The Red Sulphur, though but lately improved for the comfortable accommodation of visiters, has been for some years known as a place of considerable resort by pulmonary patients. The company bears much more the aspect of sickness, than that at the other springs. Their death-like countenances can be seen on every hand; and the deep hollow cough, which is heard almost incessantly, has at first a tendency to affect the sympathies and to throw an air of melancholy over the feelings. Many in the last stages of consumption, are taken to the Red Sulphur as the final resort, and many, during almost every season, find their long, last home, among the hills near the Red Sulphur. The funeral of Gen. Alston, of South Carolina, was attended on the day of our arrival, and another individual soon followed him to the tomb. The Red Sulphur is well calculated to remind a reflecting man of his mortality.
Many cases are also mentioned of astonishing cures, which have been effected by the use of these waters. Their properties are singular, and apparently contradictory. They deplete and strengthen the system at the same time: they reduce the quantity of blood, and still act with all the power of a tonic. The most peculiar property, however, is that which effects an almost immediate reduction of the pulse. Instances are known where the pulsations have been reduced from one hundred and twenty to eighty in the space of twenty-four hours. The effect of these waters, is at first apparently unfavorable. They frequently, and perhaps generally occasion a feverish excitement, and an unpleasant sensation of fulness throughout the whole system. I have been informed, however, by those who attribute the renovation of their constitutions to the Red Sulphur, that this excitement ceases after perhaps ten days or two weeks, and often much earlier, and then, if at all, unless the ravages of disease have been excessive, they begin to produce the desired effect. I met with a gentleman, in returning from the Red Sulphur, who had been pronounced past recovery by the most eminent physicians in this country, from a chronic affection of the lungs, but who, at the time I saw him, was enjoying excellent health, and as he believed, was entirely free from any pulmonary symptoms. He attributed his restoration solely to a residence during several seasons at the Red Sulphur.
We must, however, in closing this brief notice of the Red Sulphur, record some complaints against that establishment. We do it, however, with a spirit very far from that of reproach. Our object is rather the comfort of the public, and the more extensive encouragement of the gentlemanly proprietor. The great defect at the Red Sulphur arises principally from the want of system. The irregularity in the arrangements is exceedingly unpleasant to the visiters, and especially to those who are invalids. There is also a great want of proper attention, on the part of those who have charge of the establishment, and particularly from the servants. We must also express the same opinion of the manager of the Red Sulphur, which we have advanced in relation to the person who holds the same office at the White Sulphur. He may be admirably adapted for some other situation, but, in our opinion, he is not suited for that which he now occupies. Both of these gentlemen have certainly seen enough of the world to know, that something more substantial than promises, is necessary to satisfy the wants of men. We again affirm, that we have spoken nothing in ill will, either toward the White or Red Sulphur, nor to the gentlemen to whom we have alluded. Our remarks have reference to them only as managers of extensive public establishments, and not as private men.
For the Southern Literary Messenger.
CONVERSATION PARTIES, SOIREES AND SQUEEZES.
MR. WHITE,—If I may be permitted to imitate in my exordium, the happy brevity of the time-saving merchant in auditing his letters, I will begin by expressing the hope, that "my last of —— date has been received and contents duly noted." The excuse for following it up so speedily with another, is not so easily found. Indeed I know of none, unless you will accept as such the old plea—"in for a penny, in for a pound." Even this implies a less risk of censure than I fear my rashness may very possibly bring upon me. Methinks I already hear some of your younger readers demand—"what the deuce has such an old croaker as this impertinent Oliver Oldschool to do with the inroads that we, his juniors and therefore his betters, may choose to make on any or all of those antiquated manners, customs and fashions which seem to be the gods of his idolatry? Age, which stamps their value upon wine and ardent spirits, is precisely that very thing which renders fashion of no value at all. In this, novelty and unexpectedness are our grand, and often our sole desiderata; and for their attainment, we want neither grey headed matrons, nor grey bearded old men to advise us. What they call their experience! (of which they are so fond of boasting,) if listened to at all, serves only to cramp and to trammel our youthful inventions. Therefore, to all such we say:—Ladies and Gentlemen, both hands and tongues off, if you please; laissez nous faire—let us alone."
The bare expectation of any such flouting, you will probably say, should keep me silent, if I was a man of only a moderate degree of prudence. But like many other obstinate people, my inclination to persist seems to augment inversely to my chances of success. Maugre then the danger and forlornness of my undertaking, I must go on. But before I come to the main purpose of the present letter, pray have patience with me, while I offer a few more remarks in anticipation of another still more serious charge, which I expect will be made against me. I must make them too, with the perfect recollection of the maxim, that "he who begins to plead before he is accused, knows himself to be guilty."—True, however, as this may be in general, my case, I hope, will be excepted, after you hear me. The charge to which I allude is,—the odious one of being a Cynic. With you, sir, I am very sure my bare denial would suffice; but you have many readers who know nothing of me. In deference to them therefore, I feel bound to offer some stronger proof of my innocence; if that which is of a negative character (and it is all I can adduce,) will be accepted. Be it known then, to all whom it may concern, that I, Oliver Oldschool, have always denied, and do hereby deny, the truth of the most important, prominent and offensive of all the cynical dogmas, which is,—that "men are nothing but monkeys without tails!" and furthermore, that I hold myself bound and always ready to make battle in this behalf, "pugnis et calcibus, unguibus et rostro:" and all this too, notwithstanding the following most startling and humiliating resemblances which have been traced by the true Cynics between the two species. For instance—"Man" (say they) "is a biped"—so is a monkey; at least so nearly one, that his anterior legs serve him admirably well for arms, and accordingly it is still a mooted point, a much vexed question among naturalists which to call them, arms or legs. Man generally walks erect, although sometimes, when top-heavy, he moves quadruped fashion. The monkey, at least the kind called the ourang outang only reverses the practice, by going more frequently on his two certain and his two quasi legs, than on the two first alone. Man has a facial angle by which those curious, prying fellows, called craniologists, measure the degree of his intelligence and infer the nature of his dispositions. Monkeys also have this angle, often so nearly the same, (mathematically speaking,) with that which we discern in many of our race, that few things are more common than to hear the exclamation "such a one has a monkey face." Lastly, man is most decidedly and conspicuously an imitative animal, so is a monkey, and in a degree so very striking, that there is scarcely an outward movement, action, or gesture of ours which his mimetic talents do not enable him to take off to the life. This is especially true of all those peculiar airs indicative of self-complacency and vanity which mark these two races of animals in contradistinction to all others,1 and may be termed an idiosyncracy of intellect. The coxcomb's ineffable smile of fascination; the witling's pert and sudden smirk of self-conceit; the vain pedant's awkward cachination at his own ill-timed, out-of-place strokes of classic humor; the despicable miser's self-gratulating chuckle at inordinate gain; the great man's gracious grin to his supposed inferiors, and the little man's side-shaking, obstreperous laugh at the abortive joke of some superior from whom he is courting favors; all these and more, your true monkey can enact with such perfect verisimilitude, that if properly dressed for the occasion, he might pass off for the real man in each case, instead of his counterfeit, without the least danger of detection. His mimickry, in addition to its fidelity, has this other remarkable circumstance about it, that in applying it, he seems to have no particular choice of objects, but imitates all external actions alike, whether they be praiseworthy or the reverse. Man, on the contrary, in the exercise of his imitative propensities, shows too often a stronger inclination for the bad than the good—for the faulty than the commendable—for the fantastical and the ridiculous rather than the becoming. In nothing is this more remarkable, than in the greedy, ever restless perseverance with which he seeks foreign fashions and customs, and the reckless pertinacity, under all possible discouragements, with which he strives to imitate and adopt them. Of this assertion I have already endeavored to furnish you with some proofs, which to me at least appeared irrefutable. But I will now attempt to supply a few more. These also shall consist of remarks on certain foreign fashions, which may be said to be still under the process of naturalization, having proved so entirely uncongenial to our principles, habits and opinions, as not yet to be firmly established. They may, therefore, be considered as still within the reach of that exterminating power—public opinion.
1 Goldsmith is the only natural historian, I believe, who has urged the claim of the goose to a participation in this enviable human quality, vanity. In his "Animated Nature" he has the following remark in his natural history of the goose, of which I can give only the substance, not having the volume before me. Speaking of the action commonly called "the strutting of the gander," he says: that in this situation, there is probably no animal on the face of the earth more important in the eyes of another, than a gander in the eyes of a goose!! Verily, I think, (with due submission) he is mistaken; for a fully whiskered, well mustached beau, with all his bristly honors thick upon him, is to a belle, as far above the gander in the estimation of a goose, as imagination can possibly conceive.
At the head of these fashions or customs, pre-eminent above the rest, we find the Conversation Party, the Soiree, and the Squeeze. The first is admitted to be an emigrè from Italy, although the term is here anglicised; the second is from France, and the third from —— nobody knows where, unless from our mother country Great Britain; for Johnson gives both a Saxon and a Welsh etymology to it, both meaning to press or crush between two bodies; which meaning their American derivative (much to its honor,) has most faithfully preserved.