Harper's

New Monthly Magazine

No. V.—October, 1850.—Vol. I.

Contents

[pg 577]

Wordsworth—His Character And Genius.

In a late article on Southey, we alluded to the solitary position of Wordsworth in that lake country where he once shone the brightest star in a large galaxy. Since then, the star of Jove, so beautiful and large, has gone out in darkness—the greatest laureate of England has expired—the intensest, most unique, and most pure-minded of our poets, with the single exceptions of Milton and Cowper, is departed. And it were lesemajesty against his mighty shade not to pay it our tribute while yet his memory, and the grass of his grave, are green.

It is singular, that only a few months have elapsed since the great antagonist of his literary fame—Lord Jeffrey (who, we understand, persisted to the last in his ungenerous and unjust estimate), left the bench of human, to appear at the bar of Divine justice. Seldom has the death of a celebrated man produced a more powerful impression in his own city and circle, and a less powerful impression on the wide horizon of the world. In truth, he had outlived himself. It had been very different had he passed away thirty years ago, when the “Edinburgh Review” was in the plenitude of its influence. As it was, he disappeared like a star at midnight, whose descent is almost unnoticed while the whole heavens are white with glory, not like a sun going down, that night may come over the earth. One of the acutest, most accomplished, most warm-hearted, and generous of men, Jeffrey wanted that stamp of universality, [pg 578] that highest order of genius, that depth of insight, and that simple directness of purpose, not to speak of that moral and religious consecration, which “give the world assurance of a man.” He was the idol of Edinburgh, and the pride of Scotland, because he condensed in himself those qualities which the modern Athens has long been accustomed to covet and admire—taste and talent rather than genius—subtlety of appreciation rather than power of origination—the logical understanding rather than the inventive insight—and because his name had sounded out to the ends of the earth. But nature and man, not Edinburgh Castle, or the Grampian Hills merely, might be summoned to mourn in Wordsworth's departure the loss of one of their truest high-priests, who had gazed into some of the deepest secrets of the one, and echoed some of the loftiest aspirations of the other.

To soften such grief, however, there comes in the reflection, that the task of this great poet had been nobly discharged. He had given the world assurance, full, and heaped, and running over, of what he meant, and of what was meant by him. While the premature departure of a Schiller, a Byron, or a Keats, gives us emotions similar to those wherewith we would behold the crescent moon, snatched away as by some “insatiate archer,” up into the Infinite, ere it grew into its full glory—Wordsworth, like Scott, Goethe, and Southey, was permitted to fill his full and broad sphere.

What Wordsworth's mission was, may be, perhaps, understood through some previous remarks upon his great mistress—Nature, as a poetical personage.

There are three methods of contemplating nature. These are the material, the shadowy, and the mediatorial. The materialist looks upon it as the great and only reality. It is a vast solid fact, for ever burning and rolling around, below and above him. The idealist, on the contrary, regards it as a shadow—a mode of mind—the infinite projection of his own thought. The man who stands between the two extremes, looks on nature as a great, but not ultimate or everlasting scheme of mediation, or compromise, between pure and absolute spirit and humanity—adumbrating God to man, and bringing man near to God. To the materialist, there is an altar, star-lighted heaven-high, but no God. To the idealist, there is a God, but no altar. He who holds the theory of mediation, has the Great Spirit as his God, and the universe as the altar on which he presents the gift of his poetical (we do not speak at present so much of his theological) adoration.

It must be obvious, at once, which of those three views of nature is the most poetical. It is surely that which keeps the two principles of spirit and matter distinct and unconfounded—preserves in their proper relations—the soul and the body of things—God within, and without the garment by which, in Goethe's grand thought, “we see him by.” While one party deify, and another destroy matter, the third impregnate, without identifying it with the Divine presence.

The notions suggested by this view, which is that of Scripture, are exceedingly comprehensive and magnificent. Nature becomes to the poet's eye “a great sheet let down from God out of heaven,” and in which there is no object “common or unclean.” The purpose and the Being above cast such a grandeur over the pettiest or barest objects, as did the fiery pillar upon the sand, or the shrubs of the howling desert of its march. Every thing becomes valuable when looked upon as a communication from God, imperfect only from the nature of the material used. What otherwise might have been concluded discords, now appear only stammerings or whisperings in the Divine voice; thorns and thistles spring above the primeval curse, the “meanest flower that blows” gives

“Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

The creation is neither unduly exalted nor contemptuously trampled under-foot, but maintains its dignified position, as an embassador from the Divine King. The glory of something far beyond association—that of a divine and perpetual presence—is shed over the landscape, and its golden-drops are spilled upon the stars. Objects the most diverse—the cradle of the child, the wet hole of the centipede, the bed of the corpse, and the lair of the earthquake, the nest of the lark, and the crag on which sits, half asleep, the dark vulture, digesting blood—are all clothed in a light the same in kind, though varying in degree—

“A light which never was on sea or shore.”

In the poetry of the Hebrews, accordingly, the locusts are God's “great army;”—the winds are his messengers, the thunder his voice, the lightning a “fiery stream going before him,” the moon his witness in the heavens, the sun a strong man rejoicing to run his race—all creation is roused and startled into life through him—its every beautiful, or dire, or strange shape in the earth or the sky, is God's movable tent; the place where, for a season, his honor, his beauty, his strength, and his justice dwell—the tenant not degraded, and inconceivable dignity being added to the abode.

His mere “tent,” however—for while the great and the infinite are thus connected with the little and the finite, the subordination of the latter to the former is always maintained. The most magnificent objects in nature are but the mirrors to God's face—the scaffolding to his future purposes; and, like mirrors, are to wax dim; and, like scaffolding, to be removed. The great sheet is to be received up again into heaven. The heavens and the earth are to pass away, and to be succeeded, if not by a purely mental economy, yet by one of a more spiritual materialism, compared to which the former shall no more be remembered, neither come into mind. Those frightful and fantastic forms of animated life, through which God's glory seems to shine [pg 579] with a struggle, and but faintly, shall disappear—nay, the worlds which bore, and sheltered them in their rugged dens and eaves, shall flee from the face of the regenerator. “A milder day” is to dawn on the universe—the refinement of matter is to keep pace with the elevation of mind. Evil and sin are to be eternally banished to some Siberia of space. The word of the poet is to be fulfilled,

“And one eternal spring encircles all!”

The mediatorial purpose of creation, fully subserved, is to be abandoned, that we may see “eye to eye,” and that God may be “all in all.”

That such views of matter—its present ministry—the source of its beauty and glory—and its future destiny, transferred from the pages of both Testaments to those of our great moral and religious poets, have deepened some of their profoundest, and swelled some of their highest strains, is unquestionable. Such prospects as were in Milton's eye, when he sung,

“Thy Saviour and thy Lord

Last in the clouds from heaven to be revealed,

In glory of the Father to dissolve

Satan with his perverted world; then raise

From the conflagrant mass, purged and refined,

New heavens, new earth, ages of endless date,”

may be found in Thomson, in his closing Hymn to the Seasons, in Coleridge's “Religious Musings,” (in Shelley's “Prometheus” even, but perverted and disguised), in Bailey's “Festus” (cumbered and entangled with his religious theory); and more rootedly, although less theologically, than in all the rest, in the poetry of Wordsworth.

The secret of Wordsworth's profound and peculiar love for Nature, even in her meaner and minuter forms, may lie, perhaps, here. De Quincey seeks for it in a peculiar conformation of the eye, as if he actually did see more in the object than other men—in the rose a richer red, in the sky a deeper azure, in the broom a yellower gold, in the sun a more dazzling ray, in the sea a finer foam, and in the star a more sparkling splendor, than even Nature's own “sweet and cunning” hand put on; but the critic has not sought to explain the rationale of this peculiarity. Mere acuteness of vision it can not have been, else the eagle might have felt, though not written, “The Excursion”—else the fact is not accountable why many of weak sight, such as Burke, have been rapturous admirers of Nature; and so, till we learn that Mr. De Quincey has looked through Wordsworth's eyes, we must call this a mere fancy. Hazlitt again, and others since, have accounted for the phenomenon by association—but this fails, we suspect, fully to explain the deep, native, and brooding passion in question—a passion which, instead of being swelled by the associations of after life, rose to lull stature in youth, as “Tintern Abbey” testifies. One word of his own, perhaps, better solves the mystery—it is the one word “consecration”—

“The consecration and the poet's dream.”

His eye had been anointed with eye-salve, and he saw, as his poet-predecessors had done, the temple in which he was standing, heard in every breeze and ocean billow the sound of a temple-service, and felt that the grandeur of the ritual, and of its recipient, threw the shadow of their greatness upon every stone in the corners of the edifice, and upon every eft crawling along its floors. Reversing the miracle, he saw “trees as men walking”—heard the speechless sins, and, in the beautiful thought of “the Roman,” caught on his ear the fragments of a “divine soliloquy,” filling up the pauses in a universal anthem. Hence the tumultuous, yet awful joy of his youthful feelings to Nature. Hence his estimation of its lowliest features; for does not every bush and tree appear to him a “pillar in the temple of his God?” The leaping fish pleases him, because its “cheer” in the lonely tarn is of praise. The dropping of the earth on the coffin lid, is a slow and solemn psalm, mingling in austere sympathy with the raven's croak, and in his “Power of sound” he proceeds elaborately to condense all those varied voices, high or low, soft or harsh, united or discordant, into one crushing chorus, like the choruses of Haydn, or of heaven. Nature undergoes no outward change to his eye, but undergoes a far deeper transfiguration to his spirit—as she stands up in the white robes, and with the sounding psalmodies of her mediatorial office, between him and the Infinite i am.

Never must this feeling be confounded with Pantheism. All does not seem to him to be God, nor even (strictly speaking) divine; but all seems to be immediately from God—rushing out from him in being, to rush instantly back to him in service and praise. Again the natal dew of the first morning is seen lying on bud and blade, and the low voice of the first evening's song becomes audible again. Although Coleridge in his youth was a Spinozist, Wordsworth seems at once, and forever, to have recoiled from even his friend's eloquent version of that creedless creed, that baseless foundation, that system, through the phenomenon of which look not the bright eyes of Supreme Intelligence, but the blind face of irresponsible and infinite necessity. Shelley himself—with all the power his critics attribute to him of painting night, animating Atheism, and giving strange loveliness to annihilation—has failed in redeeming Spinoza's theory from the reproach of being as hateful as it is false; and there is no axiom we hold more strongly than this—that the theory which can not be rendered poetical, can not be true. “Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty,” said poor Keats, to whom time, however, was not granted to come down from the first glowing generalization of his heart, to the particular creeds which his ripened intellect would have, according to it, rejected or received.

Nor, although Wordsworth is a devoted lover of Nature, down to what many consider the very blots—or, at least, dashes and commas in her page, is he blind to the fact of her transient [pg 580] character. The power he worships has his “dwelling in the light of setting suns,” but that dwelling is not his everlasting abode. For earth, and the universe, a “milder day” (words certifying their truth by their simple beauty) is in store when “the monuments” of human weakness, folly, and evil, shall “all be over-grown.” He sees afar off the great spectacle of Nature retiring before God; the embassador giving place to the King; the bright toys of this nursery—sun, moon, earth, and stars—put away, like childish things; the symbols of the Infinite lost in the Infinite itself; and though he could, on the Saturday evening, bow before the midnight mountains, and midnight heavens, he could also, on the Sabbath morn, in Rydal church, bow as profoundly before the apostolic word, “All these things shall be dissolved.”

With Wordsworth, as with all great poets, his poetical creed passes into his religious. It is the same tune with variations. But we confess that, in his case, we do not think the variations equal. The mediation of Nature he understands, and has beautifully represented in his poetry; but that higher mediation of the Divine Man between man and the Father, does not lie fully or conspicuously on his page. A believer in the mystery of godliness he unquestionably was; but he seldom preached it. Christopher North, many years ago, in “Blackwood,” doubted if there were so much as a Bible in poor Margaret's cottage (Excursion). We doubt so, too, and have not found much of the “true cross” among all his trees. The theologians divide prayer into four parts—adoration, thanksgiving, confession, and petition. Wordsworth stops at the second. No where do we find more solemn, sustained, habitual, and worthy adoration, than in his writings. The tone, too, of all his poems, is a calm thanksgiving, like that of a long blue, cloudless sky, coloring, at evening, into the hues of more fiery praise. But he does not weep like a penitent, nor supplicate like a child. Such feelings seem suppressed and folded up as far-off storms, and the traces of past tempests are succinctly inclosed in the algebra of the silent evening air. And hence, like Milton's, his poetry has rather tended to foster the glow of devotion in the loftier spirits of the race—previously taught to adore—than like that of Cowper and Montgomery, to send prodigals back to their forsaken homes; Davids, to cry, “Against thee only have I sinned;” and Peters, to shriek in agony, “Lord, save us, we perish.”

To pass from the essential poetic element in a writer of genius, to his artistic skill, is a felt, yet necessary descent—like the painter compelled, after sketching the man's countenance, to draw his dress. And yet, as of some men and women, the very dress, by its simplicity, elegance, and unity, seems fitted rather to garb the soul than the body—seems the soul made visible—so is it with the style and manner of many great poets. Their speech and music without are as inevitable as their genius, or as the song forever sounding within their souls. And why? The whole ever tends to beget a whole—the large substance to cast its deep, yet delicate shadow—the divine to be like itself in the human, on which its seal is set. So it is with Wordsworth. That profound simplicity—that clear obscurity—that night-like noon—that noon-like night—that one atmosphere of overhanging Deity, seen weighing upon ocean and pool, mountain and mole-hill, forest and flower—that pellucid depth—that entireness of purpose and fullness of power, connected with fragmentary, willful, or even weak execution—that humble, yet proud, precipitation of himself, Antæus-like, upon the bosom of simple scenes and simple sentiments, to regain primeval vigor—that obscure, yet lofty isolation, like a tarn, little in size, but elevated in site, with few visitors, but with many stars—that Tory-Radicalism, Popish-Protestantism, philosophical Christianity, which have rendered him a glorious riddle, and made Shelley, in despair of finding it out, exclaim,

“No Deist, and no Christian he,

No Whig, no Tory.

He got so subtle, that to be

Nothing was all his glory,”—

all such apparent contradictions, but real unities, in his poetical and moral creed and character, are fully expressed in his lowly but aspiring language, and the simple, elaborate architecture of his verse—every stone of which is lifted up by the strain of strong logic, and yet laid to music; and, above all, in the choice of his subjects, which range, with a free and easy motion, up from a garden spade and a village drum, to the “celestial visages” which darkened at the tidings of man's fall, and to the “organ of eternity,” which sung pæans over his recovery.

We sum up what we have further to say of Wordsworth, under the items of his works, his life and character, his death; and shall close by inquiring, Who is worthy to be his successor?

His works, covering a large space, and abounding in every variety of excellence and style, assume, after all, a fragmentary aspect. They are true, simple, scattered, and strong, as blocks torn from the crags of Helvellyn, and lying there “low, but mighty still.” Few even of his ballads are wholes. They leave too much untold. They are far too suggestive to satisfy. From each poem, however rounded, there streams off a long train of thought: like the tail of a comet, which, while testifying its power, mars its aspect of oneness. The “Excursion,” avowedly a fragment, seems the splinter of a larger splinter; like a piece of Pallas, itself a piece of some split planet. Of all his poems, perhaps, his sonnets, his “Laodamia,” his “Intimations of Immortality,” and his verses on the “Eclipse in Italy,” are the most complete in execution, as certainly they are the most classical in design. Dramatic power he has none, nor does he regret the want. “I hate,” he was wont to say to Hazlitt, “those interlocutions between Caius and Lucius.” He [pg 581] sees, as “from a tower, the end of all.” The waving lights and shadows, the varied loopholes of view, the shiftings and fluctuations of feeling, the growing, broadening interest of the drama, have no charm for him. His mind, from its gigantic size, contracts a gigantic stiffness. It “moveth altogether, if it move at all.” Hence, some of his smaller poems remind you of the dancing of an elephant, or of the “hills leaping like lambs.” Many of the little poems which he wrote upon a system, are exceedingly tame and feeble. Yet often, even in his narrow bleak vales, we find one “meek streamlet—only one”—beautifying the desolation; and feel how painful it is for him to become poor, and that, when he sinks, it is with “compulsion and laborious flight.” But, having subtracted such faults, how much remains—of truth—of tenderness—of sober, eve-like grandeur—of purged beauties, white and clean as the lilies of Eden—of calm, deep reflection, contained in lines and sentences which have become proverbs—of mild enthusiasm—of minute knowledge of nature—of strong, yet unostentatious sympathy with man—and of devout and breathless communion with the Great Author of all! Apart altogether from their intellectual pretensions Wordsworth's poems possess a moral clearness, beauty, transparency, and harmony, which connect them immediately with those of Milton: and beside the more popular poetry of the past age—such as Byron's, and Moore's—they remind us of that unplanted garden, where the shadow of God united all trees of fruitfulness, and all flowers of beauty, into one; where the “large river,” which watered the whole, “ran [pg 582] south,” toward the sun of heaven—when compared with the gardens of the Hesperides, where a dragon was the presiding deity, or with those of Vauxhall or White Conduit-house, where Comus and his rabble rout celebrate their undisguised orgies of miscalled and miserable pleasure.

Wordsworth's Home at Rydal Mount.

To write a great poem demands years—to write a great undying example, demands a lifetime. Such a life, too, becomes a poem—higher far than pen can inscribe, or metre make musical. Such a life it was granted to Wordsworth to live in severe harmony with his verse—as it lowly, and as it aspiring, to live, too, amid opposition, obloquy, and abuse—to live, too, amid the glare of that watchful observation, which has become to public men far more keen and far more capacious in its powers and opportunities, than in Milton's days. It was not, unquestionably, a perfect life, even as a man's, far less as a poet's. He did feel and resent, more than beseemed a great man, the pursuit and persecution of the hounds, whether “gray” and swift-footed, or whether curs of low degree, who dogged his steps. His voice from his woods sounded at times rather like the moan of wounded weakness, than the bellow of masculine wrath. He should, simply, in reply to his opponents, have written on at his poems, and let his prefaces alone. “If they receive your first book ill,” wrote Thomas Carlyle to a new author, “write the second better—so much better as to shame them.” When will authors learn that to answer an unjust attack, is, merely to give it a keener edge, and that all injustice carries the seed of oblivion and exposure in itself? To use the language of the masculine spirit just quoted, “it is really a truth, one never knows whether praise be really good for one—or whether it be not, in very fact, the worst poison that could be administered. Blame, or even vituperation, I have always found a safer article. In the long run, a man has, and is, just what he is and has—the world's notion of him has not altered him at all, except, indeed, if it have poisoned him with self-conceit, and made a caput mortuum of him.”

The sensitiveness of authors—were it not such a sore subject—might admit of some curious reflections. One would sometimes fancy that Apollo, in an angry hour, had done to his sons, what fable records him to have done to Marsyas—flayed them alive. Nothing has brought more contempt upon authors than this—implying, as it does, a lack of common courage and manhood. The true son of genius ought to rush before the public as the warrior into battle, resolved to hack and hew his way to eminence and power, not to whimper like a schoolboy at every scratch—to acknowledge only home thrusts—large, life-letting-out blows—determined either to conquer or to die, and, feeling that battles should be lost in the same spirit in which they are won. If Wordsworth did not fully answer this ideal, others have sunk far more disgracefully and habitually below it.

In private, Wordsworth, we understand, was pure, mild, simple, and majestic—perhaps somewhat austere in his judgments of the erring, and, perhaps, somewhat narrow in his own economics. In accordance, we suppose, with that part of his poetic system, which magnified mole-heaps to mountains, pennies assumed the importance of pounds. It is ludicrous, yet characteristic, to think of the great author of the “Recluse,” squabbling with a porter about the price of a parcel, or bidding down an old book at a stall. He was one of the few poets who were ever guilty of the crime of worldly prudence—that ever could have fulfilled the old parodox, “A poet has built a house.” In his young days, according to Hazlitt, he said little in society—sat generally lost in thought—threw out a bold or an indifferent remark occasionally—and relapsed into reverie again. In latter years, he became more talkative and oracular. His health and habits were always regular, his temperament happy, and his heart sound and pure.

We have said that his life, as a poet, was far from perfect. Our meaning is, that he did not sufficiently, owing to temperament, or position, or habits, sympathize with the on-goings of society, the fullness of modern life, and the varied passions, unbeliefs, sins, and miseries of modern human nature. His soul dwelt apart. He came, like the Baptist, “neither eating nor drinking,” and men said, “he hath a demon.” He saw at morning, from London bridge, “all its mighty heart” lying still; but he did not at noon plunge artistically into the thick of its throbbing life; far less sound the depths of its wild midnight heavings of revel and wretchedness, of hopes and fears, of stifled fury and eloquent despair. Nor, although he sung the “mighty stream of tendency” of this wondrous age, did he ever launch his poetic craft upon it, nor seem to see the witherward of its swift and awful stress. He has, on the whole, stood aside from his time—not on a peak of the past—not on an anticipated Alp of the future, but on his own Cumberland highlands—hearing the tumult and remaining still, lifting up his life as a far-seen beacon-fire, studying the manners of the humble dwellers in the vales below—“piping a simple song to thinking hearts,” and striving to waft to brother spirits, the fine infection of his own enthusiasm, faith, hope, and devotion. Perhaps, had he been less strict and consistent in creed and in character, he might have attained greater breadth, blood-warmth, and wide-spread power, have presented on his page a fuller reflection of our present state, and drawn from his poetry a yet stronger moral, and become the Shakspeare, instead of the Milton, of the age. For himself, he did undoubtedly choose the “better part;” nor do we mean to insinuate that any man ought to contaminate himself for the sake of his art, but that the poet of a period will necessarily come so near to its peculiar sins, sufferings, follies, and mistakes, as to understand them, and even to feel the [pg 583] force of their temptations, and though he should never yield to, yet must have a “fellow-feeling” of its prevailing infirmities.

The death of this eminent man took few by surprise. Many anxious eyes have for a while been turned toward Rydal mount, where this hermit stream was nearly sinking into the ocean of the Infinite. And now, to use his own grand word, used at the death of Scott, a “trouble” hangs upon Helvellyn's brow, and over the waters of Windermere. The last of the Lakers has departed. That glorious country has become a tomb for its more glorious children. No more is Southey's tall form seen at his library window, confronting Skiddaw—with a port as stately as its own. No more does Coleridge's dim eye look down into the dim tarn, heavy laden, too, under the advancing thunder-storm. And no more is Wordsworth's pale and lofty front shaded into divine twilight, as he plunges at noon-day amidst the quiet woods. A stiller, sterner power than poetry has folded into its strict, yet tender and yearning embrace, those

“Serene creators of immortal things.”

Alas! for the pride and the glory even of the purest products of this strange world! Sin and science, pleasure and poetry, the lowest vices, and the highest aspirations, are equally unable to rescue their votaries from the swift ruin which is in chase of us all.

“Golden lads and girls all must

Like chimney-sweepers come to dust.”

But Wordsworth has left for himself an epitaph almost superfluously rich—in the memory of his private virtues—of the impulse he gave to our declining poetry—of the sympathies he discovered in all his strains with the poor, the neglected, and the despised—of the version he furnished of Nature, true and beautiful as if it were Nature describing herself—of his lofty and enacted ideal of his art and the artist—of the “thoughts, too deep for tears,” he has given to meditative and lonely hearts—and, above all, of the support he has lent to the cause of the “primal duties” and eldest instincts of man—to his hope of immortality, and his fear of God. And now we bid him farewell, in his own words—

“Blessings be with him, and eternal praise,

The poet, who on earth has made us heirs

Of truth and pure delight, by heavenly lays.”

Although, as already remarked, not the poet of the age—it has, in our view, been, on the whole, fortunate for poetry and society, that for seven years William Wordsworth has been poet-laureate. We live in a transition state in respect to both. The march and the music are both changing—nor are they yet fully attuned to each other—and, meanwhile, it was desirable that a poet should preside, whose strains formed a fine “musical confusion,” like that of old in the “wood of Crete”—of the old and the new—of the Conservative and the Democratic—of the golden age, supposed by many to have existed in the past, and of the millennium, expected by more in the future—a compromise of the two poetical styles besides—the one, which clung to the hoary tradition of the elders, and the other, which accepted innovation because it was new, and boldness because it was daring, and mysticism because it was dark—not truth, though new; beauty, though bold; and insight, though shadowy and shy. Nay, we heartily wish, had it been for nothing else than this, that his reign had lasted for many years longer, till, perchance, the discordant elements in our creeds and literature, had been somewhat harmonized. As it is, there must now be great difficulty in choosing his successor to the laureateship; nor is there, we think, a single name in our poetry whose elevation to the office would give universal, or even general, satisfaction.

Milman is a fine poet, but not a great one. Croly is, or ought to have been, a great poet; but is not sufficiently known, nor en rapport with the spirit of the time. Bowles is dead—Moore dying. Lockhart and Macaulay have written clever ballads; but no shapely, continuous, and masterly poem. John Wilson, alias Christopher North, has more poetry in his eye, brow, head, hair, figure, voice, talk, and the prose of his “Noetes,” than any man living; but his verse, on the whole, is mawkish—and his being a Scotchman will be a stumbling-block to many, though not to us; for, had Campbell been alive, we should have said at once, let him be laureate—if manly grace, classic power, and genuine popularity, form qualifications for the office. Tennyson, considering all he has done, has received his full meed already. Let him and Leigh Hunt repose under the shadow of their pensions. Our gifted friends, Bailey, of “Festus,” and Yendys, of the “Roman,” are yet in blossom—though it is a glorious blossom. Henry Taylor is rather in the sere and yellow leaf—nor was his leaf ever, in our judgment, very fresh or ample: a masterly builder he is, certainly, but the materials he brings are not highly poetical. When Dickens is promoted to Scott's wizard throne, let Browning succeed Wordsworth on the forked Helvellyn! Landor is a vast monumental name; but, while he has overawed the higher intellects of the time, he has never touched the general heart, nor told the world much, except his great opinion of himself, the low opinion he has of almost every body else, and the very learned reasons and sufficient grounds he has for supporting those twin opinions. Never was such power so wasted and thrown away. The proposition of a lady laureate is simply absurd, without being witty. Why not as soon have proposed the Infant Sappho? In short, if we ask again, Where is the poet worthy to wear the crown which has dropped from the solemn brow of “old Pan,” “sole king of rocky Cumberland?”—Echo, from Glaramara, or the Langdale Pikes, might well answer, “Where?”

We have, however, a notion of our own, which we mean, as a close to the article, to indicate. The laureateship was too long a sop for parasites, whose politics and poetry were equally tame. It seems now to have become the late reward of veteran merit—the Popedom of poetry. Why not, rather, hang it up as a crown, to be won by our rising bards—either as the reward of some special poem on an appointed subject, or of general merit? Why not delay for a season the bestowal of the laurel, and give thus a national importance to its decision?

Sidney Smith. By George Gilfillan.

Sidney Smith.

It is melancholy to observe how speedily, successively, nay, almost simultaneously, our literary luminaries are disappearing from the sky. Every year another and another member of the bright clusters which arose about the close of the last, or at the beginning of this century, is fading from our view. Within nineteen years, what havoc, by the “insatiate archer,” among the ruling spirits of the time! Since 1831, Robert Hall, Andrew Thomson, Goethe, Cuvier, Mackintosh, Crabbe, Foster, Coleridge, Edward Irving, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, Southey, Thomas Campbell, &c., have entered on the “silent land;” and latterly has dropped down one of the wittiest and shrewdest of them all—the projector of the “Edinburgh Review”—the author of “Peter Plymley's Letters”—the preacher—the politician—the brilliant converser—the “mad-wag”—Sidney Smith.

It was the praise of Dryden that he was the best reasoner in verse who ever wrote; let it be the encomium of our departed Sidney that, he was one of the best reasoners in wit of whom our country can boast. His intellect—strong, sharp, clear, and decided—wrought and moved in a rich medium of humor. Each thought, as it came forth from his brain, issued as “in dance,” and amid a flood of inextinguishable laughter. The march of his mind through his subject resembled the procession of Bacchus from the conquest of India—joyous, splendid, straggling—to the sound of flutes and hautboys—rather a victory than a march—rather a revel than a contest. His logic seemed always hurrying into the arms of his wit. Some men argue in mathematical formulæ; others, like Burke, in the figures and flights of poetry; others in the fire and fury of passion; Sidney Smith in exuberant and riotous fun. And yet the matter of his reasoning was solid, and its inner spirit earnest and true. But though his steel was strong and sharp, his hand steady, and his aim clear, the management of the motions of his weapon was always fantastic. He piled, indeed, like a Titan, his Pelion on Ossa, but at the oddest of angles; he lifted and carried his load bravely, and like a man, but laughed as he did so; and so carried it that beholders forgot the strength of the arm in the strangeness of the attitude. He thus sometimes disarmed anger; for his adversaries could scarcely believe that they had received a deadly wound while their foe was roaring in their face. He thus did far greater execution; for the flourishes of his weapon might distract his opponents, but never himself, from the direct and terrible line of the blow. His laughter sometimes stunned, like the cachination of the Cyclops, shaking the sides of his cave. In this mood—and it was his common one—what scorn was he wont to pour upon the opponents of Catholic emancipation—upon the enemies of all change in legislation—upon any individual or party who sought to obstruct measures which, in his judgment, were likely to benefit the country. Under such, he could at any moment spring a mine of laughter; and what neither the fierce invective of Brougham, nor the light and subtle raillery of Jeffrey could do, his contemptuous explosion effected, and, himself crying with mirth, saw them hoisted toward heaven in ten thousand comical splinters. Comparing him with other humorists of a similar class, we might say, that while Swift's ridicule resembles something between a sneer and a spasm (half a sneer of mirth, half a spasm of misery)—while Cobbett's is a grin—Fonblanque's a light but deep and most significant smile—Jeffrey's a sneer, just perceptible on his fastidious lip—Wilson's a strong, healthy, hearty laugh—Carlyle's a wild unearthly sound, like the neighing of a homeless steed—Sidney Smith's is a genuine guffaw, given forth with his whole heart, and soul, and mind, and strength. Apart from his matchless humor, strong, rough, instinctive, and knotty sense was the leading feature of his mind. Every thing like mystification, sophistry, and humbug, fled before the first glance of his piercing eye; every thing in the shape of affectation excited in him a disgust “as implacable” as even a Cowper could feel. If possible, [pg 585] with still deeper aversion did his manly nature regard cant in its various forms and disguises; and his motto in reference to it was, “spare no arrows.” But the mean, the low, the paltry, the dishonorable, in nations or in individuals, moved all the fountains of his bile, and awakened all the energy of his invective. Always lively, generally witty, he is never eloquent, except when emptying out his vials of indignation upon baseness in all its shapes. His is the ire of a genuine “English gentleman, all of the olden time.” It was in this spirit that he recently explained, in his own way, the old distinctions of Meum and Tuum to Brother Jonathan, when the latter was lamentably inclined to forget them. It was the same sting of generous indignation which, in the midst of his character of Mackintosh, prompted the memorable picture of that extraordinary being who, by his transcendent talents and his tortuous movements—his head of gold, and his feet of miry clay—has become the glory, the riddle, and the regret of his country, his age, and his species.

As a writer, Smith is little more than a very clever, witty, and ingenious pamphleteer. He has effected no permanent chef d'oeuvre; he has founded no school; he has left little behind him that the “world will not willingly let die;” he has never drawn a tear from a human eye, nor excited a thrill of grandeur in a human bosom. His reviews are not preserved by the salt of original genius, nor are they pregnant with profound and comprehensive principle; they have no resemblance to the sibylline leaves which Burke tore out from the vast volume of his mind, and scattered with imperial indifference among the nations; they are not the illuminated indices of universal history, like the papers of Macaulay; they are not specimens of pure and perfect English, set with modest but magnificent ornaments, like the criticism of Jeffrey or of Hall; nor are they the excerpts, rugged and rent away by violence, from the dark and iron tablet of an obscure and original mind, like the reviews of Foster; but they are exquisite jeux d'esprit, admirable occasional pamphlets, which, though now they look to us like spent arrows, yet assuredly have done execution, and have not been spent in vain. And as, after the lapse of a century and more, we can still read with pleasure Addison's “Old Whig and Freeholder,” for the sake of the exquisite humor and inimitable style in which forgotten feuds and dead logomachies are embalmed, so may it be, a century still, with the articles on Bentham's Fallacies and on the Game Laws, and with the letters of the witty and ingenious Peter Plymley. There is much at least in those singular productions—in their clear and manly sense—in their broad native fun—in their rapid, careless, energetic style—and in their bold, honest, liberal, and thoroughly English spirit—to interest several succeeding generations, if not to secure the “rare and regal” palm of immortality.

Sidney Smith was a writer of sermons as well as of political squibs. Is not their memory eternized in one of John Foster's most ponderous pieces of sarcasm? In an evil hour the dexterous and witty critic came forth from behind the fastnesses of the Edinburgh Review, whence, in perfect security he had shot his quick glancing shafts at Methodists and Missions, at Christian Observers and Eclectic Reviews, at Owens and Styles, and (what the more wary Jeffrey, in the day of his power, always avoided) became himself an author, and, mirabile dictu, an author of sermons. It was as if he wished to give his opponents their revenge, and no sooner did his head peep forth from beneath the protection of its shell than the elephantine foot of Foster was prepared to crush it in the dust. It was the precise position of Saladin with the Knight of the Leopard, in their memorable contest near the Diamond of the Desert. In the skirmish Smith had it all his own way; but when it came to close quarters, and when the heavy and mailed hand of the sturdy Baptist had confirmed its grasp on his opponent, the disparity was prodigious, and the discomfiture of the light horseman complete. But why recall the memory of an obsolete quarrel and a forgotten field? The sermons—the causa belli—clever but dry, destitute of earnestness and unction—are long since dead and buried; and their review remains their only monument.

Even when, within his own stronghold, our author intermeddled with theological topics, it was seldom with felicity or credit to himself. His onset on missions was a sad mistake; and in attacking the Methodists, and poor, pompous John Styles, he becomes as filthy and foul-mouthed as Swift himself. His wit forsakes him, and a rabid invective ill supplies its place; instead of laughing, he raves and foams at the mouth. Indeed, although an eloquent and popular preacher, and in many respects an ornament to his cloth, there was one radical evil about Smith; he had mistaken his profession. He was intended for a barrister, or a literary man, or a member of parliament, or some occupation into which he could have flung his whole soul and strength. As it was, but half his heart was in a profession which, of all others, would require the whole. He became consequently a rather awkward medley of buffoon, politician, preacher, literateur, divine, and diner-out. Let us grant, however, that the ordeal was severe, and that, if a very few have weathered it better, many more have ignominiously broken down. No one coincides more fully than we do with Coleridge in thinking that every literary man should have a profession; but in the name of common sense let it be one fitted for him, and for which he is fitted—one suited to his tastes as well as to his talents—to his habits as well as to his powers—to his heart as well as to his head.

As a conversationist, Sidney Smith stood high among the highest—a Saul among a tribe of Titans. His jokes were not rare and refined, like those of Rogers and Jekyll; they wanted [pg 586] the slyness of Theodore Hook's inimitable equivoque; they were not poured forth with the prodigal profusion of Hood's breathless and bickering puns; they were rich, fat, unctuous, always bordering on farce, but always avoiding it by a hair's-breadth. No finer cream, certes, ever mantled at the feasts of Holland House than his fertile brain supplied; and, to quote himself, it would require a “forty-parson power” of lungs and language to do justice to his convivial merits. An acquaintance of ours sometimes met him in the company of Jeffrey and Macaulay—a fine concord of first-rate performers, content, generally, to keep each within his own part, except when, now and then, the author of the “Lays” burst out irresistibly, and changed the concert into a fine solo.

Altogether “we could have better spared a better man.” Did not his death “eclipse the gayety of nations?” Did not a Fourth Estate of Fun expire from the midst of us? Did not even Brother Jonathan drop a tear when he thought that the scourge that so mercilessly lashed him was broken? And shall not now all his admirers unite with us in inscribing upon his grave—“Alas! poor Yorick!”

Thomas Carlyle. By George Gilfillan.

Thomas Carlyle.

Thomas Carlyle was born at Ecclefechan, Annandale. His parents were “good farmer people,” his father an elder in the Secession church there, and a man of strong native sense, whose words were said to “nail a subject to the wall.” His excellent mother still lives, and we had the pleasure of meeting her lately in the company of her illustrious son; and beautiful it was to see his profound and tender regard, and her motherly and yearning reverence—to hear her fine old covenanting accents, concerting with his transcendental tones. He studied in Edinburgh. Previous to this, he had become intimate with Edward Irving, an intimacy which continued unimpaired to the close of the latter's eccentric career. Like most Scottish students, he had many struggles to encounter in the course of his education; and had, we believe, to support himself by private tuition, translations for the booksellers, &c. The day star of German literature arose early in his soul, and has been his guide and genius ever since. He entered into a correspondence with Goethe, which lasted, at intervals, till the latter's death. Yet he has never, we understand, visited Germany. He was, originally, destined for the church. At one period he taught an academy in Dysart, at the same time that Irving was teaching in Kirkaldy. After his marriage, he resided partly at Comely Bank, Edinburgh; and, for a year or two in Craigenputtock, a wild and solitary farm-house in the upper part of Dumfriesshire. Here, however, far from society, save that, of the “great dumb monsters of mountains,” he wearied out his very heart. A ludicrous story is told of Lord Jeffrey visiting him in this out-of-the-way region, when they were unapprized of his coming—had nothing in the house fit for the palate of the critic, and had, in dire haste and pother, to send off for the wherewithal to a market town about fifteen miles off. Here, [pg 587] too, as we may see hereafter, Emerson, on his way home from Italy, dropped in like a spirit, spent precisely twenty-four hours, and then “forth uprose that lone, wayfaring man,” to return to his native woods. He has, for several years of late, resided in Chelsea, London, where he lives in a plain, simple fashion; occasionally, but seldom, appearing at the splendid soirées of Lady Blessington, but listened to, when he goes, as an oracle; receiving, at his tea-table, visitors from every part of the world; forming an amicable centre for men of the most opposite opinions and professions, Poets and Preachers, Pantheists and Puritans, Tennysons and Scotts, Cavanaighs and Erskines, Sterlings and Robertsons, smoking his perpetual pipe, and pouring out, in copious stream, his rich and quaint philosophy. His appearance is fine, without being ostentatiously singular—his hair dark—his brow marked, though neither very broad nor very lofty—his cheek tinged with a healthy red—his eye, the truest index of his genius, flashing out, at times, a wild and mystic fire from its dark and quiet surface. He is above the middle size, stoops slightly, dresses carefully, but without any approach to foppery. His address, somewhat high and distant at first, softens into simplicity and cordial kindness. His conversation is abundant, inartificial, flowing on, and warbling as it flows, more practical than you would expect from the cast of his writings—picturesque and graphic in a high measure—full of the results of extensive and minute observation—often terribly direct and strong, garnished with French and German phrase, rendered racy by the accompaniment of the purest Annandale accent, and coming to its climaxes, ever and anon, in long, deep, chest-shaking bursts of laughter.

Altogether, in an age of singularities, Thomas Carlyle stands peculiarly alone. Generally known, and warmly appreciated, he has of late become—popular, in the strict sense, he is not, and may never be. His works may never climb the family library, nor his name become a household word; but while the Thomsons and the Campbells shed their gentle genius, like light, into the hall and the hovel—the shop of the artisan and the sheiling of the shepherd, Carlyle, like the Landors and Lambs of this age, and the Brownes and Burtons of a past, will exert a more limited but profounder power—cast a dimmer but more gorgeous radiance—attract fewer but more devoted admirers, and obtain an equal, and perhaps more enviable immortality.

To the foregoing sketch of Carlyle, which is from the eloquent critical description of Gilfillan, we append the following, which is from a letter recently published in the Dumfries and Galloway Courier. The writer, after remarking at some length upon the “Latter Day Pamphlets,” which are Carlyle's latest productions, proceeds to give this graphic and interesting sketch of his personal appearance and conversation:

“Passing from the political phase of these productions (the ‘Latter Day Pamphlets’), which is not my vocation to discuss, I found for myself one very peculiar charm in the perusal of them—they seemed such perfect transcripts of the conversation of Thomas Carlyle. With something more of set continuity—of composition—but essentially the same thing, the Latter Day Pamphlets' are in their own way a ‘Boswell's Life’ of Carlyle. As I read and read, I was gradually transported from my club-room, with its newspaper-clad tables, and my dozing fellow-loungers, only kept half awake by periodical titillations of snuff, and carried in spirit to the grave and quiet sanctum in Chelsea, where Carlyle dispenses wisdom and hospitality with equally unstinted hand. The long, tall, spare figure is before me—wiry, though, and elastic, and quite capable of taking a long, tough spell through the moors of Ecclefechan, or elsewhere—stretched at careless, homely ease in his elbow-chair, yet ever with strong natural motions and starts, as the inward spirit stirs. The face, too, is before me—long and thin, with a certain tinge of paleness, but no sickness or attenuation, form muscular and vigorously marked, and not wanting some glow of former rustic color—pensive, almost solemn, yet open, and cordial, and tender, very tender. The eye, as generally happens, is the chief outward index of the soul—an eye is not easy to describe, but felt ever after one has looked thereon and therein. It is dark and full, shadowed over by a compact, prominent forehead. But the depth, the expression, the far inner play of it—who could transfer that even to the eloquent canvas, far less to this very in-eloquent paper? It is not brightness, it is not flash, it is not power even—something beyond all these. The expression is, so to speak, heavy laden—as if be-tokening untold burdens of thought, and long, long fiery struggles, resolutely endured—endured until they had been in some practical manner overcome; to adopt his own fond epithet, and it comes nearest to the thing, his is the heroic eye, but of a hero who has done hard battle against Paynim hosts. This is no dream of mine—I have often heard this peculiarity remarked. The whole form and expression of the face remind me of Dante—it wants the classic element, and the mature and matchless harmony which distinguish the countenance of the great Florentine; but something in the cast and in the look, especially the heavy laden, but dauntless eye, is very much alike. But he speaks to me. The tongue has the sough of Annandale—an echo of the Solway, with its compliments to old Father Thames. A keen, sharp, ringing voice, in the genuine Border key, but tranquil and sedate withal—neighborly and frank, and always in unison with what is uttered. Thus does the presence of Thomas Carlyle rise before me—a ‘true man’ in all his bearings and in all his sayings. And in this same guise do I seem to hear from him all those ‘Latter Day Pamphlets.’ Even such in his conversation—he sees the very thing he speaks of; it breathes and moves palpable to him, and hence his words form a picture. When you [pg 588] come from him, the impression is like having seen a great brilliant panorama; every thing had been made visible and naked to your sight. But more and better far than that; you bear home with you an indelible feeling of love for the man—deep at the heart, long as life. No man has ever inspired more of this personal affection. Not to love Carlyle when you know him is something unnatural, as if one should say they did not love the breeze that fans their cheek, or the vine-tree which has refreshed them both with its leafy shade and its exuberant juices. He abounds, himself, in love and in good works. His life, not only as a ‘writer of books,’ but as a man among his fellows, has been a continued shower of benefits. The young men, more especially, to whom he has been the good Samaritan, pouring oil upon their wounds, and binding up their bruised limbs, and putting them on the way of recovery of health and useful energy—the number of such can scarcely be told, and will never be known till the great day of accounts. One of these, who in his orisons will ever remember him, has just read to me, with tears of grateful attachment in his eyes, portions of a letter of counsel and encouragement which he received from him in the hour of darkness, and which was but the prelude to a thousand acts of substantial kindness and of graceful attention. As the letter contains no secret, and may fall as a fructifying seed into some youthful bosom that may be entering upon its trials and struggles, a quotation from it will form an appropriate finale at this time. He thus writes: ‘It will be good news, in all times coming, to learn that such a life as yours unfolds itself according to its promise, and becomes in some tolerable degree what it is capable of being. The problem is your own, to make or to mar—a great problem for you, as the like is for every man born into this world. You have my entire sympathy in your denunciation of the “explosive” character. It is frequent in these times, and deplorable wherever met with. Explosions are ever wasteful, woeful; central fire should not explode itself, but lie silent, far down at the centre; and make all good fruits grow! We can not too often repeat to ourselves, “Strength is seen, not in spasms, but in stout bearing of burdens.” You can take comfort in the meanwhile, if you need it, by the experience of all wise men, that a right heavy burden is precisely the thing wanted for a young strong man. Grievous to be borne; but bear it well, you will find it one day to have been verily blessed. “I would not, for any money,” says the brave Jean Paul, in his quaint way. “I would not, for any money, have had money in my youth!” He speaks a truth there, singular as it may seem to many. These young obscure years ought to be incessantly employed in gaining knowledge of things worth knowing, especially of heroic human souls worth knowing. And you may believe me, the obscurer such years are, it is apt to be the better. Books are needful; but yet not many books; a few well read. An open, true, patient, and valiant soul is needed; that is the one thing needful.’ ”

The Gentleman Beggar. An Attorney's Story. (From Dickens's Household Words.)

One morning, about five years ago, I called by appointment on Mr. John Balance, the fashionable pawnbroker, to accompany him to Liverpool, in pursuit for a Levanting customer—for Balance, in addition to pawning, does a little business in the sixty per cent. line. It rained in torrents when the cab stopped at the passage which leads past the pawning boxes to his private door. The cabman rang twice, and at length Balance appeared, looming through the mist and rain in the entry, illuminated by his perpetual cigar. As I eyed him rather impatiently, remembering that trains wait for no man, something like a hairy dog, or a bundle of rags, rose up at his feet, and barred his passage for a moment. Then Balance cried out with an exclamation, in answer apparently to a something I could not hear, “What, man alive!—slept in the passage!—there, take that, and get some breakfast, for Heaven's sake!” So saying, he jumped into the “Hansom,” and we bowled away at ten miles an hour, just catching the Express as the doors of the station were closing. My curiosity was full set—for although Balance can be free with his money, it is not exactly to beggars that his generosity is usually displayed; so when comfortably ensconced in a coupé, I finished with—

“You are liberal with your money this morning: pray, how often do you give silver to street cadgers?—because I shall know now what walk to take when flats and sharps leave off buying law.”

Balance, who would have made an excellent parson if he had not been bred to a case-hardening trade, and has still a soft bit left in his heart that is always fighting with his hard head, did not smile at all, but looked as grim as if squeezing a lemon into his Saturday night's punch. He answered slowly, “A cadger—yes; a beggar—a miserable wretch, he is now; but let me tell you, Master David, that that miserable bundle of rags was born and bred a gentleman; the son of a nobleman, the husband of an heiress, and has sat and dined at tables where you and I, Master David, are only allowed to view the plate by favor of the butler. I have lent him thousands, and been well paid. The last thing I had from him was his court suit; and I hold now his bill for one hundred pounds that will be paid, I expect, when he dies.”

“Why, what nonsense you are talking! you must be dreaming this morning. However, we are alone, I'll light a weed, in defiance of Railway law, you shall spin that yarn; for, true or untrue, it will fill up the time to Liverpool.”

“As for yarn,” replied Balance, “the whole story is short enough; and as for truth, that you [pg 589] may easily find out if you like to take the trouble. I thought the poor wretch was dead, and I own it put me out meeting him this morning, for I had a curious dream last night.”

“Oh, hang your dreams! Tell us about this gentleman beggar that bleeds you of half-crowns—that melts the heart even of a pawnbroker!”

“Well, then, that beggar is the illegitimate son of the late Marquis of Hoopborough by a Spanish lady of rank. He received a first-rate education, and was brought up in his father's house. At a very early age he obtained an appointment in a public office, was presented by the marquis at court, and received into the first society, where his handsome person and agreeable manners made him a great favorite. Soon after coming of age, he married the daughter of Sir E. Bumper, who brought him a very handsome fortune, which was strictly settled on herself. They lived in splendid style, kept several carriages, a house in town, and a place in the country. For some reason or other, idleness, or to please his lady's pride, he resigned his appointment. His father died and left him nothing; indeed, he seemed at that time very handsomely provided for.

“Very soon Mr. and Mrs. Molinos Fitz-Roy began to disagree. She was cold, correct—he was hot and random. He was quite dependent on her, and she made him feel it. When he began to get into debt, he came to me. At length some shocking quarrel occurred; some case of jealousy on the wife's side, not without reason, I believe; and the end of it was, Mr. Fitz-Roy was turned out of doors. The house was his wife's, the furniture was his wife's, and the fortune was his wife's—he was, in fact, her pensioner. He left with a few hundred pounds ready money, and some personal jewelry, and went to an hotel. On these and credit he lived. Being illegitimate, he had no relations; being a fool, when he spent his money he lost his friends. The world took his wife's part, when they found she had the fortune, and the only parties who interfered were her relatives, who did their best to make the quarrel incurable. To crown all, one night he was run over by a cab, was carried to a hospital, and lay there for months, and was during several weeks of the time unconscious. A message to the wife, by the hands of one of his debauched companions, sent by a humane surgeon, obtained an intimation that ‘if he died, Mr. Croak, the undertaker to the family, had orders to see to the funeral,’ and that Mrs. Molinos was on the point of starting for the Continent, not to return for some years. When Fitz-Roy was discharged, he came to me limping on two sticks, to pawn his court suit, and told me his story. I was really sorry for the fellow, such a handsome, thoroughbred-looking man. He was going then into the west somewhere, to try to hunt out a friend. ‘What to do, Balance,’ he said, ‘I don't know. I can't dig, and unless somebody will make me their gamekeeper, I must starve, or beg, as my Jezebel bade me when we parted!’

“I lost sight of Molinos for a long time, and when I next came upon him it was in the Rookery of Westminster, in a low lodging-house, where I was searching with an officer for stolen goods. He was pointed out to me as the ‘gentleman cadger,’ because he was so free with his money when ‘in luck.’ He recognized me, but turned away then. I have since seen him, and relieved him more than once, although he never asks for any thing. How he lives, Heaven knows. Without money, without friends, without useful education of any kind, he tramps the country, as you saw him, perhaps doing a little hop-picking or hay-making, in season, only happy when he obtains the means to get drunk. I have heard through the kitchen whispers, that you know come to me, that he is entitled to some property; and I expect if he were to die his wife would pay the hundred pound bill I hold; at any rate, what I have told you I know to be true, and the bundle of rags I relieved just now is known in every thieves' lodging in England as the ‘gentleman cadger.’ ”

This story produced an impression on me—I am fond of speculation, and like the excitement of a legal hunt as much as some do a fox-chase: A gentleman a beggar, a wife rolling in wealth, rumors of unknown property due to the husband: it seemed as if there were pickings for me amidst this carrion of pauperism.

Before returning from Liverpool, I had purchased the gentleman beggar's acceptance from Balance. I then inserted in the “Times” the following advertisement: “Horatio Molinos Fitz-Roy.—If this gentleman will apply to David Discount, Esq., Solicitor, St. James's, he will hear of something to his advantage. Any person furnishing Mr. F.'s correct address, shall receive 1£. 1s. reward. He was last seen,” &c. Within twenty-four hours I had ample proof of the wide circulation of the “Times.” My office was besieged with beggars of every degree, men and women, lame and blind, Irish, Scotch, and English, some on crutches, some in bowls, some in go-carts. They all knew him as the “gentleman,” and I must do the regular fraternity of tramps the justice to say, that not one would answer a question until he made certain that I meant the “gentleman” no harm.

One evening, about three weeks after the appearance of the advertisement, my clerk announced “another beggar.” There came in an old man leaning upon a staff, clad in a soldier's great coat all patched and torn, with a battered hat, from under which a mass of tangled hair fell over his shoulders and half concealed his face. The beggar, in a weak, wheezy, hesitating tone, said, “You have advertised for Molinos Fitz-Roy. I hope you don't mean him any harm; he is sunk, I think, too low for enmity now; and surely no one would sport with such misery as his.” These last words were uttered in a sort of piteous whisper.

I answered quickly, “Heaven forbid I should sport with misery: I mean and hope to do him good, as well as myself.”

“Then, sir, I am Molinos Fitz-Roy!”

While we were conversing candles had been brought in. I have not very tender nerves—my head would not agree with them—but I own I started and shuddered when I saw and knew that the wretched creature before me was under thirty years of age and once a gentleman. Sharp, aquiline features, reduced to literal skin and bone, were begrimed and covered with dry fair hair; the white teeth of the half-open mouth shattered with eagerness, and made more hideous the foul pallor of the rest of the countenance. As he stood leaning on a staff half bent, his long, yellow bony fingers clasped over the crutch-head of his stick, he was indeed a picture of misery, famine, squalor, and premature age, too horrible to dwell upon. I made him sit down, and sent for some refreshment which he devoured like a ghoul, and set to work to unravel his story. It was difficult to keep him to the point; but with pains I learned what convinced me that he was entitled to some property, whether great or small there was no evidence. On parting, I said, “Now, Mr. F., you must stay in town while I make proper inquiries. What allowance will be enough to keep you comfortably?”

He answered humbly, after much pressing, “Would you think ten shillings too much?”

I don't like, if I do those things at all, to do them shabbily, so I said, “Come every Saturday and you shall have a pound.” He was profuse in thanks, of course, as all such men are as long as distress lasts.

I had previously learned that my ragged client's wife was in England, living in a splendid house in Hyde Park Gardens, under her maiden name. On the following day the Earl of Owing called upon me, wanting five thousand pounds by five o'clock the same evening. It was a case of life or death with him, so I made my terms, and took advantage of his pressure to execute a coup de main. I proposed that he should drive me home to receive the money, calling at Mrs. Molinos in Hyde Park Gardens, on our way. I knew that the coronet and liveries of his father, the marquis, would insure me an audience with Mrs. Molinos Fitz-Roy.

My scheme answered. I was introduced into the lady's presence. She was, and probably is, a very stately, handsome woman, with a pale complexion, high solid forehead, regular features, thin, pinched, self-satisfied mouth. My interview was very short, I plunged into the middle of the affair, but had scarcely mentioned the word husband, when she interrupted me with, “I presume you have lent this profligate person money, and want me to pay you.” She paused, and then said, “He shall not have a farthing.” As she spoke, her white face became scarlet.

“But, madam, the man is starving. I have strong reasons for believing he is entitled to property, and if you refuse any assistance, I must take other measures.” She rang the bell, wrote something rapidly on a card; and, as the footman appeared, pushed it toward me across the table, with the air of touching a toad, saying, “There, sir, is the address of my solicitors; apply to them if you think you have any claim. Robert, show the person out, and take care he is not admitted again.”

So far I had effected nothing; and, to tell the truth, felt rather crest-fallen under the influence of that grand manner peculiar to certain great ladies and to all great actresses.

My next visit was to the attorneys, Messrs. Leasem and Fashun, of Lincoln's Inn Square, and there I was at home. I had had dealings with the firm before. They are agents for half the aristocracy, who always run in crowds like sheep after the same wine-merchants, the same architects, the same horse-dealers, and the same law-agents. It may be doubted whether the quality of law and land management they get on this principle is quite equal to their wine and horses. At any rate, my friends of Lincoln's Inn, like others of the same class, are distinguished by their courteous manners, deliberate proceedings, innocence of legal technicalities, long credit, and heavy charges. Leasem, the elder partner, wears powder and a huge bunch of seals, lives in Queen-square, drives a brougham, gives the dinners and does the cordial department. He is so strict in performing the latter duty, that he once addressed a poacher who had shot a duke's keeper, as “my dear creature,” although he afterward hung him.

Fashun has chambers in St. James-street, drives a cab, wears a tip, and does the grand haha style.

My business lay with Leasem. The interviews and letters passing were numerous. However, it came at last to the following dialogue:

“Well, my dear Mr. Discount,” began Mr. Leasem, who hates me like poison. “I'm really very sorry for that poor dear Molinos—knew his father well; a great man, a perfect gentleman; but you know what women are, eh, Mr. Discount? My client won't advance a shilling; she knows it would only be wasted in low dissipation. Now, don't you think (this was said very insinuatingly)—don't you think he had better be sent to the workhouse; very comfortable accommodations there, I can assure you—meat twice a week, and excellent soup; and then, Mr. D., we might consider about allowing you something for that bill.”

“Mr. Leasem, can you reconcile it to your conscience to make such an arrangement? Here's a wife rolling in luxury, and a husband starving!”

“No, Mr. Discount, not starving; there is the workhouse, as I observed before; besides, allow me to suggest that these appeals to feeling are quite unprofessional—quite unprofessional.”

“But, Mr. Leasem, touching this property which the poor man is entitled to.”

“Why, there again, Mr. D., you must excuse me; you really must. I don't say he is; I don't say he is not. If you know he is entitled to property, I am sure you know how to proceed; the law is open to you, Mr. Discount—the law is open; and a man of your talent will know how to use it.”

“Then, Mr. Leasem, you mean that I must, in order to right this starving man, file a bill of discovery, to extract from you the particulars of his rights. You have the marriage settlement, and all the information, and you decline to allow a pension, or afford any information; the man is to starve, or go to the workhouse.”

“Why, Mr. D., you are so quick and violent, it really is not professional; but you see (here a subdued smile of triumph), it has been decided that a solicitor is not bound to afford such information as you ask, to the injury of his client.”

“Then you mean that this poor Molinos may rot and starve, while you keep secret from him, at his wife's request, his title to an income, and that the Court of Chancery will back you in this iniquity?”

I kept repeating the word “starve,” because I saw it made my respectable opponent wince.

“Well, then, just listen to me. I know that in the happy state of your equity law, chancery can't help my client; but I have another plan: I shall go hence to my office, issue a writ, and take your client's husband in execution—as soon as he is lodged in jail, I shall file his schedule in the Insolvent Court, and when he comes up for his discharge, I shall put you in the witness-box, and examine you on oath, ‘touching any property of which you know the insolvent to be possessed,’ and where will be your privileged communications then?”

The respectable Leasem's face lengthened in a twinkling, his comfortable confident air vanished, he ceased twiddling his gold chain, and, at length, he muttered,

“Suppose we pay the debt?”

“Why, then, I'll arrest him the day after for another.”

“But, my dear Mr. Discount, surely such conduct would not be quite respectable.”

“That's my business; my client has been wronged, I am determined to right him, and when the aristocratic firm, of Leasem and Fashun takes refuge according to the custom of respectable repudiators, in the cool arbors of the Court of Chancery, why, a mere bill-discounting attorney like David Discount need not hesitate about cutting a bludgeon out of the Insolvent Court.”

“Well, well, Mr. D., you are so warm—so fiery; we must deliberate—we must consult. You will give me until the day after to-morrow, and then we'll write you our final determination; in the meantime, send us a copy of your authority to act for Mr. Molinos Fitz-Roy.”

Of course, I lost no time in getting the gentleman beggar to sign a proper letter.

On the appointed day came a communication with the L. and F. seal, which I opened, not without unprofessional eagerness. It was as follows:

“In re Molinos Fitz-Roy and Another.

“Sir—In answer to your application on behalf of Mr. Molinos Fitz-Roy, we beg to inform you that under the administration of a paternal aunt who died intestate, your client is entitled to two thousand five hundred pounds eight shillings and sixpence, Three per Cents.; one thousand five hundred pounds nineteen shillings and fourpence, Three per Cents. Reduced; one thousand pounds, Long Annuities; five hundred pounds, Bank Stock; three thousand five hundred pounds, India Stock; besides other securities, making up about ten thousand pounds, which we are prepared to transfer over to Mr. Molinos Fitz-Roy's direction forthwith.”

Here was a windfall! It quite took away my breath.

At dusk came my gentleman beggar, and what puzzled me was, how to break the news to him. Being very much overwhelmed with business that day, I had not much time for consideration. He came in rather better dressed than when I first saw him, with only a week's beard on his chin; but, as usual, not quite sober. Six weeks had elapsed since our first interview. He was still the humble, trembling, low-voiced creature, I first knew him.

After a prelude, I said, “I find, Mr. F., you are entitled to something; pray, what do you mean to give me in addition to my bill, for obtaining it?” He answered rapidly, “Oh, take half; if there is one hundred pounds, take half; if there is five hundred pounds, take half.”

“No, no; Mr. F., I don't do business in that way, I shall be satisfied with ten per cent.”

It was so settled. I then led him out into the street, impelled to tell him the news, yet dreading the effect; not daring to make the revelation in my office, for fear of a scene.

I began hesitatingly, “Mr. Fitz-Roy, I am happy to say, that I find you are entitled to .....ten thousand pounds!”

“Ten thousand pounds!” he echoed. “Ten thousand pounds!” he shrieked. “Ten thousand pounds!” he yelled, seizing my arm violently. “You are a brick. Here, cab! cab!” Several drove up—the shout might have been heard a mile off. He jumped in the first.

“Where to?” said the driver.

“To a tailor's, you rascal!”

“Ten thousand pounds! ha, ha, ha!” he repeated hysterically, when in the cab; and every moment grasping my arm. Presently he subsided, looked me straight in the face, and muttered with agonizing fervor,

“What a jolly brick you are!”

The tailor, the hosier, the bootmaker, the hair-dresser, were in turn visited by this poor pagan of externals. As, by degrees, under their hands, he emerged from the beggar to the [pg 592] gentleman, his spirits rose; his eyes brightened; he walked erect, but always nervously grasping my arm; fearing, apparently, to lose sight of me for a moment, lest his fortune should vanish with me. The impatient pride with which he gave his orders to the astonished tradesmen for the finest and best of every thing, and the amazed air of the fashionable hairdresser when he presented his matted locks and stubble chin, to be “cut and shaved,” may be acted—it can not be described.

By the time the external transformation was complete, and I sat down in a Café in the Haymarket, opposite a haggard but handsome, thoroughbred-looking man, whose air, with the exception of the wild eyes and deeply browned face, did not differ from the stereotyped men about town sitting around us, Mr. Molinos Fitz-Roy had already almost forgotten the past; he bullied the waiter, and criticised the wine, as if he had done nothing else but dine and drink and scold there all the days of his life.

Once he wished to drink my health, and would have proclaimed his whole story to the coffee-room assembly, in a raving style. When I left he almost wept in terror at the idea of losing sight of me. But, allowing for these ebullitions—the natural result of such a whirl of events—he was wonderfully calm and self-possessed.

The next day, his first care was to distribute fifty pounds among his friends the cadgers, at a house of call in Westminster, and formally to dissolve his connection with them; those present undertaking for the “fraternity,” that, for the future, he should never be noticed by them in public or private.

I can not follow his career much further. Adversity had taught him nothing. He was soon again surrounded by the well-bred vampires who had forgotten him when penniless; but they amused him, and that was enough. The ten thousand pounds were rapidly melting when he invited me to a grand dinner at Richmond, which included a dozen of the most agreeable, good-looking, well-dressed dandies of London, interspersed with a display of pretty butterfly bonnets. We dined deliciously, and drank as men do of iced wines in the dog-days—looking down from Richmond Hill.

One of the pink bonnets crowned Fitz-Roy with a wreath of flowers; he looked—less the intellect—as handsome as Alcibiades. Intensely excited and flushed, he rose with a champagne glass in his hand to propose my health.

The oratorical powers of his father had not descended on him. Jerking out sentences by spasms, at length he said, “I was a beggar—I am a gentleman—thanks to this—”

Here he leaned on my shoulder heavily a moment, and then fell back. We raised him, loosened his neckcloth—

“Fainted!” said the ladies.

“Drunk!” said the gentlemen.

He was dead!

Singular Proceedings Of The Sand Wasp. (From Howitt's Country Year-Book.)

In all my observations of the habits of living things, I have never seen any thing more curious than the doings of one species of these ammophilæ—lovers of sand. I have watched them day after day, and hour after hour, in my garden, and also on the sandy banks on the wastes about Esher, in Surrey, and always with unabated wonder. They are about an inch long, with orange-colored bodies, and black heads and wings. They are slender and most active. You see them on the warm borders of your garden, or on warm, dry banks, in summer, when the sun shines hotly. They are incessantly and most actively hunting about. They are in pursuit of a particular gray spider with a large abdomen. For these they pursue their chase with a fiery quickness and avidity. The spiders are on the watch to seize flies; but here we have the tables turned, and these are flies on the watch to discover and kill the spiders. These singular insects seem all velocity and fire. They come flying at a most rapid rate, light down on the dry soil, and commence an active search. The spiders lie under the leaves of plants, and in little dens under the dry little clods. Into all these places the sand-wasp pops his head. He bustles along here and there, flirting his wings, and his whole body all life and fire. And now he moves off to a distance, hunts about there, then back to his first place, beats the old ground carefully over, as a pointer beats a field. He searches carefully round every little knob of earth, and pops his head into every crevice. Ever and anon, he crouches close among the little clods as a tiger would crouch for his prey. He seems to be listening, or smelling down into the earth, as if to discover his prey by every sense which he possesses, He goes round every stalk, and descends into every hollow about them. When he finds the spider, he dispatches him in a moment, and seizing him by the centre of his chest, commences dragging him off backward.

He conveys his prey to a place of safety. Frequently he carries it up some inches into a plant, and lodges it among the green leaves. Seeing him do this, I poked his spider down with a stick after he had left it; but he speedily returned, and finding it fallen down, he immediately carried it up again to the same place.

Having thus secured his spider, he selects a particular spot of earth, the most sunny and warm, and begins to dig a pit. He works with all his might, digging up the earth with his formidable mandibles, and throwing it out with his feet, as a dog throws out the earth when scratching after a rabbit. Every few seconds he ascends, tail first, out of his hole, clears away the earth about its mouth with his legs, and spreads it to a distance on the surface. When he has dug the hole, perhaps two inches deep, he comes forth eagerly, goes off for his [pg 593] spider, drags it down from its lodgment, and brings it to the mouth of his hole. He now lets himself down the hole, tail first, and then, putting forth his head, takes the spider, and turns it into the most suitable position for dragging it in.

It must be observed that this hole is made carefully of only about the width of his body, and therefore the spider can not be got into it except lengthwise, and then by stout pulling. Well, he turns it lengthwise, and seizing it, commences dragging it in. At first, you would imagine this impossible; but the sand-wasp is strong, and the body of the spider is pliable. You soon see it disappear. Down into the cylindrical hole it goes, and anon you perceive the sand-wasp pushing up its black head beside it; and having made his way out he again sets to work, and pushes the spider with all his force to the bottom of the den.

And what is all this for? Is the spider laid up in his larder for himself? No; it is food for his children? It is their birth-place, and their supply of provision while they are in the larva state.

We have been all along calling this creature he, for it has a most masculine look; but it is in reality a she; it is the female sand-wasp, and all this preparation is for the purpose of laying her eggs. For this she has sought and killed the spider, and buried it here. She has done it all wittingly. She has chosen one particular spider, and that only, for that is the one peculiarly adapted to nourish her young.

So here it is safely stored away in her den; and she now descends, tail first, and piercing the pulpy abdomen of the spider, she deposits her egg or eggs. That being done, she carefully begins filling in the hole with earth. She rakes it up with her legs and mandibles, and fills in the hole, every now and then turning round and going backward into the hole to stamp down the earth with her feet, and to ram it down with her body as a rammer. When the hole is filled, it is curious to observe with what care she levels the surface, and removes the surrounding lumps of earth, laying some first over the tomb of the spider, and others about, so as to make that place look as much as possible like the surface all round. And before she has done with it—and she works often for ten minutes at this leveling and disguising before she is perfectly satisfied—she makes the place so exactly like all the rest of the surface, that it will require good eyes and close observation to recognize it.

She has now done her part, and Nature must do the rest. She has deposited her eggs in the body of the spider, and laid that body in the earth in the most sunny spot she can find. She has laid it so near the surface that the sun will act on it powerfully, yet deep enough to conceal it from view. She has, with great art and anxiety, destroyed all traces of the hole, and the effect will soon commence. The heat of the sun will hatch the egg. The larva, or young grub of the sand-wasp, will become alive, and begin to feed on the pulpy body of the spider in which it is enveloped. This food will suffice it till it is ready to emerge to daylight, and pass through the different stages of its existence. Like the ostrich, the sand-wasp thus leaves her egg in the sand till the sun hatches it, and having once buried it, most probably never knows herself where it is deposited. It is left to Nature and Providence

What Horses Think Of Men. From The Raven In The Happy Family. (From Dickens's Household Words.)

I suppose you thought I was dead? No such thing. Don't flatter yourselves that I haven't got my eye upon you. I am wide awake, and you give me plenty to look at.

I have begun my great work about you, I have been collecting materials from the Horse, to begin with. You are glad to hear it, ain't you? Very likely. Oh, he gives you a nice character! He makes you out a charming set of fellows.

He informs me by-the-by, that he is a distant relation of the pony that was taken up in a balloon a few weeks ago; and that the pony's account of your going to see him at Vauxhall Gardens, is an amazing thing. The pony says that when he looked round on the assembled crowd, come to see the realization of the wood-cut in the bill, he found it impossible to discover which was the real Mister Green—there were so many Mister Greens—and they were all so very green!

But that's the way with you. You know it is. Don't tell me! You'd go to see any thing that other people went to see. And don't flatter yourselves that I am referring to “the vulgar curiosity,” as you choose to call it, when you mean some curiosity in which you don't participate yourselves. The polite curiosity in this country is as vulgar as any curiosity in the world.

Of course you'll tell me, no it isn't; but I say, yes it is. What have you got to say for yourselves about the Nepaulese princes, I should like to know? Why, there has been more crowding, and pressing, and pushing, and jostling, and struggling, and striving, in genteel houses this last season, on account of those Nepaulese princes, than would have taken place in vulgar Cremorne Gardens and Greenwich Park, at Easter time and Whitsuntide! And what for? Do you know any thing about 'em? Have you any idea why they came here? Can you put your finger on their country in the map? Have you ever asked yourselves a dozen common questions about its climate, natural history, government, productions, customs, religion, manners? Not you! Here are a couple of swarthy princes very much out of their element, walking about in wide muslin trowsers, and sprinkled all over with gems (like the clockwork figure on the old round platform in the [pg 594] street, grown-up), and they're fashionable outlandish monsters, and it's a new excitement for you to get a stare at 'em. As to asking 'em to dinner, and seeing 'em sit at table without eating in your company (unclean animals as you are!), you fall into raptures at that. Quite delicious, isn't it? Ugh, you dunder-headed boobies!

I wonder what there is, new and strange, that you wouldn't lionize, as you call it. Can you suggest any thing! It's not a hippopotamus, I suppose. I hear from my brother-in-law in the Zoological Gardens, that you are always pelting away into the Regent's Park, by thousands, to see the hippopotamus. Oh, you're very fond of hippopotami, ain't you? You study one attentively, when you do see one, don't you? You come away so much wiser than when you went, reflecting so profoundly on the wonders of the creation—eh?

Bah! You follow one another like wild geese; but you are not so good to eat!

These, however, are not the observations of my friend the Horse. He takes you, in another point of view. Would you like to read his contribution to my Natural History of you? No? You shall then.

He is a cab-horse now. He wasn't always, but he is now, and his usual stand is close to our proprietor's usual stand. That's the way we have come into communication, we “dumb animals.” Ha, ha! Dumb, too! Oh, the conceit of you men, because you can bother the community out of their five wits, by making speeches!

Well. I mentioned to this Horse that I should be glad to have his opinions and experiences of you. Here they are:

“At the request of my honorable friend the Raven, I proceed to offer a few remarks in reference to the animal called Man. I have had varied experience of this strange creature for fifteen years, and am now driven by a Man, in the hackney cabriolet, number twelve thousand four hundred and fifty-two.

“The sense Man entertains of his own inferiority to the nobler animals—and I am now more particularly referring to the Horse—has impressed me forcibly, in the course of my career. If a man knows a horse well, he is prouder of it than of any knowledge of himself, within the range of his limited capacity. He regards it as the sum of all human acquisition. If he is learned in a horse, he has nothing else to learn. And the same remark applies, with some little abatement, to his acquaintance with dogs. I have seen a good deal of man in my time, but I think I have never met a man who didn't feel it necessary to his reputation to pretend, on occasion, that he knew something of horses and dogs, though he really knew nothing. As to making us a subject of conversation, my opinion is that we are more talked about than history, philosophy, literature, art, and science, all put together. I have encountered innumerable gentlemen in the country, who were totally incapable of interest in any thing but horses and dogs—except cattle. And I have always been given to understand that they were the flower of the civilized world.

“It is very doubtful to me, whether there is, upon the whole, any thing man is so ambitious to imitate as an ostler, jockey, a stage coachman, a horse-dealer, or dog-fancier. There may be some other character which I do not immediately remember, that fires him with emulation; but if there be, I am sure it is connected with horses or dogs, or both. This is an unconscious compliment, on the part of the tyrant, to the nobler animals, which I consider to be very remarkable. I have known lords and baronets, and members of parliament, out of number, who have deserted every other calling to become but indifferent stablemen or kennelmen, and be cheated on all hands, by the real aristocracy of those pursuits who were regularly born to the business.

“All this, I say, is a tribute to our superiority, which I consider to be very remarkable. Yet, still I can't quite understand it. Man can hardly devote himself to us, in admiration of our virtues, because he never imitates them. We horses are as honest, though I say it, as animals can be. If, under the pressure of circumstances, we submit to act at a circus, for instance, we always show that we are acting. We never deceive any body. We would scorn to do it. If we are called upon to do any thing in earnest, we do our best. If we are required to run a race falsely, and to lose when we could win, we are not to be relied upon to commit a fraud; man must come in at that point, and force us to it. And the extraordinary circumstance to me is, that man (whom I take to be a powerful species of monkey) is always making us nobler animals the instruments of his meanness and cupidity. The very name of our kind has become a byword for all sorts of trickery and cheating. We are as innocent as counters at a game—and yet this creature will play falsely with us!

“Man's opinion, good or bad, is not worth much, as any rational horse knows. But justice is justice; and what I complain of is, that mankind talks of us as if we had something to do with all this. They say that such a man was ‘ruined by horses.’ Ruined by horses! They can't be open, even in that, and say he was ruined by men; but they lay it at our stable-door! As if we ever ruined any body, or were ever doing any thing but being ruined ourselves, in our generous desire to fulfill the useful purposes of our existence!

“In the same way, we get a bad name, as if we were profligate company. ‘So and so got among horses, and it was all up with him.’ Why, we would have reclaimed him—we would have made him temperate, industrious, punctual, steady, sensible—what harm would he ever have got from us, I should wish to ask?

“Upon the whole, speaking of him as I have [pg 595] found him, I should describe man as an unmeaning and conceited creature, very seldom to be trusted, and not likely to make advances toward the honesty of the nobler animals. I should say that his power of warping the nobler animals to bad purposes, and damaging their reputation by his companionship, is, next to the art of growing oats, hay, carrots, and clover, one of his principal attributes. He is very unintelligible in his caprices; seldom expressing with distinctness what he wants of us; and relying greatly on our better judgment to find out. He is cruel, and fond of blood—particularly at a steeple-chase—and is very ungrateful.

“And yet, so far as I can understand, he worships us, too. He sets up images of us (not particularly like, but meant to be) in the streets and calls upon his fellows to admire them, and believe in them. As well as I can make out, it is not of the least importance what images of men are put astride upon these images of horses, for I don't find any famous personage among them—except one, and his image seems to have been contracted for by the gross. The jockeys who ride our statues are very queer jockeys, it appears to me, but it is something to find man even posthumously sensible of what he owes to us. I believe that when he has done any great wrong to any very distinguished horse, deceased, he gets up a subscription to have an awkward likeness of him made, and erects it in a public place, to be generally venerated. I can find no other reason for the statues of us that abound.

“It must be regarded as a part of the inconsistency of man, that he erects no statues to the donkeys—who, though far inferior animals to ourselves, have great claims upon him. I should think a donkey opposite the horse at Hyde Park, another in Trafalgar-square, and a group of donkeys, in brass, outside the Guild-hall of the city of London (for I believe the common-council chamber is inside that building) would be pleasant and appropriate memorials.

“I am not aware that I can suggest any thing more to my honorable friend the Raven, which will not already have occurred to his fine intellect. Like myself, he is the victim of brute force, and must bear it until the present state of things is changed—as it possibly may be in the good time which I understand is coming, if I wait a little longer.”

There! How do you like that? That's the Horse! You shall have another animal's sentiments, soon. I have communicated with plenty of 'em, and they are all down upon you. It's not I alone who have found you out. You are generally detected, I am happy to say, and shall be covered with confusion.

Talking about the horse, are you going to set up any more horses? Eh? Think a bit. Come! You haven't got horses enough yet, surely? Couldn't you put somebody else on horseback, and stick him up, at the cost of a few thousands? You have already statues to most of the “benefactors of mankind” (see Advertisement) in your principal cities. You walk through groves of great inventors, instructors, discoverers, assuagers of pain, preventers of disease, suggesters of purifying thoughts, doers of noble deeds. Finish the list. Come!

Whom will you hoist into the saddle? Let's have a cardinal virtue! Shall it be Faith? Hope? Charity? Ay, Charity's the virtue to ride on horseback! Let's have Charity!

How shall we represent it? Eh? What do you think? Royal? Certainly. Duke? Of course. Charity always was typified in that way, from the time of a certain widow downward. And there's nothing less left to put up; all the commoners who were “benefactors of mankind” having had their statues in the public places, long ago.

How shall we dress it? Rags? Low. Drapery? Commonplace. Field-Marshal's uniform? The very thing! Charity in a Field-Marshal's uniform (none the worse for wear) with thirty thousand pounds a year, public money, in its pocket, and fifteen thousand more, public money, up behind, will be a piece of plain, uncompromising truth in the highways, and an honor to the country and the time.

Ha, ha, ha! You can't leave the memory of an unassuming, honest, good-natured, amiable old duke alone, without bespattering it with your flunkeyism, can't you? That's right—and like you! Here are three brass buttons in my crop. I'll subscribe 'em all. One, to the statue of Charity; one, to a statue of Hope; one, to a statue of Faith. For Faith, we'll have the Nepaulese Embassador on horseback—being a prince. And for Hope, we'll put the Hippopotamus on horseback, and so make a group.

Let's have a meeting about it!

The Quakers During The American War. (From Howitt's Country Year-Book.)

George Dilwyn was an American, a remarkable preacher among the Quakers. About fifty years ago he came over to this country, on what we have already said is termed a “Religious Visit,” and being in Cornwall, when I was there, and at George Fox's, in Falmouth—our aged relative still narrates—soon became an object of great attraction, not only from his powerful preaching, but from his extraordinary gift in conversation, which he made singularly interesting from the introduction of curious passages in his own life and experience.

His company was so much sought after, that a general invitation was given, by his hospitable and wealthy entertainer, to all the Friends of the town and neighborhood to come, and hear, and see him; and evening by evening, their rooms were crowded by visitors, who sat on seats, side by side, as in a public lecture-room.

Among other things, he related, that during [pg 596] the time of the revolutionary war, one of the armies passing through a district in which a great number of Friends resided, food was demanded from the inhabitants, which was given to them. The following day the adverse army came up in pursuit, and stripped them of every kind of provision that remained; and so great was the strait to which they were reduced, that absolute famine was before them. Their sufferings were extreme, as day after day went on, and no prospect of relief was afforded them. Death seemed to stare them in the face, and many a one was ready to despair. The forests around them were in possession of the soldiers, and the game, which otherwise might have yielded them subsistence, was killed or driven away.

After several days of great distress, they retired at night, still without hope or prospect of succor. How great, then, was their surprise and cause of thankfulness when, on the following morning, immense herds of wild deer were seen standing around their inclosures, as if driven there for their benefit! From whence they came none could tell, nor the cause of their coming, but they suffered themselves to be taken without resistance; and thus the whole people were saved, and had great store of provisions laid up for many weeks.

Again, a similar circumstance occurred near the sea-shore, when the flying and pursuing armies had stripped the inhabitants, and when, apparently to add to their distress, the wind set in with such unusual violence, and the sea drove the tide so far inland, that the people near the shore were obliged to abandon their houses, and those in the town retreat to their upper rooms. This also being during the night, greatly added to their distress; and, like the others, they were ready to despair. Next morning, however, they found that God had not been unmindful of them; for the tide had brought up with it a most extraordinary shoal of mackerel, so that every place was filled with them, where they remained ready taken, without net or skill of man—a bountiful provision for the wants of the people, till other relief could be obtained.

Another incident he related, which occurred in one of the back settlements, when the Indians had been employed to burn the dwellings of the settlers, and cruelly to murder the people. One of these solitary habitations was in the possession of a Friend's family. They lived in such secure simplicity, that they had hitherto had no apprehension of danger, and used neither bar nor bolt to their door, having no other means of securing their dwelling from intrusion than by drawing in the leathern thong by which the wooden latch inside was lifted from without.

The Indians had committed frightful ravages all around, burning and murdering without mercy. Every evening brought forth tidings of horror, and every night the unhappy settlers surrounded themselves with such defenses as they could muster—even then, for dread, scarcely being able to sleep. The Friend and his family, who had hitherto put no trust in the arm of flesh, but had left all in the keeping of God, believing that man often ran in his own strength to his own injury, had used so little precaution, that they slept without even withdrawing the string, and were as yet uninjured. Alarmed, however, at length, by the fears of others, and by the dreadful rumors that surrounded them, they yielded to their fears on one particular night, and, before retiring to rest, drew in the string, and thus secured themselves as well as they were able.

In the dead of the night, the Friend, who had not been able to sleep, asked his wife if she slept; and she replied that she could not, for her mind was uneasy. Upon this, he confessed that the same was his case, and that he believed it would be the safest for him to rise and put out the string of the latch as usual. On her approving of this, it was done, and the two lay down again, commending themselves to the keeping of God.

This had not occurred above ten minutes, when the dismal sound of the war-whoop echoed through the forest, filling every heart with dread, and almost immediately afterward, they counted the footsteps of seven men pass the window of their chamber, which was on the ground-floor, and the next moment the door-string was pulled, the latch lifted, and the door opened. A debate of a few minutes took place, the purport of which, as it was spoken in the Indian language, was unintelligible to the inhabitants; but that it was favorable to them was proved by the door being again closed, and the Indians retiring without having crossed the threshold.

The next morning they saw the smoke rising from burning habitations all around them; parents were weeping for their children who were carried off, and children lamenting over their parents who had been cruelly slain.

Some years afterward, when peace was restored, and the colonists had occasion to hold conferences with the Indians, this Friend was appointed as one for that purpose, and speaking in favor of the Indians, he related the above incident; in reply to which, an Indian observed, that, by the simple circumstance of putting out the latch-string, which proved confidence rather than fear, their lives and their property had been saved; for that he himself was one of that marauding party, and that, on finding the door open, it was said—“These people shall live; they will do us no harm, for they put their trust in the Great Spirit.”

During the whole American revolution, indeed, the Indians, though incited by the whites to kill and scalp the enemy, never molested the Friends, as the people of Father Onas, or William Penn, and as the avowed opponents of all violence. Through the whole war, there were but two instances to the contrary, and they were occasioned by the two Friends themselves. The one was a young man, a tanner, who went to his tan-yard and back daily unmolested, while devastation spread [pg 597] on all sides; but at length, thoughtlessly carrying a gun to shoot some birds, the Indians, in ambush, believed that he had deserted his principles, and shot him. The other was a woman, who, when the dwellings of her neighbors were nightly fired, and the people themselves murdered, was importuned by the officers of a neighboring fort to take refuge there till the danger was over. For some time she refused, and remained unharmed amid general destruction; but, at length, letting in fear, she went for one night to the fort, but was so uneasy, that the next morning she quitted it to return to her home. The Indians, however, believed that she too had abandoned her principles, and joined the fighting part of the community, and before she reached home she was shot by them.

A Shilling's Worth Of Science. (From Dickens's Household Words.)

Dr. Paris has already shown, in a charming little book treating scientifically of children's toys, how easy even “philosophy in sport can be made science in earnest.” An earlier genius cut out the whole alphabet into the figures of uncouth animals, and inclosed them in a toy-box representing Noah's Ark, for the purpose of teaching children their letters. Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, have been decimated; “yea, the great globe itself,” has been parceled into little wooden sections, that their readjustment into a continuous map might teach the infant conqueror of the world the relative positions of distant countries. Archimedes might have discovered the principle of the lever and the fundamental principles of gravity upon a rocking-horse. In like manner he might have ascertained the laws of hydrostatics, by observing the impetus of many natural and artificial fountains, which must occasionally have come beneath his eye. So also the principles of acoustics might even now be taught by the aid of a penny whistle, and there is no knowing how much children's nursery games may yet be rendered subservient to the advancement of science. The famous Dr. Cornelius Scriblerus had excellent notions on these subjects. He determined that his son Martinus should be the most learned and universally well-informed man of his age, and had recourse to all sorts of devices in order to inspire him even unthinkingly with knowledge. He determined that every thing should contribute to the improvement of his mind—even his very dress. He therefore, his biographer informs us, invented for him a geographical suit of clothes, which might give him some hints of that science, and also of the commerce of different nations. His son's disposition to mathematics—for he was a remarkable child—was discovered very early by his drawing parallel lines on his bread and butter, and intersecting them at equal angles, so as to form the whole superficies into squares. His father also wisely resolved that he should acquire the learned languages, especially Greek—and remarking, curiously enough, that young Martinus Scriblerus was remarkably fond of gingerbread, the happy idea came into his parental head that his pieces of gingerbread should be stamped with the letters of the Greek alphabet; and such was the child's avidity for knowledge, that the very first day he eat down to iota.

When Sir Isaac Newton changed his residence and went to live in Leicester-place, his next door neighbor was a widow lady, who was much puzzled by the little she observed of the habits of the philosopher. One of the Fellows of the Royal Society called upon her one day, when, among other domestic news, she mentioned that some one had come to reside in the adjoining house, who she felt certain was a poor mad gentleman. “And why so?” asked her friend. “Because,” said she, “he diverts himself in the oddest way imaginable. Every morning when the sun shines so brightly that we are obliged to draw down the window-blinds, he takes his seat on a little stool before a tub of soap-suds, and occupies himself for hours blowing soap-bubbles through a common clay-pipe, which he intently watches floating about until they burst. He is doubtless,” she added, “now at his favorite diversion, for it is a fine day; do come and look at him.” The gentleman smiled; and they went up-stairs, when after looking through the stair-case window into the adjoining court-yard, he turned round and said, “My dear lady, the person whom you suppose to be a poor lunatic, is no other than the great Sir Isaac Newton studying the refraction of light upon thin plates, a phenomenon which is beautifully exhibited upon the surface of a common soap-bubble.”

The principle, illustrated by the examples we have given, has been efficiently followed by the Directors of the Royal Polytechnic Institution in Regent-street, London. Even the simplest models and objects they exhibit in their extensive halls and galleries, expound—like Sir Isaac Newton's soap-bubble—some important principle of Science or Art.

On entering the Hall of Manufactures (as we did the other day) it was impossible not to be impressed with the conviction that we are in an utilitarian age in which the science of Mechanics advances with marvelous rapidity. Here we observed steam-engines, hand-looms, and machines in active operation, surrounding us with that peculiar din which makes the air

“Murmur, as with the sound of summer-flies.”

Passing into the “Gallery in the Great Hall,” we did not fail to derive a momentary amusement, from observing the very different objects which seemed most to excite the attention, and interest of the different sight-seers. Here, stood obviously a country farmer examining the model of a steam-plow; there, a Manchester or Birmingham manufacturer looking into a curious and complicated weaving machine; here, we noticed a group of ladies admiring specimens of [pg 598] elaborate carving in ivory, and personal ornaments esteemed highly fashionable at the antipodes; and there, the smiling faces of youth watching with eager eyes the little boats and steamers paddling along the Water Reservoir in the central counter. But we had scarcely looked around us, when a bell rang to announce a lecture on Voltaic Electricity by Dr. Bachhoffner; and moving with a stream of people up a short stair-case, we soon found ourselves in a very commodious and well-arranged theatre. There are many universities and public institutions that have not better lecture rooms than this theatre in the Royal Polytechnic Institution. The lecture was elementary and exceedingly instructive, pointing out and showing by experiments, the identity between Magnetism and Electricity—light and heat; but notwithstanding the extreme perspicuity of the Professor, it was our fate to sit next two old ladies who seemed to be very incredulous about the whole business.

“If heat and light are the same thing,” asked one, “why don't a flame come out at the spout of a boiling tea-kettle?”

“The steam,” answered the other, “may account for that.”

“Hush!” cried somebody behind them; and the ladies were silent: but it was plain they thought Voltaic Electricity had something to do with conjuring, and that the lecturer might be a professor of Magic. The lecture over, we returned to the Gallery, where we found the Diving Bell just about to be put in operation. It is made of cast iron, and weighs three tons; the interior being provided with seats, and lighted by openings in the crown, upon which a plate of thick glass is secured. The weighty instrument suspended by a massive chain to a large swing crane, was soon in motion, when we observed our skeptical lady-friends join a party and enter, in order, we presume, to make themselves more sure of the truth of the diving-bell than they could do of the identity between light and heat. The bell was soon swung round and lowered into a tank, which holds nearly ten thousand gallons of water; but we confess our fears for the safety of its inmates were greatly appeased, when we learned that the whole of this reservoir of water could be emptied in less than one minute. Slowly and steadily was the bell drawn up again, and we had the satisfaction of seeing the enterprising ladies and their companions alight on terra firma, nothing injured excepting that they were greatly flushed in the face. A man, clad in a water-tight dress and surmounted with a diving-helmet, next performed a variety of sub-aqueous feats, much to the amusement and astonishment of the younger part of the audience, one of whom shouted as he came up above the surface of the water, “Oh! ma'a! Don't he look like an Ogre!” and certainly the shining brass helmet and staring large plate-glass eyes fairly warranted such a suggestion. The principles of the diving-bell and of the diving-helmet are too well known to require explanation: but the practical utility of these machines is daily proved. Even while we now write, it has been ascertained that the foundations of Blackfriars Bridge are giving way. The bed of the river, owing to the constant ebb and flow of its waters, has sunk some six or seven feet below its level since the bridge was built, thus undermining its foundation; and this effect, it is presumed, has been greatly augmented by the removal of the old London Bridge, the works surrounding which operated as a dam in checking the force of the current. These machines, also, are constantly used in repairing the bottom of docks, landing-piers, and in the construction of breakwater works, such as those which are at present being raised at Dover Harbor.

Among other remarkable objects in the museum of natural history we recognized, swimming upon his shingly bed under a glass case, our old friend the Gymnotus Electricus, or Electrical Eel. Truly, he is a marvelous fish. The power which animals of every description possess in adapting themselves to external and adventitious circumstances, is here marvelously illustrated, for, notwithstanding this creature is surrounded by the greatest possible amount of artificial circumstances, inasmuch as instead of sporting in his own pellucid and sparkling waters of the river Amazon, he is here confined in a glass prison, in water artificially heated; instead of his natural food, he is here supplied with fish not indigenous to his native country, and denied access to fresh air, with sunlight sparkling upon the surface of the waves—he is here surrounded by an impure and obscure atmosphere, with crowds of people constantly moving to and fro and gazing upon him; yet, notwithstanding all these disadvantageous circumstances, he has continued to thrive; nay, since we saw him ten years ago, he has increased in size and is apparently very healthy, notwithstanding that he is obviously quite blind.

This specimen of the Gymnotus Electricus was caught in the river Amazon, and was brought over to this country by Mr. Potter, where it arrived on the 12th of August, 1838, when he displayed it to the proprietors of the Adelaide Gallery. In the first instance, there was some difficulty in keeping him alive, for, whether from sickness, or sulkiness, he refused food of every description, and is said to have eaten nothing from the day he was taken, in March, 1838, to the 19th of the following October. He was confided upon his arrival to the care of Mr. Bradley, who placed him in an apartment the temperature of which could be maintained at about seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit, and acting upon the suggestions of Baron Humboldt, he endeavored to feed him with bits of boiled meat, worms, frogs, fish, and bread, which were all tried in succession. But the animal would not touch these. The plan adopted by the London fishmongers for fattening the common eel was then had recourse to; a quantity of bullock's blood was put into the [pg 599] water, care being taken that it should be changed daily, and this was attended with some beneficial effects, as the animal gradually improved in health. In the month of October it occurred to Mr. Bradley to tempt him with some small fish, and the first gudgeon thrown into the water he darted at and swallowed with avidity. From that period the same diet has been continued, and he is now fed three times a day, and upon each occasion is given two or three carp, or perch, or gudgeon, each weighing from two to three ounces. In watching his movements we observed, that in swimming about he seems to delight in rubbing himself against the gravel which forms the bed above which he floats, and the water immediately becomes clouded with the mucus from which he thus relieves the surface of his body.

When this species of fish was first discovered, marvelous accounts respecting them were transmitted to the Royal Society: it was even said that in the river Surinam, in the western province of Guiana, some existed twenty feet long. The present specimen is forty inches in length; and measures eighteen inches round the body; and his physiognomy justifies the description given by one of the early narrators, who remarked, that the Gymnotus “resembles one of our common eels, except that its head is flat, and its mouth wide, like that of a cat-fish, without teeth.” It is certainly ugly enough. On its first arrival in England, the proprietors offered Professor Faraday (to whom this country may possibly discover, within the next five hundred years, that it owes something) the privilege of experimenting upon him for scientific purposes, and the result of a great number of experiments, ingeniously devised, and executed with great nicety, clearly proved the identity between the electricity of the fish and the common electricity. The shock, the circuit, the spark, were distinctly obtained: the galvanometer was sensibly affected; chemical decompositions were obtained; an annealed steel needle became magnetic, and the direction of its polarity indicated a current from the anterior to the posterior parts of the fish, through the conductors used. The force with which the electric discharge is made is also very considerable, for this philosopher tells us we may conclude that a single medium discharge of the fish is at least equal to the electricity of a Leyden Battery of fifteen jars, containing three thousand five hundred square inches of glass, coated upon both sides, charged to its highest degree. But great as is the force of a single discharge, the Gymnotus will sometimes give a double, and even a triple shock, with scarcely any interval. Nor is this all. The instinctive action it has recourse to in order to augment the force of the shock, is very remarkable.

The professor one day dropped a live fish, five inches long, into the tub; upon which the Gymnotus turned round in such a manner as to form a coil inclosing the fish, the latter representing a diameter across it, and the fish was struck motionless, as if lightning had passed through the water. The Gymnotus then made a turn to look for his prey, which having found, he bolted it, and then went about seeking for more. A second smaller fish was then given him, which being hurt, showed little signs of life; and this he swallowed apparently without “shocking it.” We are informed by Dr. Williamson, in a paper he communicated some years ago to the Royal Society, that a fish already struck motionless gave signs of returning animation, which the Gymnotus observing, he instantly discharged another shock, which killed it. Another curious circumstance was observed by Professor Faraday—the Gymnotus appeared conscious of the difference of giving a shock to an animate and an inanimate body, and would not be provoked to discharge its powers upon the latter. When tormented by a glass rod, the creature in the first instance threw out a shock, but as if he perceived his mistake, he could not be stimulated afterward to repeat it, although the moment the professor touched him with his hands, he discharged shock after shock. He refused, in like manner, to gratify the curiosity of the philosophers, when they touched him with metallic conductors, which he permitted them to do with indifference. It is worthy of observation, that this is the only specimen of the Gymnotus Electricus ever brought over alive into this country. The great secret of preserving his life would appear to consist in keeping the water at an even temperature—summer and winter—of seventy-five degrees of Fahrenheit. After having been subjected to a great variety of experiments, the creature is now permitted to enjoy the remainder of its days in honorable peace, and the only occasion upon which he is now disturbed, is when it is found necessary to take him out of his shallow reservoir to have it cleaned, when he discharges angrily enough shock after shock, which the attendants describe to be very smart, even though he be held in several thick and well wetted cloths, for they do not at all relish the job.

The Gymnotus Electricus is not the only animal endowed with this very singular power; there are other fish, especially the Torpedo and Silurus, which are equally remarkable, and equally well known. The peculiar structure which enters into the formation of their electrical organs, was first examined by the eminent anatomist John Hunter, in the Torpedo; and, very recently, Rudolphi has described their structure with great exactness in the Gymnotus Electricus.

Without entering into minute details, the peculiarity of the organic apparatus of the Electrical Eel seems to consist in this, that it is composed of numerous laminæ or thin tendinous partitions, between which exists an infinite number of small cells filled with a thickish gelatinous fluid. These strata and cells are supplied with nerves of unusual size, and the intensity of the electrical power is presumed to [pg 600] depend on the amount of nervous energy accumulated in these cells, whence it can be voluntarily discharged, just as a muscle may be voluntarily contracted. Furthermore, there are, it would appear, good reasons to believe that nervous power (in whatever it may consist) and electricity are identical. The progress of science has already shown the identity between heat, electricity, and magnetism; that heat may be concentrated into electricity, and this electricity reconverted into heat; that electric force may be converted into magnetic force, and Professor Faraday himself discovered how, by reacting back again, the magnetic force can be reconverted into the electric force, and vice versâ; and should the identity between electricity and nervous power be as clearly established, one of the most important and interesting problems in physiology will be solved.

Every new discovery in science, and all improvements in industrial art, the principles of which are capable of being rendered in the least degree interesting, are in this Exhibition forthwith popularized, and become, as it were, public property. Every individual of the great public can at the very small cost of one shilling, claim his or her share in the property thus attractively collected, and a small amount of previous knowledge or natural intelligence will put the visitor in actual possession of treasures which previously “he wot not of,” in so amusing a manner that they will be beguiled rather than bored into his mind.

A Tuscan Vintage.

All Tuscany had been busy with the vintage. The vintage! Is there a word more rich to the untraveled Englishman in picturesque significance and poetical associations? All that the bright south has of glowing coloring, harmonious forms, teeming abundance, and Saturnian facility, mixed up in the imagination with certain vague visions of bright black eyes and bewitching ankles—all this, and more, goes to the making up of the Englishman's notion of the vintage. Alas! that it should be needful to dissipate such charming illusions. And yet it is well to warn those who cherish these couleur-de-rose imaginings, and who would fain shun a disagreeable désenchantement, that they will do wisely in continuing to receive their impressions of Italian ruralities from the presentations of our theatres, and the description of Mrs. Radcliffe. To those inquirers, however, of sterner mould, who would find truth, be it ever so disagreeable when found, it must be told that a Devonshire harvesting is twice as pretty, and a Kentish hop-picking thrice as pretty a scene as any “vindemia” that the vineyards of Italy can show. The vine, indeed, as grown in Italy—especially when the fruit is ripe, and the leaves begin to be tinted with crimson and yellow—is an exceedingly pretty object, rich in coloring, and elegant in its forms. Nothing but the most obsolete and backward agriculture, however, preserves these beauties. If good wine and not pretty crops be the object in view, the vine should be grown as in France—a low dwarf plant closely pruned, and raised only two or three feet from the ground; and than such a vineyard nothing can be more ugly. Classic Italy, however, still cultivates her vines as she did when the Georgics were written; “marries” them most becomingly and picturesquely to elms or mulberries, &c, and makes of them lovely festoons and very acrid wine. Again, it must be admitted that a yoke of huge dove-colored oxen, with their heavy unwieldy tumbril, is a more picturesque object than an English wagon and a team of horses. Occasionally, too, may be seen bearing not ungracefully a blushing burden of huge bunches, a figure, male or female, who might have sat for a model to Leopold Robert. But despite all this, the process of gathering the vintage is any thing but a pleasing sight. In one of the heavy tumbrils I have mentioned, are placed some twelve or fifteen large pails, some three feet deep, and a foot or so in diameter. Into these are thrown pell-mell the bunches of fruit, ripe and unripe, clean and dirty, stalks and all, white and red indiscriminately. The cart thus laden, the fifteen pails of unsightly, dirty-looking slush, are driven to the “fattoria,” there to be emptied into vats, which appear, both to nose and eye, never to have been cleansed since they were made. In performing this operation much is of course spilt over the men employed, over the cart, over the ground; and nothing can look less agreeable than the effect thus produced. Sometimes one large tub occupies the whole tumbril, the contents of which, on reaching the “fattoria,” have to be ladled out with buckets. Often the contents of the vat, trodden in one place—a most unsightly process—have to be transported in huge barrels, like water-carts, to another place to undergo fermentation. And then the thick muddy stream, laden with filth and impurities of all sorts, which is seen when these barrels discharge their cargo, is as little calculated to give one a pleasing idea of the “ruby wine” which is to be the result of all this filthy squash, as can well be imagined. Add to this an exceedingly unpleasant smell in and about all the buildings in which any part of the wine-making process takes place, and the constant recurrence of rotting heaps of the refuse matter of the pressed grape under every wall and hedge in the neighborhood of each “fattoria”—and the notions connected with the so be-poetized vintage, will be easily understood to be none of the pleasantest in the minds of those acquainted with its sights and smells.—Trollope's Impressions of a Wanderer.

How To Make Home Unhealthy. By Harriet Martineau.

Emperor Yao (very many years B.C.) established a certain custom, which was followed, we are told, by his successors on the throne of China. The custom was this. Outside the hall-door of his palace, he suspended a tablet and a gong; and if one among his subjects felt himself able to suggest a good idea to his ruler, or wished to admonish him of any error in his ways, the critic paid a visit to the palace, wrote what he had to say upon the tablet, battered at the gong, and ran away. The Emperor came out; and then, unless it happened that some scapegrace of a schoolboy had annoyed him by superadding a fly-away knock to a contemptuous hieroglyphic, he gravely profited by any hint the tablets might convey. Not unlike honest, patriarchal Yao is our British Public. It is summoned out to read inscriptions at its door, left there by all who have advice to give or faults to deprecate. The successors of Yao, finding upon their score so many conflicting tales, soon substituted for the gong five instruments of music. It was required, then, that the monitor should distinguish, by the instrument upon which he performed his summons, what particular department of imperial duties it might be to which he desired to call attention. Now not five but fifty voices summon our royal public. One man courts attention with a dulcet strain, one brays, one harps upon a string, another drums. And among those who have of late been busiest in pointing errors out, and drumming at the public's door to have them rectified, are they who profess concern about the Public Health.

For the writer who now proposes to address to you, O excellent Public, through these pages, a Series of Practical Hints as to How to make Home Unhealthy, we would not have you think that he means to be in any respect so troublesome as those Sanitary Instructors. The lion on your knocker gives him confidence; he will leave no disconcerting messages; he will seek to come into your parlor as a friend. A friend he is; for, with a polite sincerity, he will maintain in all his arguments that what you do is what ought always to be done. He knows well that you are not foolish, and perceives, therefore, what end you have in view. He sees that you are impressed deeply with a conviction of the vanity of life; that you desire, accordingly, to prove your wisdom by exhibiting contempt for that which philosopher after philosopher forbids a thoughtful man to cherish. You would be proud to have Unhealthy Homes. Lusty carcases, they are for coarse folk and for the heathen; civilization forbids us to promote animal development. How can a man look spiritual, if he be not sickly? How can a woman—Is not Paris the mode? Go, weigh an elegant Parisienne against a peasant girl from Normandy. It is here proposed, therefore, to honor your discretion by demonstrating publicly how right you are. Some of the many methods by which one may succeed in making Home Unhealthy will be here detailed to you, in order that, as we go on, you may congratulate yourself on feeling how extremely clever you already are in your arrangements. Here is a plain purpose. If any citizen, listening to such lessons, think himself wise, and yet is one who, like good M. Jourdain in the comedy, n'applaudit qu'à contresens—to such a citizen it is enough to say. May much good come of his perversity!

I. Hints To Hang Up In The Nursery.

In laying a foundation of ill health, it is a great point to be able to begin at the beginning. You have the future man at excellent advantage when he is between your fingers as a baby. One of Hoffman's heroines, a clever housewife, discarded and abhorred her lover from the moment of his cutting a yeast dumpling. There are some little enormities of that kind which really can not be forgiven, and one such is, to miss the opportunity of physicking a baby. Now I will tell you how to treat the future pale-face at his first entrance into life.

A little while before the birth of any child, have a little something ready in a spoon; and, after birth, be ready at the first opportunity, to thrust this down his throat. Let his first gift from his fellow-creatures be a dose of physic—honey and calomel, or something of that kind: but you had better ask the nurse for a prescription. Have ready also, before birth, an abundant stock of pins; for it is a great point, in putting the first dress upon the little naked body, to contrive that it shall contain as many pins as possible. The prick of a sly pin is excellent for making children cry; and since it may lead nurses, mothers, now and then even doctors, to administer physic for the cure of imaginary gripings in the bowels, it may be twice blessed. Sanitary enthusiasts are apt to say that strings, not pins, are the right fastening for infants' clothes. Be not misled. Is not the pincushion an ancient institution? What is to say, “Welcome, little stranger,” if pins cease to do so? Resist this innovation. It is the small end of the wedge. The next thing that a child would do, if let alone, would be to sleep. I would not suffer that. The poor thing must want feeding; therefore waken it and make it eat a sop, for that will be a pleasant joke at the expense of nature. It will be like wakening a gentleman after midnight to put into his mouth some pickled herring; only the baby can not thank you for your kindness as the gentleman might do.

This is a golden rule concerning babies: to procure sickly growth, let the child always suckle. Attempt no regularity in nursing. It is true that if an infant be fed at the breast every four hours, it will fall into the habit of desiring food only so often, and will sleep very tranquilly during the interval. This may save trouble, but it is a device for rearing healthy children: we discard it. Our infants shall be nursed in no new-fangled way. As for the child's crying, [pg 602] quiet costs eighteen-pence a bottle; so that argument is very soon disposed of.

Never be without a flask of Godfrey's Cordial, or Daffy, in the nursery; but the fact is, that you ought to keep a medicine-chest. A good deal of curious information may be obtained by watching the effects of various medicines upon your children.

Never be guided by the child's teeth in weaning it. Wean it before the first teeth are cut, or after they have learned to bite. Wean all at once, with bitter aloes or some similar devices; and change the diet suddenly. It is a foolish thing to ask a medical attendant how to regulate the food of children; he is sure to be over-run with bookish prejudices; but nurses are practical women, who understand thoroughly matters of this kind.

Do not use a cot for infants, or presume beyond the time-honored institution of the cradle. Active rocking sends a child to sleep by causing giddiness. Giddiness is a disturbance of the blood's usual way of circulation; obviously, therefore, it is a thing to aim at in our nurseries. For elder children, swinging is an excellent amusement, if they become giddy on the swing.

In your nursery, a maid and two or three children may conveniently be quartered for the night, by all means carefully secured from draughts. Never omit to use at night a chimney board. The nursery window ought not to be much opened; and the door should be kept always shut, in order that the clamor of the children may not annoy others in your house.

When the children walk out for an airing, of course they are to be little ladies and gentlemen. They are not to scamper to and fro; a little gentle amble with a hoop ought to be their severest exercise. In sending them to walk abroad, it is a good thing to let their legs be bare. The gentleman papa, probably, would find bare legs rather cold walking in the streets of London; but the gentleman son, of course, has quite another constitution. Besides, how can a boy, not predisposed that way, hope to grow up consumptive, if some pains are not taken with him in his childhood?

It is said that of old time children in the Balearic Islands were not allowed to eat their dinner, until, by adroitness in the shooting of stones out of a sling, they had dislodged it from a rafter in the house. Children in the British Islands should be better treated. Let them not only have their meals unfailingly, but let them be at all other times tempted and bribed to eat. Cakes and sweetmeats of alluring shape and color, fruits, and palatable messes, should, without any regularity, be added to the diet of a child. The stomach, we know, requires three or four hours to digest a meal, expects a moderate routine of tasks, and between each task looks for a little period of rest. Now, as we hope to create a weak digestion, what is more obvious than that we must use artifice to circumvent the stomach? In one hour we must come upon it unexpectedly with a dose of fruit and sugar; then, if the regular dinner have been taken, astonish the digestion, while at work upon it, with the appearance of an extra lump of cake, and presently some gooseberries. In this way we soon triumph over Nature, who, to speak truth, does not permit to us an easy victory, and does try to accommodate her working to our whims. We triumph, and obtain our reward in children pale and polite, children with appetites already formed, that will become our good allies against their health in after life.

Principiis obsta. Let us subdue mere nature at her first start, and make her civilized in her beginnings. Let us wipe the rose-tint out of the child's cheek, in good hope that the man will not be able to recover it. White, yellow, and purple—let us make them to be his future tricolor.

II. The Londoner's Garden.

Brick walls do not secrete air. It comes in through your doors and windows, from the streets and alleys in your neighborhood; it comes in without scraping its feet, and goes down your throat, unwashed, with small respect for your gentility. You must look abroad, therefore, for some elements of an unwholesome home: and when, sitting at home, you do so, it is a good thing if you can see a burial-ground—one of “God's gardens,” which our city cherishes.

Now, do not look up with a dolorous face, saying, “Alas! these gardens are to be taken from us!” Let agitators write and let Commissioners report, let Government nod its good-will, and although all the world may think that our London burial-grounds are about to be incontinently jacketed in asphalte, and that we ourselves, when dead, are to be steamed off to Erith—we are content: at present this is only gossip.[1] On one of the lowest terraces of hell, says Dante, he found a Cordelier, who had been dragged thither by a logical demon, in defiance of the expostulations of St. Francis. The sin of that monk was a sentence of advice for which absolution had been received before he gave it: “Promise much, and perform little.” In the hair of any Minister's head, and of every Commissioner's head, we know not what “black cherubim” may have entwined their claws. There is hope, while there is life, for the old cause. But if those who have authority to do so really have determined to abolish intramural burial, let us call upon them solemnly to reconsider their verdict. Let them ponder what follows.

Two or three years ago, a book, promulgating notions upon spiritual life, was published in London by the Chancellor of a certain place across the Channel. It was a clever book; and, among other matter, broached a theory. “Our souls,” the Rev. Chancellor informed us, “consist of the essence, extract, or gas contained in the human body;” and, that he might not be [pg 603] vague, he made special application to a chemist, who “added some important observations of his own respecting the corpse after death.” But we must decorate a great speculation with the ornamental words of its propounder.

“The gases into which the animal body is resolved by putrefaction are ammonia, carbonic acid, carbonic oxide, cyanogen, and sulphureted, phosphureted, and carbureted hydrogen. The first, and the two last-named gases, are most abundant.” We omit here some details as to the time a body takes in rotting. “From which it appears, that these noble elements and rich essences of humanity are too subtle and volatile to continue long with the corpse; but soon disengage themselves, and escape from it. After which nothing remains but the foul refuse in the vat; the mere caput mortuum in the crucible; the vile dust and ashes of the tomb. Nor does inhumation, however deep in the ground, nor drowning in the lowest depths and darkest caverns of the fathomless abyss, prevent those subtle essences, rare attenuate spirits, or gases, from escaping; or chain down to dust those better, nobler elements of the human body. No bars can imprison them; no vessels detain them from their kindred element, confine them from their native home.”

We are all of us familiar with the more noticeable of these “essences,” by smell, if not by name. Metaphysicians tell us that perceptions and ideas will follow in a train: perhaps that may account for the sudden recollection of an old-fashioned story—may the moderns pardon it. A young Cambridge student, airing his wisdom at a dinner-party, was ingenious upon the Theory of Winds. He was most eloquent concerning heat and cold; radiation, rarefaction; polar and equatorial currents; he had brought his peroration to a close, when he turned round upon a grave Professor of his College, saying, “And what, sir, do you believe to be the cause of wind?” The learned man replied, “Pea-soup—pea-soup!” In the group of friends around a social soup-tureen, must we in future recognize

“The feast of reason, and—the flow of soul!”

How gladly shall we fight the fight of life, hoping that, after death, we shall meet in a world of sulphureted hydrogen and other gases! And where do the Sanitary Reformers suppose that, after death, their gases will go—they who, in life, with asphalte and paving-stones, would have restrained the souls of their own fathers from ascending into upper air?

Against us let there be no such reproach. Freely let us breathe into our bosoms some portion of the spirit of the dead. If we live near no church-yard, let us visit one—Mesmerically, if you please. Now we are on the way. We see narrow streets and many people; most of the faces that we meet are pale. Here is a walking funeral; we follow with it to the church-yard. A corner is turned, and there is another funeral to be perceived at no great distance in advance. Our walkers trot. The other party, finding itself almost overtaken, sets off with a decent run. Our party runs. There is a race for prior attention when they reach the ground. We become interested. We perceive that one undertaker wears gaiters, and the other straps. We trot behind them, betting with each other, you on Gaiters, I on Straps. I win; a Deus ex machinâ saves me, or I should have lost. An over-goaded ox rushes bewildered round a corner, charges and overthrows the foremost coffin; it is broken, and the body is exposed—its white shroud flaps upon the mud. This has occurred once, I know; and how much oftener, I know not. So Gaiters pioneers his party to the nearest undertaker for repairs, and we follow the triumphant procession to the church-yard. The minister there meets it, holding his white handkerchief most closely to his nose: the mourners imitate him, sick and sorrowful. Your toe sticks in a bit of carrion, as we pass near the grave and seek the sexton. He is a pimpled man, who moralizes much; but his morality is maudlin. He is drunk. He is accustomed to antagonize the “spirits” of the dead with spirits from the “Pig and Whistle.” Here let the séance end.

At home again, let us remark upon a striking fact. Those poor creatures whom we saw in sorrow by the grave, believed that they were sowing flesh to immortality—and so they were. They did not know that they were also sowing coffee. By a trustworthy informant, I am taught that of the old coffin-wood dug up out of the crowded church-yards, a large quantity that is not burned, is dried and ground; and that ground coffee is therewith adulterated in a wholesale manner. It communicates to cheap coffee a good color; and puts Body into it, there can be no doubt of that. It will be a severe blow to the trade in British coffees if intramural interment be forbidden. We shall be driven to depend upon distant planters for what now can be produced in any quantity at home.

Remember the largeness of the interests involved. Within the last thirty years, a million and a half of corpses have been hidden under ground, in patches, here and there, among the streets of London. This pasturage we have enjoyed from our youth up, and it is threatened now to put us off our feed.

I say no more, for better arguments than these can not be urged on behalf of the maintenance of City grave-yards. Possibly these may not prevail. Yet never droop. Nevertheless, without despairing, take a house in the vicinity of such a garden of the dead. If our lawgivers should fear the becoming neighborly with Dante's Cordelier, and therefore absolutely interdict more burials in London, still you are safe. They shall not trample on the graves that are. We can agitate, and we will agitate successfully against their asphalte. Let the City be mindful of its old renown; let Vestries rally round Sir Peter Laurie, and there may be yet secured to you, for seven years to come, an atmosphere which shall assist in making Home Unhealthy.

III. Spending A Very Pleasant Evening.

By the consent of antiquity, it is determined that Pain shall be doorkeeper to the house of Pleasure. In Europe Purgatory led to Paradise; and, had St. Symeon lived among us now, he would have earned heaven, if the police permitted, by praying for it, during thirty years, upon the summit of a lamp-post. In India the Fakir was beatified by standing on his head, under a hot sun, beset with roasting bonfires. In Greenland the soul expected to reach bliss by sliding for five days down a rugged rock, wounding itself, and shivering with cold. The American Indians sought happiness through castigation, and considered vomits the most expeditious mode of enforcing self-denial on the stomach. Some tribes of Africans believe, that on the way to heaven every man's head is knocked against a wall. By consent of mankind, therefore, it is granted that we must pass Pain on the way to Pleasure.

What Pleasure is, when reached, none but the dogmatical can venture to determine. To Greenlanders, a spacious fish-kettle, forever simmering, in which boiled seals forever swim, is the delight of heaven. And remember that, in the opinion of M. Bailly, Adam and Eve gardened in Nova Zembla.

You will not be surprised, therefore, if I call upon you to prepare for your domestic pleasures with a little suffering; nor, when I tell you what such pleasures are, must you exclaim against them as absurd. Having the sanction of our forefathers, they are what is fashionable now, and consequently they are what is fit.

I propose, then, that you should give, for the entertainment of your friends, an Evening Party; and as this is a scene in which young ladies prominently figure, I will, if you please, on this occasion, pay particular attention to your daughter.

O mystery of preparation!—Pardon, sir. You err if you suppose me to insinuate that ladies are more careful over personal adornment than the gentlemen. When men made a display of manhood, wearing beards, it is recorded that they packed them, when they went to bed, in pasteboard cases, lest they might be tumbled in the night. Man at his grimmest is as vain as woman, even when he stalks about bearded and battle-axed. This is the mystery of preparation in your daughter's case: How does she breathe? You have prepared her from childhood for the part she is to play to-night, by training her form into the only shape which can be looked at with complacency in any ball-room. A machine, called stays, introduced long since into England by the Normans, has had her in its grip from early girlhood. She has become pale, and—only the least bit—liable to be blue about the nose and fingers.

Stays are an excellent contrivance; they give a material support to the old cause, Unhealthiness at Home. This is the secret of their excellence. A woman's ribs are narrow at the top, and as they approach the waist they widen, to allow room for the lungs to play within them. If you can prevent the ribs from widening, you can prevent the lungs from playing, which they have no right to do, and make them work. This you accomplish by the agency of stays. It fortunately happens that these lungs have work to do—the putting of the breath of life into the blood—which they are unable to do properly when cramped for space; it becomes about as difficult to them as it would be to you to play the trombone in a china closet. By this compression of the chest, ladies are made nervous, and become unfit for much exertion; they do not, however, allow us to suppose that they have lost flesh. There is a fiction of attire which would induce, in a speculative critic, the belief that some internal flame had caused their waists to gutter, and that the ribs had all run down into a lump which protrudes behind under the waistband. This appearance is, I think, a fiction; and for my opinion I have newspaper authority. In the papers it was written, one day last year, that the hump alluded to was tested with a pin, upon the person of a lady, coming from the Isle of Man, and it was found not to be sensitive. Brandy exuded from the wound; for in that case the projection was a bladder, in which the prudent housewife was smuggling comfort in a quiet way. The touch of a pin changed all into discomfort, when she found that she was converted into a peripatetic watering-can—brandying-can, I should have said.

Your daughter comes down stairs dressed, with a bouquet, at a time when the dull seeker of Health and Strength would have her to go up stairs with a bed-candlestick. Your guests arrive. Young ladies, thinly clad and packed in carriages, emerge, half-stifled; put a cold foot, protected by a filmy shoe, upon the pavement, and run, shivering, into your house. Well, sir, we'll warm them presently. But suffer me to leave you now, while you receive your guests.

I know a Phyllis, fresh from the country, who gets up at six and goes to bed at ten; who knows no perfume but a flower-garden, and has worn no bandage to her waist except a sash. She is now in London, and desires to do as others do. She is invited to your party, but is not yet come; it may be well for me to call upon her. Why, in the name of Newgate, what is going on? She is shrieking “Murder!” on the second floor. Up to the rescue! A judicious maid directs me to the drawing-room: “It's only miss a-trying on her stays.”

Here we are, sir; Phyllis and I. You find the room oppressive—'tis with perfume, Phyllis. With foul air? ah, your nice country nose detects it; yes, there is foul air: not nasty, of course, my dear, mixed, as it here is, with eau-de-Cologne and patchouli. Pills are not nasty, sugared. A grain or two of arsenic in each might be not quite exactly neutralized by sugar, but there is nothing like faith in a good digestion. Why do the gentlemen cuddle the ladies, and spin about the room with them, like tee-totums? [pg 605] Oh, Phyllis! Phyllis! let me waltz with you. There, do you not see how it is? Faint, are you—giddy—will you fall? An ice will refresh you. Spasms next! Phyllis, let me take you home.

Now then, sir, Phyllis has been put to bed; allow me to dance a polka with your daughter. Frail, elegant creature that she is! A glass of wine—a macaroon: good. Sontag, yes; and that dear novel. That was a delightful dance; now let us promenade. The room is close; a glass of wine, an ice, and let us get to the delicious draught in the conservatory, or by that door. Is it not beautiful? The next quadrille—I look slily at my watch, and Auber's grim chorus rumbles within me, “Voici minuit! voici minuit!” Another dance. How fond she seems to be of macaroons! Supper. My dear sir, I will take good care of your daughter. One sandwich. Champagne. Blanc-mange. Tipsey-cake. Brandy cherries. Glass of wine. A macaroon. Trifle. Jelly. Champagne. Custard. Macaroon. The ladies are being taken care of—Yes, now in their absence we will drink their health, and wink at each other: their and our Bad Healths. This is the happiest moment of our lives; at two in the morning, with a dose of indigestion in the stomach, and three hours more to come before we get to bed. You, my dear sir, hope that on many occasions like the present you may see your friends around you, looking as glassy-eyed as you have made them to look now. We will rejoin the ladies.

Nothing but Champagne could have enabled us to keep up the evening so well. We were getting weary before supper—but we have had some wine, have dug the spur into our sides, and on we go again. At length, even the bottle stimulates our worn-out company no more; and then we separate. Good-night, dear sir; we have spent a Very Pleasant Evening under your roof.

To-morrow, when you depart from a late breakfast, having seen your daughter's face, and her boiled-mackerel eye, knowing that your wife is bilious, and that your son has just gone out for soda-water, you will feel yourself to be a Briton who has done his duty, a man who has paid something on account of his great debt to civilized society.

IV. The Light Nuisance.

Tieck tells us, in his “History of the Schildbürger,” that the town council of that spirited community was very wise. It had been noticed that many worthy aldermen and common-councilors were in the habit of looking out of window when they ought to be attending to their duties. A vote was therefore, on one occasion, passed by a large majority, to this effect, namely—Whereas the windows of the Town-hall are a great impediment to the dispatch of public business, it is ordered that before the next day of meeting they be all bricked up. When the next day of meeting came, the worthy representatives of Schildbürg were surprised to find themselves assembling in the dark. Presently, accepting the unlooked-for fact, they settled down into an edifying discussion of the question, whether darkness was not more convenient for their purposes than daylight. Had you and I been there, my friend, our votes in the division would have been, like the vote in our own House of Commons a few days ago, for keeping out the Light Nuisance as much as possible. Darkness is better than daylight, certainly.

Now this admits of proof. For, let me ask, where do you find the best part of a lettuce?—not in the outside leaves. Which are the choice parts of celery?—of course, the white shoots in the middle. Why, sir? Because light has never come to them. They become white and luxurious by tying up, by earthing up, by any contrivance which has kept the sun at bay. It is the same with man: while we obstruct the light by putting brick and board where glass suggests itself, and mock the light by picturing impracticable windows on our outside walls—so that our houses stare about like blind men with glass eyes—while this is done, we sit at home and blanch, we become in our dim apartments pale and delicate, we grow to look refined, as gentlemen and ladies ought to look. Let the sanitary doctor, at whose head we have thrown lettuces, go to the botanist and ask him, How, is this? Let him come back and tell us, Oh, gentlemen, in these vegetables the natural juices are not formed when you exclude the light. The natural juices in the lettuce or in celery are flavored much more strongly than our tastes would relish, and therefore we induce in these plants an imperfect development, in order to make them eatable. Very well. The natural juices in a man are stronger than good taste can tolerate. Man requires horticulture to be fit to come to table. To rear the finer sorts of human kind, one great operation necessary is to banish light as much as possible.

Ladies know that. To keep their faces pale, they pull the blinds down in their drawing-rooms, they put a vail between their countenances and the sun when they go out, and carry, like good soldiers, a great shield on high, by name a Parasol, to ward his darts off. They know better than to let the old god kiss them into color, as he does the peaches. They choose to remain green fruit: and we all know that to be a delicacy.

Yet there are men among us daring to propose that there shall no longer be protection against light; men who would tax a house by its capaciousness, and let the sun shine into it unhindered. The so-called sanitary people really seem to look upon their fellow-creatures as so many cucumbers. But we have not yet fallen so far back in our development. Disease is a privilege. Those only who know the tender touch of a wife's hand, the quiet kiss, the soothing whisper, can appreciate its worth. All who are not dead to the tenderest emotions will lament [pg 606] the day when light is turned on without limit in our houses. We have no wish to be blazed upon. Frequently pestilence itself avoids the sunny side of any street, and prefers walking in the shade. Nay, even in one building, as in the case of a great barrack at St. Petersburg, there will be three calls made by disease upon the shady side of the establishment for every one visit that it pays to the side brightened by the sun; and this is known to happen uniformly, for a series of years. Let us be warned, then. There must be no increase of windows in our houses; let us curtain those we have, and keep our blinds well down. Let morning sun or afternoon sun fire no volleys in upon us. Faded curtains, faded carpets, all ye blinds forbid! But faded faces are desirable. It is a cheering spectacle on summer afternoons to see the bright rays beating on a row of windows, all the way down a street, and failing to find entrance any where. Who wants more windows? Is it not obvious that, when daylight really comes, every window we possess is counted one too many? If we could send up a large balloon into the sky, with Mr. Braidwood and a fire-engine, to get the flames of the sun under, just a little bit, that would be something rational. More light, indeed! More water next, no doubt! As if it were not perfectly notorious that in the articles of light, water, and air, Nature outran the constable. We have to keep out light with blinds and vails, and various machinery, as we would keep out cockroaches with wafers; we keep out air with pads and curtains; and still there are impertinent reformers clamoring to increase our difficulty, by giving us more windows to protect against the inroads of those household nuisances.

I call upon consistent Englishmen to make a stand against these innovators. There is need of all our vigor. In 1848, the repeal of the window-tax was scouted from the Commons by a sensible majority of ninety-four. In 1850, the good cause has triumphed only by a precarious majority of three. The exertions of right-thinking men will not be wanting, when the value and importance of a little energetic labor is once clearly perceived.

What is it that the sanitary agitators want? To tan and freckle all their countrywomen, and to make Britons apple-faced? The Persian hero, Rustum, when a baby, exhausted seven nurses, and was weaned upon seven sheep a day, when he was of age for spoon-meat. Are English babies to be Rustums? When Rustum's mother, Roubadah, from a high tower first saw and admired her future husband Zal, she let her ringlets fall, and they were long, and reached unto the ground; and Zal climbed up by them, and knelt down at her feet, and asked to marry her. Are British ladies to be strengthened into Roubadahs, with hair like a ship's cable, up which husbands may clamber? In the present state of the mania for public health, it is quite time that every patriotic man should put these questions seriously to his conscience.

One topic more. Let it clearly be understood, that against artificial light we can make no objection. Between sun and candle there are more contrasts than the mere difference in brilliancy. The light which comes down from the sky not only eats no air out of our mouths, but it comes charged with mysterious and subtle principles which have a purifying, vivifying power. It is a powerful ally of health, and we make war against it. But artificial light contains no sanitary marvels. When the gas streams through half a dozen jets into your room, and burns there and gives light; when candles become shorter and shorter, until they are “burnt out” and seen no more; you know what happens. Nothing in Nature ceases to exist. Your camphine has left the lamp, but it has not vanished out of being. Nor has it been converted into light. Light is a visible action; and candles are no more converted into light when they are burning, than breath is converted into speech when you are talking. The breath, having produced speech, mixes with the atmosphere; gas, camphine, candles, having produced light, do the same. If you saw fifty wax-lights shrink to their sockets last week in an unventilated ball-room, yet, though invisible, they had not left you; for their elements were in the room, and you were breathing them. Their light had been a sign that they were combining chemically with the air; in so combining they were changed, but they became a poison. Every artificial light is, of necessity, a little workshop for the conversion of gas, oil, spirit, or candle into respirable poison. Let no sanitary tongue persuade you that the more we have of such a process, the more need we have of ventilation. Ventilation is a catchword for the use of agitators, in which it does not become any person of refinement to exhibit interest.

The following hint will be received thankfully by gentlemen who would be glad to merit spectacles. To make your eyes weak, use a fluctuating light; nothing can be better adapted for your purpose than what are called “mould” candles. The joke of them consists in this, they begin with giving you sufficient light; but, as the wick grows, the radiance lessens, and your eye gradually accommodates itself to the decrease: suddenly they are snuffed, and your eye leaps back to its original adjustment, there begins another slide, and then leaps back again. Much practice of this kind serves very well as a familiar introduction to the use of glasses.

V. Passing The Bottle.

A brass button from the coat of Saint Peter, was at one time shown to visitors among the treasures of a certain church in Nassau; possibly some traveler of more experience may have met with a false collar from the wardrobe of Saint Paul. The intellect displayed of old by holy saints and martyrs, we may reasonably believe to have surpassed the measure of a bishop's understanding in the present day; for [pg 607] we have the authority of eyesight and tradition in asserting that the meanest of those ancient worthies possessed not less than three skulls, and that a great saint must have had so very many heads, that it would have built the fortune of a man to be his hatter. Perhaps some of these relics are fictitious; nevertheless, they are the boast of their possessors; they are exhibited as genuine, and thoroughly believed to be so. Sir, did your stomach never suggest to you that doctored elder-berry of a recent brew had been uncorked with veneration at some dinner-table as a bottle of old port? Have you experience of any festive friend, who can commit himself to doubt about the age and genuineness of his wine? The cellar is the social relic-chamber; every bin rejoices in a most veracious legend; and, whether it be over wine or over relics that we wonder, equal difficulties start up to obstruct our faith.

Our prejudices, for example, run so much in favor of one-headed men, that we can scarcely entertain the notion of a saint who had six night-caps to put on when he went to bed, and when he got up in the morning had six beards to shave. Knowing that the Russians, by themselves, drink more Champagne than France exports, and that it must rain grapes at Hockheim before that place can yield all the wine we English label Hock, and haunted as we are by the same difficulty when we look to other kinds of foreign wine, we feel a justified suspicion that the same glass of “genuine old port” can not be indulged in simultaneously by ten people. If only one man of the number drinks it, what is that eidolon which delights the other nine?

When George the Fourth was Regent, he possessed a small store of the choicest wine, and never called for it. There were some gentlemen in his establishment acquainted with its merits; these took upon themselves to rescue it from undeserved neglect. Then the prince talked about his treasure—when little remained thereof except the bottles; and it was to be produced at a forthcoming dinner-party. The gentlemen, who knew its flavor, visited the vaults of an extensive wine-merchant, and there they vainly sought to look upon its like again. “In those dim solitudes and awful cells” they, groaning in spirit, made a confessor of the merchant, who, for a fee, engaged to save them from the wrath to come. As an artist in wine, having obtained a sample of the stuff required, this dealer undertook to furnish a successful imitation. So he did; for, having filled those bottles with a wondrous compound, he sent them to the palace just before the fateful dinner-hour, exhorting the conspirators to take heed how they suffered any to be left. The compound would become a tell-tale after twelve hours' keeping. The prince that evening enjoyed his wine.

The ordinary manufacture of choice wine for people who are not princes, requires the following ingredients: for the original fluid, cider, or Common cape, raisin, grape, parsnip, or elder wine; a wine made of rhubarb (for Champagne); to these may be added water. A fit stock having been chosen, strength, color, and flavor may be grafted on it. Use is made of these materials: for color-burnt sugar, logwood, cochineal, red sanders wood, or elder-berries. Plain spirit or brandy for strength. For nutty flavor, bitter almonds. For fruitiness, Dantzic spruce. For fullness or smoothness, honey. For port-wine flavor, tincture of the seeds of raisins. For bouquet, orris root or ambergris. For roughness or dryness, alum, oak sawdust, rhatany or kino. It is not necessary that an imitation should contain one drop of the wine whose name it bears; but a skillful combination of the true and false is desirable, if price permit. Every pint of the pure wine thus added to a mixture is, of course, so much abstracted from the stock of unadulterated juice.

You will perceive, therefore, that a free use of wine, not highly priced, is likely to assist us very much in our endeavors to establish an unhealthy home. Fill your cellar with bargains; be a genuine John Bull; invite your friends, and pass the bottle.

There is hope for us also in the recollection, that if chance force upon us a small stock of wine that has not been, in England, under the doctor's hands, we know not what may have been done to it abroad. The botanist, Robert Fortune, was in China when the Americans deluged the Chinese market with their orders for Young Hyson tea. The Chinese very promptly met the whole demand; and Fortune in his “Wanderings” has told us how. He found his way to a Young Hyson manufactory, where coarse old Congou leaves were being chopped, and carefully manipulated by those ingenious merchants the Chinese. But it is in human nature for other folks than the Chinese to be ingenious in such matters. We may, therefore, make up our minds that, since the demand for wine from certain celebrated vineyards, largely exceeds all possibility of genuine supply, since, also, every man who asks is satisfied, it is inevitable that the great majority of wine-drinkers are satisfied with a factitious article. The chances are against our very often meeting with a glass of port that has not taken physic. So, let us never drink dear wine, nor ask a chemist what is in our bottles. Enough that they contain for us delightful poison.

That name for wine, “delightful poison,” is not new. It is as old as the foundation of Persepolis. Jemsheed was fond of grapes, Ferdusi tells, and once, when grapes went out of season, stored up for himself some jars of grape-juice. After a while he went to seek for a refreshing draught; then fermentation was in progress; and he found his juice abominably nasty. A severe stomach-ache induced him to believe that the liquor had acquired, in some way, dangerous qualities, and, therefore, to avoid accidents, he labeled each jar, “Poison.” More time elapsed, and then one of his wives, in trouble of soul, weary of life, resolved to put an end to her existence. Poison was handy: but a draught [pg 608] transformed her trouble into joy; more of it stupefied, but did not kill her. That woman kept a secret: she alone exhausted all the jars. Jemsheed then found them to be empty. Explanations followed. The experiment was tried once more, and wine, being so discovered, was thereafter entitled “the delightful poison.” What Jemsheed would have said to a bottle of port out of our friend Hoggin's cellar—but I tread on sacred ground.

Of good wine health requires none, though it will tolerate a little. Our prospect, therefore, when the bottle passes briskly, is encouraging. Is the wine good, we may expect some indigestion; is it bad, who can tell what disorders we may not expect? Hoggins, I know, drinks more than a quart without disordering his stomach. He has long been a supporter of the cause we are now advocating, and therein finds one of his rewards. It is not safe to pinch a tiger's tail; yet, when the animal is sick, perhaps he will not bite although you tread upon it heavily. Healthy men and healthy stomachs tolerate no oppression.

London is full now; elsewhere country folks come out of doors, invited by fine weather. Walk where you will, in country or in town, and look at all the faces that you meet. Traverse the Strand, and Regent-street, and Holborn, and Cheapside; get into a boat at London bridge, steam to Gravesend, and look at your fellow-passengers: examine where you will, the stamp of our civilization, sickliness, is upon nine people in any ten. There are good reasons why this should be so, and so let it continue. We have excluded sanitary calculations from our social life; we have had hitherto unhealthy homes, and we will keep them. Bede tells of a Mercian noble on his death-bed, to whom a ghost exhibited a scrap of paper, upon which were written his good deeds; then the door opened, and an interminable file of ghosts brought in a mile or two of scroll, whereon his misdeeds were all registered, and made him read them. Our wars against brute health are glorious, and we rejoice to feel that of such sins we have no scanty catalogue; we are content with our few items of mere sanitary virtue. As for sanitary reformers, they are a company of Danaids; they may get some of us into their sieve, but we shall soon slip out again. When a traveler proposed, at Ghadames in the Sahara, to put up a lantern here and there of nights among the pitch-dark streets, the people said his notion might be good, but that, as such things never had been tried before, it would be presumptuous to make the trial of them now. The traveler, a Briton, must have felt quite at home when he heard that objection. Amen, then; with the Ghadamese, we say, Let us have no New Lights.

VI. Art Against Appetite.

The object of food is, to support the body in its natural development that it may reach a reasonable age without becoming too robust. Civilization can instruct us so to manage, that a gentle dissolution tread upon the heels of growth, that, as Metastasio hath it,

—“dalle fasce,

Si comincia a morir quando si nasce.”[2]

An infant's appetite is all for milk; but art suggests a few additions to that lamentably simple diet. A lady not long since complacently informed her medical attendant that, for the use of a baby, then about eight months old she had spent nine pounds in “Infant's Preservative.” Of this, or of some like preparation, the advertisements tells us that it compels Nature to be orderly, and that all infants take it with greediness. So we have even justice to the child. Pet drinks Preservative; papa drinks Port.

Then there is “farinaceous food.” Here, for a purpose, we must interpolate a bit of science. There is a division of food into two great classes, nourishment and fuel. Nourishment is said to exist chiefly in animal flesh and blood, and in vegetable compounds which exactly correspond thereto, called vegetable fibrine, albumen, and caseine. Fuel exists in whatever contains much carbon: fat and starchy vegetables, potatoes, gum, sugar, alcoholic liquors. If a person take more nourishment than he wants, it is said to be wasted; if he take more fuel than he wants, part of it is wasted, and part of it the body stacks away as fat. These men of science furthermore assert, that the correct diet of a healthy man must contain eight parts of fuel food to one of nourishment. This preserves equilibrium, they say—suits, therefore, an adult; the child which has to become bigger as it lives has use for an excess of nourishment. And so one of the doctors, Dr. R.D. Thomson, gives this table; it has been often copied. The proportion of nourishment to fuel is in

Milk (food for a growing animal)1 to 2.
Beans1 to 2-1/2.
Oatmeal1 to 5.
Barley1 to 7.
Wheat flour (food for an animal at rest)1 to 8.
Potatoes1 to 9.
Rice1 to 10.
Turnips1 to 11.
Arrow-root, tapioca, sago1 to 26.
Starch1 to 40.

Very well, gentlemen, we take your facts. As ægritudinary men, we know what use to make of them. We will give infants farinaceous food; arrow-root, tapioca, and the like; quite ready to be taught by you that so we give one particle of nourishment in twenty-six. Tell us, this diet is like putting leeches on a child. We are content. Leeches give a delicate whiteness that we are thankful to be able to obtain with out the biting or the bloodshed.

Sanitary people will allow a child, up to its seventh year, nothing beyond bread, milk, water, sugar, light meat broth, without fat, and fresh [pg 609] meat for its dinner—when it is old enough to bite it—with a little well-cooked vegetable. They confine a child, poor creature, to this miserable fare; permitting, in due season, only a pittance of the ripest fruit.

They would give children, while they are growing, oatmeal and milk for breakfast, made into a porridge. They would deny them beer. You know how strengthening that is, and yet these people say that there is not an ounce of meat in a whole bucketful. They would deny them comfits, cakes, wine, pastry, and grudge them nuts; but our boys shall rebel against all this. We will teach them to regard cake as bliss, and wine as glory; we will educate them to a love of tarts. Once let our art secure over the stomach its ascendency, and the civilized organ acquires new desires. Vitiated cravings, let the sanitary doctors call them; let them say that children will eat garbage, as young women will eat chalk and coals, not because it is their nature so to do, but because it is a symptom of disordered function. We know nothing about function. Art against Appetite has won the day, and the pale face of civilization is established.

Plain sugar, it is a good thing to forbid our children; there is something healthy in their love of it. Suppose we tell them that it spoils the teeth. They know no better; we do. We know that the negroes, who in a great measure live upon sugar, are quite famous for their sound white teeth; and Mr. Richardson tells us of tribes among the Arabs of Sahara, whose beautiful teeth he lauds, that they are in the habit of keeping about them a stick of sugar in a leathern case, which they bring out from time to time for a suck, as we bring out the snuff-box for a pinch. But we will tell our children that plain sugar spoils the teeth; sugar mixed with chalk or verdigris, or any other mess—that is to say, civilized sugar—they are welcome to.

And for ourselves, we will eat any thing. The more our cooks, with spice, with druggery and pastry, raise our wonder up, the more we will approve their handicraft. We will excite the stomach with a peppered soup; we will make fish indigestible with melted butter, and correct the butter with cayenne. We will take sauces, we will drink wine, we will drink beer, we will eat pie-crust, we will eat indescribable productions—we will take celery, and cheese, and ale—we will take liqueur—we will take wine and olives and more wine, and oranges and almonds, and any thing else that may present itself, and we will call all that our dinner, and for such the stomach shall accept it. We will eat more than we need, but will compel an appetite. Art against Appetite forever.

Sanitary people bear ill-will to pie-crust; they teach that butter, after being baked therein, becomes a compound hateful to the stomach. We will eat pies, we will eat pastry, we will eat—we would eat M. Soyer himself in a tart, if it were possible.