The restless thought and wayward will,
And discontent, attend him still,
Nor quit him while he lives;
At sea, care follows in the wind;
At land, it mounts the pad behind,
Or with the postboy drives.
He who would happy live to-day,
Must laugh the present ills away,
Nor think of woes to come;
For come they will, or soon or late,
Since mixed at best is man’s estate,
By heaven’s eternal doom.
In allusion to his own situation, he wrote the following lines in Mickle’s translation of Camoën’s “Lusiad,” at the end of the speech of Pacheo:—
Yet shrink not, gallant Lusiad, nor repine
That man’s eternal destiny is thine;
Whene’er success the advent’rous chief befriends,
Fell malice on his parting steps attends;
On Britain’s candidates for fame await,
As now on thee, the hard decrees of fate;
Thus are ambition’s fondest hopes o’erreach’d,
One dies imprison’d, and one lives impeach’d.
Mr. Seward, who published these lines with a portrait of Mr. Hastings, from a bust by the late Mr. Banks, observes, that his head resembles the head of Aratus, the founder of the Achæan league, in the Ludovísi gardens at Rome.
ANOTHER LIVING SKELETON.
The “Dramatist” of the present day, “stop him who can,” ever on the alert for novelty, has seized on the “Living Skeleton.” Poor Seurat is “as well as can be expected;” but it appears, from a “Notice” handed about the streets, that he has a rival in a British “Living Skeleton.” This “Notice,” printed by W. Glindon, Newport-street, Haymarket, and signed “Thomas Feelwell, 104, High Holborn,” states, that a “humane individual, in justice to his own feelings and those of a sensitive public,” considers it necessary to “expose the resources” by which the proprietors of the “Coburg Theatre” have produced “a rival to the Pall-Mall object.” One part of his undertaking, the “resources,” honest “Thomas Feelwell” leaves untouched, but he tells the following curious story:—
“A young man of extraordinary leanness, was, for some days, observed shuffling about the Waterloo-road, reclining against the posts and walls, apparently from excessive weakness, and earnestly gazing through the windows of the eating houses in the neighbourhood, for hours together. One of the managers of the Coburg theatre, accidentally meeting him, and being struck with his attenuated appearance, instantly seized him by the bone of his arm, and, leading him into the saloon of the theatre, made proposals that he should be produced on the stage as a source of attraction and delight for a British audience; at the same time stipulating that he should contrive to exist upon but half a meal a day—that he should be constantly attended by a constable, to prevent his purchasing any other sustenance, and be allowed no pocket-money, till the expiration of his engagement—that he should be nightly buried between a dozen heavy blankets, to prevent his growing lusty, and to reduce him to the lightness of a gossamer, in order that the gasping breath of the astonished audience might so agitate his frame, that he might be tremblingly alive to their admiration.”
If this narrative be true, the situation of the “young man of extraordinary leanness” is to be pitied. The new living skeleton may have acceded to the manager’s terms of “half a meal” a day on the truth of the old saying, that “half a loaf is better than no bread,” and it is clearly the manager’s interest to keep him alive as long as he will “run;” yet, if the “poor creature” is nightly buried between a dozen heavy blankets “to reduce him to the lightness of a gossamer,” he may outdo the manager’s hopes, and “run” out of the world. Seriously, if this be so, it ought not so to be. The “dozen heavy blankets to prevent his growing lusty” might have been spared; for a man with “half a meal a day” can hardly be expected to arrive at that obesity which destroyed a performer formerly, who played the starved apothecary in Romeo and Juliet till he got fat, and was only reduced to the wonted “extraordinary leanness” which qualified him for the character, by being struck off the pay-list. The condition of the poor man should be an object of public inquiry as well as public curiosity.