Our hero decides upon adopting the stage as a profession, and with this view takes lessons in elocution. Having perfected himself in this art, he applies to a manager, by note, for permission to display his abilities, but is informed that the nights are engaged for two months ahead, and it would be impossible for him to appear during the season. By the influence, however, of some hanger-on of the theatre, his wishes are at length gratified, and he is announced in the bills as "the celebrated Master Le Brun, the son of a distinguished English nobleman, whose success was so unprecedented in London as to have performed fifty nights in succession at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane"—a sentence in which we are at a loss to discover whether the English nobleman, or the English nobleman's son, or the success of the English nobleman's son is the distinguished performer in question.
Our adventurer succeeds in his debût, and is in a fair way of becoming a popular performer, when his prospects are suddenly nipped in the bud. His valet one morning announces a Sir Thomas Le Brun, and Sir Thomas Le Brun proves to be that worthy gentleman Sir John Augustus Frederick Geoffry Ulric, Baronet. A scene ensues. Paul screams, and Sir John clenches his fist. The father makes a speech, and the son makes a speech and a bow. At length they fly into each other's arms, and the drama closes by the old personage taking the young personage home in his carriage. In all this balderdash about the stage, there is not one original incident or idea. The same anecdotes are told, but in infinitely better language, in every book of dramatic reminiscences since the flood.
Our author now indulges in what we suppose to be satire. The arrows of his wit are directed, with much pertinacity at least, against one Borel Bunting, by which name it strikes us that Mr. M. wishes to indicate some poor devil of an editor in bonâ fide existence—perhaps some infatuated young person who could not be prevailed upon, by love or money, to look over the MS. of Paul Ulric. If our supposition be true, we could wish Mr. Borel Bunting no better revenge than what the novelist has himself afforded by this public exposure of his imbecility. We must do our readers the favor of copying for their especial perusal, a portion of this vehement attack.
There has been much speculation as to the birthplace of Borel; (in this respect he somewhat resembled Homer) but if I have been correctly informed it was in one of the New England States. Further than this I cannot particularize. When he came to Essex he managed to procure a situation in a counting-house, which afforded him the means of support as well as leisure for study. He did not overlook these advantages, and gradually rose in public estimation until he became the editor of the Literary Herald. This gentleman was deeply read in the classics, and had also perused every novel and volume of poetry from the earliest period of English literature down to the present. Such had been his indefatigable research, that there was not a remarkable passage in the whole range of the Waverley fictions, or indeed any other fictions, to which he could not instantly turn. As to poetry, he was an oracle. He could repeat the whole of Shelley, Moore, and Wordsworth, verbatim. He was a very Sidrophel in his acquirements. He could tell
"How many scores a flea would jump;"
he could prove, also, "that the man in the moon's a sea Mediterranean," and
| "In lyric numbers write an ode on His mistress eating a black pudding." |
He composed acrostics extempore by the dozen; we say extempore, though it was once remarked that he was months in bringing them to maturity. He was inimitable, moreover, in his pictures of natural scenery. When a river, or a mountain, or a waterfall was to be sketched, Borel Bunting, of all others, was the man to guide the pencil. He had the rare faculty of bringing every thing distinctly before the mind of the reader—a compliment to which a majority of his brother scribes are not entitled.
Borel Bunting possessed also a considerable degree of critical acumen. Southey was a mere doggerelist; Cooper and Irving were not men of genius: so said Borel. Pope, he declared, was the first of poets, because Lord Byron said so before him. Tom Jones, he contended, was the most perfect specimen of a novel extant. He was also willing to admit that Goldsmith had shown some talent in his Vicar of Wakefield.
In a word, Borel's wonderful acquirements secured him the favorable attention of many distinguished men; and at length (as a reward of his industry and merit) he was regularly installed in the chair editorial of the "Literary Herald," an important weekly periodical, fifteen inches in diameter. His salary, it is supposed, was something less than that received by the President of the United States.