| Love hates your large fat lubberly fellows, Panting and blowing like a blacksmith's bellows; |
but I never heard that oratory did.
In the next breath we hear that "Mr. Pinkney has a continual appearance of natural superciliousness and affected courtesy." Continual—and yet afterwards "his manner is exceedingly arrogant and unpropitiating;" and his deportment had been already described as "brutal, arrogant, full of sound and fury, accompanied by the rude and violent gestures of a vulgar fellow." One moment he is a giant, not only metaphorically, but in sober truth, if we may judge from his stentorian lungs, which have caused the author's whole system to jar—and from those violent gesticulations, which indicate uncommon personal strength;—the next, he turns out to be only five feet ten, and a petit maitre, and affectedly courtly and conciliatory; and yet "nothing could make a gentleman of him; he can neither look, act, speak, sit, nor talk like one." Notwithstanding all this scurrility and abuse of Mr. Pinkney's person, the author is not yet exhausted, but lavishes more upon his intellect. "The physical powers of Mr. Pinkney," he says, "are to my notion, strictly correspondent with his intellectual ones; both arc solid, strong and substantial, but without grace, dignity or loftiness." Loftiness! the same man who has such "prodigious elevation and amplitude of mind," "and both have a dash of fat English dandyism." I confess myself wholly at a loss to comprehend what the fat dandyism of the intellectual powers is. A man's mind might, by a forced metaphor, be said to be dandyish, perhaps; but a fat mind, is a solecism in words wholly inadmissible, I think. "His style of eloquence," it is added, "is a most disagreeable and unnatural compound of the worst faults of the worst speakers." "He is said to resemble Lord Erskine as he was in the day of his power: it is a libel on Erskine, who was himself a libel on the reputation of his country as a speaker." "The language of Mr. Pinkney does resemble that of Lord Erskine; his reasoning is about as forcible." If the term style here be the manner of speaking appropriate to particular characters, I have shown that the censure is equally applicable to Demosthenes, the prince of orators, who, in addition to his vehemence, was so ungraceful in his motions, that it was necessary for him to practice with a naked sword hanging over his shoulder; and therefore to compare Demosthenes to Lord Erskine is a libel on Lord Erskine, himself a libel on his country as a speaker—and argal, as Shakspeare says, Demosthenes is inferior to English orators. If, again, the word style mean the manner of writing with regard to language, these sentences would involve a contradiction, and Mr. Pinkney is like and unlike Lord Erskine at the same time.
Yet why do I talk of Demosthenes? In the following sentences the author admits that Mr. P. copied too closely after Cicero and Demosthenes. "He desired to be eloquent; he thought of Demosthenes and Cicero, and his heart swelled with ambition. He remembered not that he was to be a lawyer, and that Demosthenes and Cicero were declaimers. He who should look to move a body of Americans in a court of justice by the best thundering of Demosthenes, would only make himself ridiculous." Very true; and this may certainly prove that Mr. Pinkney might have been a greater lawyer, by bending the whole force of his mind to that one pursuit; but it has nothing to do with the premises. The ground is here changed; this is not the point to be proved—not the quod erat demonstrandum. The point to be proved is not the propriety of displaying eloquence before a jury, but that Wm. Pinkney was never meant by God for an orator; that he has no property of mind or body to make one. This is assuredly the scope of the extracts. Had Mr. P. not aimed at ornament, his ashes might have passed undisturbed by the author, who allows that he was decidedly the greatest lawyer in America, but is very angry that he was not the greatest in the world. In spite of all this, however, Pinkney "pursued his way like a conqueror, and had well nigh established himself as the high priest of eloquence in America." Why, what a stupid, blind, misjudging race we must be, to think of choosing a man for our high priest of eloquence whom God never meant for an orator, and who had no property, not one, of mind or body, for his business—and never to awaken from our folly until this writer tore the urim and thummim from his breast. "The giant," he says, "is gone down like a giant to the household of death," and there should at least have escaped the imputation of baseness which deserved shooting. How giants die, I pretend not to know; but imagine such giants die pretty much like other people; and it seems to me perfectly ridiculous to talk of a man's dying like a giant. At that awful hour, the littleness of the greatest genius is a subject of melancholy reflection. I will only add that I know nothing of this writer. If his object was to guard us against the mischievous effects of a false taste in eloquence, he cannot be angry with me for wishing to guard against the equally bad effects of a false taste in criticism.
NUGATOR.
THE DANDY CHASTISED.
In this metropolis a real, downright exquisite is rarely to be seen. Curiosity may be gratified by a good description of the animal as exhibited in other places. The following communication is from one residing in a city much more fashionable than ours. Its author seems well informed in the science of æsthetics; and it is to be hoped that he will exert himself to correct mistaken impressions as to the beautiful. Further notices by him may be beneficial.
C.
Among the follies and vices of mankind, there is nothing more remarkable or ridiculous than the continual effort, among all classes and kinds of people—savage, civilized, and pseudo-civilized—to increase or impart beauty and comeliness to their forms and features. Through what various and opposite means is this cherished object pursued! This savage tattoos his cheeks—that smooths and oils them, and would esteem the gratuitous tattoonry of the small-pox a graver misfortune than all the pain attendant on the disease.