the attraction at Sadler's Wells, Bath, and Cheltenham, but water? the Brighton people, too, not content with the sea, have even found it necessary to superadd to their fashionable follies, artificial mineral waters, with whose fount the grossest duchess may in a few days recover from the repletion of a whole season; and the minister, after the jading of a session, soon resume his wonted complacency and good humour.[3] Our aquatic taste is even carried into all our public amusements; would the festivities in celebration of the late peace have been complete without the sham fight on the Serpentine? To insure the run of a melo-drama, the New River is called in to flow over deal boards, and form a cataract; and the Vauxhall proprietors, with the aid of a hydropyric exhibition, contrive to represent a naval battle. This introduction during the past season was, however, as perfectly gratuitous as that of the rain was uncalled for. Had they contented themselves with the latter, the scene would have been more true to nature.
We carry this taste into our money-getting speculations, those freaks of the funds that leave many a man with one unfunded coat. The Thames tunnel is too amphibious an affair to be included in the number; but the ship canal project, the bridge-building mania, and the penchant for working mines by steam, evidently belong to them. The fashion even extends to royalty, since our good King builds a fishing-temple, and dines on the Virginia Water; and the Duke of Clarence, as Lord High Admiral, gives a dejeuné à la fourchette between Waterloo and Westminster bridges.
Whoever takes the trouble to read a paper in a late Edinburgh Review on the Nervous System, will doubtless find that much of our predilection for hanging and drowning is to be attributed to this "insular situation." Every man and woman of us is indeed a self pluviometer, or rain-gauge; or, in plain terms, our nerves are like so many musical strings, affected by every change of the atmosphere, which, if screwed up too tight, are apt to snap off, and become useless; or, if you please, we are like so many barometers, and our animal spirits like their quicksilver; so "servile" are we to all the "skyey influences." Take, for example, the same man at three different periods of the year: on a fine morning in January, his nerves are braced to their best pitch, and, in his own words, he is fit for any thing; see him panting for cooling streams in a burning July day, when though an Englishman, he is "too hot to eat;" see him on a wet, muggy ninth of November, when the finery of the city coach and the new liveries appear tarnished, and common councilmen tramp through the mud and rain in their robes of little authority—even with the glorious prospect of the Guildhall tables, the glitter of gas and civic beauty, and the six pounds of turtle, and iron knives and forks before him—still he is a miserable creature, he drinks to desperation, and is carried home at least three hours sooner than he would be on a fine frosty night. Then, instead of fifteen pounds to the square inch, atmospheric pressure is increased to five-and-forty, not calculating the simoom of the following morning, when he is as dry as the desert of Sahara, and eyes the pumps and soda- water fountains with as much gout as the Israelites did the water from Mount Horeb.
Man, however, is the most helpless of all creatures in water, and with the exception of a few proscribed pickpockets and swindlers, he is almost as helpless on land. This infirmity, or difficulty of keeping above water, accounts for the crammed state of our prisons, fond as we are of the element. On the great rivers of China, where thousands of people find it more convenient to live in covered boats upon the water, than in houses on shore, the younger and male children have a hollow ball of some light material attached constantly to their necks, so that in their frequent falls overboard, they are not in danger. Had we not read this in a grave, philosophical work, we should have thought it a joke upon poor humanity, or at best a piece of poetical justice, and that the hollow ball, &c. represented the head—fools being oftener inheritors of good fortune than their wiser companions. As the great secret in swimming is to keep the chest as full of air as possible, perhaps the great art of living is to keep the head a vacuum, a state "adapted to the meanest capacity." But had kind Nature supplied us with an air-bladder at the neck, the heaviest of us might have floated to eternity, Leander's swimming across the Hellespont no wonder at all, and the drags of the Humane Society be converted into halters for the suspension and recovery of old offenders and small debts.
A wet day in London is what every gentleman who does not read, or does not recollect, Shakspeare, calls a bore,[4] and every lady decides to be a nuisance. Abroad, everything is discomfiture; at home all is fidget and uneasiness. What is called a smart shower, sweeps off a whole stand of hackney-coaches in a few seconds, and leaves a few leathern conveniences called cabriolets, so that your only alternative is that of being soaked to the skin, or pitched out, taken up, bled, and carried home in "a state of insensibility." The Spanish proverb, "it never rains but it pours" soon comes to pass, and every street is momentarily washed as clean as the most diligent housemaid could desire. Every little shelter is crowded with solitary, houseless-looking people, who seem employed in taking descriptions of each other for the Hue and Cry, or police gazette. On the pavement may probably be seen some wight who with more than political obstinacy, resolves to "weather the storm," with slouched hat, which acts upon the principle of capillary attraction, drenched coat, and boots in which the feet work like pistons in tannin: now