THE GATHERER.
Hood's Comic Annual for 1833.—Mr. Hood's announcement of his forthcoming volume is in the very vein of the work itself. He writes to his publisher:—"The report of my death, I can assure you is premature, but I am equally obliged to you for your tribute of putting up shutters and wearing a crape hatband. I suspect your friend and informant, Mr. Livingstone—(it should be Gravestone)—drew his inference from a dark passage in Miss Sheridan's Preface which states that, 'of the three Comic Annuals which started at the same time, the Comic Offering alone remains.' The two defuncts therein referred to are the 'Falstaff' and 'The Humorist,' which I understand have put an end to themselves.
"If you should still entertain any doubts, you will shortly have ten thousand impressions to the contrary; for I intend to contradict my demys by fresh octavos. The Comic Annual for 1833, with its usual complement of plates—mind, not coffin-plates—to appear as heretofore, in November, will give the lie, I trust, not merely to my departure, but even to anything like a serious illness: and a novel, about the same time, will help to prove that I am not in a state of de-composition.
"I should have relieved your joint anxieties some days earlier, but till I met Mr. Livingstone, at Bury, I was really not alive to my death."
Cartoons at Hampton Court.[14]—I mentioned in my last, that I had formed an acquaintance with Holloway, who has been sometime occupied in copying in black chalks the Cartoons of Raphael in this palace. It will be a magnificent work, and admirably executed, for he finishes them as highly as a miniature; his chalk-pencils are of a superior quality, and he cuts them to the finest point: but he says they will only serve to work with on vellum, or on fine skin. He is an eccentric genius, deeply read in Scripture history, which he expounds in the most methodistical tone; but it is very delightful and instructive to listen to his observations on the beauties and merits of these masterpieces of Raphael. A Madame Bouiller, an interesting French emigrant is also occupied on the same subjects. She is patronized by West, who has given her permission to study here; and says that he never saw such masterly artist touches of the crayon as hers. Her style is large heads, after the size and manner of the French; therefore the figures in the Cartoons are particularly adapted for her pencil.
I found poor Holloway this morning foaming with rage in the Cartoon Gallery. Some person has written against the Cartoons, denominating them "washed daubs." No doubt it is either the pen of envy and malignity, or of ignorance: n'importe, it has wounded the feelings of a superior artist and a good man, who worships with religious enthusiasm those works of Raphael, and who has spent so many years in perfecting his engravings of them. It was a grotesque scene to behold Madame Bouiller pacing after Holloway up and down the gallery, with all the grimaces and vivacity of a Frenchwoman, and re-echoing his furious lamentations.
Edinburgh (by Mr. Cobbett).—I thought that Bristol, taking in its heights and Clifton, and its rocks and its river, was the finest city in the world; but Edinburgh, with its castle, its hills, its pretty little sea-port, conveniently detached from it, its vale of rich land lying all around, its lofty hills in the back ground, its views across the Frith;—I think little of its streets and rows of fine houses, though all built of stone, and though everything in London and Bath is beggary to these; I think nothing of Holyrood House; but I think a great deal of the fine and well-ordered streets of shops—of the regularity which you perceive everywhere in the management of business; and I think still more of the absence of all that foppishness, and that affectation of carelessness, and that insolent assumption of superiority, that you see in almost all the young men that you meet with in the fashionable parts of the great towns in England. I was not disappointed; for I expected to find Edinburgh the finest city in the kingdom. Conversations at Newcastle, and with many Scotch gentlemen for years past, had prepared me for this; but still the reality has greatly surpassed every idea that I had formed about it. The people, however, still exceed the place: here all is civility; you do not meet with rudeness, or even with the want of a disposition to oblige, even in persons in the lowest state of life. A friend took me round the environs of the city; he had a turnpike ticket, received at the first gate, which cleared five or six gates. It was sufficient for him to tell the future gatekeepers that he had it. When I saw that, I said to myself, "Nota bene: Gate-keepers take people's word in Scotland—a thing that I have not seen before since I left Long Island."