Kitabı oku: «The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844», sayfa 10

‘Sir: When I parted from you at Doncaster, I imagined, long before this, to have met with some oddities worth acquainting you with. It is grown a fashion of late to write lives; I have now, and for a long time have had, leisure enough to undertake mine, but want materials for the latter part of it; for my existence now cannot properly be called living, but what the painters term still life; having ever since February 13, been confined in this town-goal for a London debt.

‘As a hunted deer is always shunned by the happier herd, so am I deserted by the company,⁷ my share taken off, and no support left me, save what my wife can spare me out of hers:

 
‘Deserted in my utmost need
By those my former bounty fed.’
 

‘With an economy, which until now I was a stranger to, I have made shift to victual hitherto my little garrison, but then it has been with the aid of my good friends and allies—my clothes. This week’s eating finishes my last waistcoat; and next, I must atone for my errors upon bread and water.

‘Themistocles had so many towns to furnish his table, and a whole city bore the charge of his meals. In some respects I am like him, for I am furnished by the labors of a multitude. A wig has fed me two days; the trimming of a waistcoat as long; a pair of velvet breeches paid my washerwoman, and a ruffled shirt has found me in shaving. My coats I swallowed by degrees. The sleeves I breakfasted upon for weeks; the body, skirts, etc., served me for dinner two months. My silk stocking have paid my lodgings, and two pair of new pumps enabled me to smoke several pipes. It is incredible how my appetite, (barometer like) rises in proportion as my necessities make their terrible advances. I here could say something droll about a good stomach, but it is ill jesting with edge tools, and I am sure that is the sharpest thing about me. You may think I can have no sense of my condition, that while I am thus wretched, I should offer at ridicule: but, Sir, people constituted like me, with a disproportioned levity of spirits, are always most merry when they are most miserable; and quicken like the eyes of the consumptive, which are always brightest the nearer the patient approaches his dissolution. However, Sir, to show you I am not lost to all reflection, I think myself poor enough to want a favor, and humble enough to ask it here. Sir, I might make an encomium on your good nature, humanity, etc.; but I shall not pay so bad a compliment to your understanding, as to endeavor, by a parade of phrases, to win it over to my interest. If you could, any night at a concert, make a small collection for me, it might be a means of my obtaining my liberty; and you well know, Sir, the first people of rank abroad will perform the most friendly offices for the sick; be not, therefore, offended at the request of a poor (though a deservedly punished) debtor.

‘Geo. A. Stevens.’

Among the facetiæ of the ‘Centinel’ we find a clever hit at two prominent official characters of the name of Day: ‘Titus, a Roman emperor, we are told, once lamented that ‘he had lost a Day.’ If the commonwealth of Massachusetts were to lose two Days, it would not be the cause of much lamentation!’ A correspondent elsewhere observes, that in a procession on a certain solemn occasion in this city, the place of the physician was immediately before the corpse; which, he adds, was ‘exactly consonant with the etiquette observed at capital executions in ancient times; the executioner always going before!’ By the way, ‘speaking of Stevens;’ perhaps the reader of good things at second-hand may not be aware how much he is indebted to this author’s ‘Lectures on Heads’ for amusement and instruction. They were very popular throughout Great Britain; and as illustrated by the author, after the manner of ‘Old Matthews,’ they are said to have been irresistible. It was in this collection that the law-cases of ‘Bullum vs. Boatum’ and ‘Daniel vs. Dishclout’ had their origin. They are familiar to every school-boy, not less for their wit than the canine Latinity in which they abound; ‘Primus strokus est provokus; now who gave the primus strokus? Who gave the first offence?’ Or, ‘a drunken man is ‘homo duplicans,’ or a double man, seeing things double,’ etc., etc. We annex an example or two of the writer’s individuality. The first is a sketch of a nil admirari critic and amateur, who has travelled long enough abroad to fall in love with every thing foreign, and despise every thing belonging to his own country except himself: ‘He pretended to be a great judge of paintings, but only admired those done a great way off, and a great while ago; he could not bear any thing painted by any of his own countrymen. One day being in an auction-room where there was a number of capital pictures, and among the rest an inimitable painting of fruits and flowers, the connoisseur would not give his opinion of the picture until he had examined his catalogue; when, finding it was done by one of his own countrymen, he pulled out his eye-glass, exclaiming: ‘This fellow has spoiled a fine piece of canvass; he’s worse than a sign-post dauber; there’s no keeping, no perspective, no fore-ground, no chiar’oscuro. Look you, he has attempted to paint a fly upon that rose-bud! Why, it is no more like a fly than I am like an –’ But as the connoisseur approached his finger to the picture, the fly flew away. It happened to be the real insect!’ Is not the following a forcible picture of a mercurial, hero-loving Frenchman? ‘Has he property? An edict from the Grand Monarque can take it, and he is satisfied. Pursue him to the Bastile, or the dismal dungeon in the country to which a lettre-de-cachet conveys him, and buries him for life: there see him in all his misery; ask him ‘What is the cause?’ ‘Je ne sai pas; it is the will of the Grand Monarque.’ Give him a soup-maigre, a little sallad, and a hind-quarter of a frog, and he’s in spirits. ‘Fal, lal, lal! Vive le Roi? Vive la bagatelle!’’ Here we have a Materialist proving the affinity of matter: ‘All round things are globular, all square things flat-sided. Now, if the bottom is equal to the top, and the top equal to the bottom, and the bottom and top are equal to the four sides, then all matter is as broad as it is long.’ But the materialist ‘had not in his head matter sufficient to prove matter efficient; and being thus deficient, he knew nothing of the matter.’ One of Stevens’s ‘heads’ was that of a heartless, devil-may-care sort of person, in some respects like the hero of ‘A Capital Joke’ in preceding pages, who is always ‘keeping it up.’ He illustrates his own character very forcibly: ‘I’ll tell you how it was; you see, I was in high spirits, so I stole a dog from a blind man, for I do so love fun! So then the blind man cried for his dog, and that made me laugh; so says I to the blind man. ‘Halloo, master! do you want your dog?’ ‘Yes, Sir, indeed, indeed I do,’ says he. Then says I to the blind man, says I, ‘Go look for him! Keep it up!’ I always turn sick when I think of a parson; and my brother, he’s a parson too, and he hates to hear any body swear; so I always swear when I am along with him, just to roast him. I went to dine with him one day last week; and as soon as I arrived, I began to swear. I never swore so well in all my life; I swore all my new oaths. At last my brother laid down his knife and fork, and lifting up his hands and eyes, he calls out: ‘O Tempora! O Mores.’ ‘Oh, ho! brother,’ says I, ‘don’t think to frighten me by calling all your family about you. I don’t mind you nor your family neither. Only bring Tempora and Moses here—that’s all! I’ll box ’em for five pounds. Keep it up!’ ••• There is many a bereaved heart that will be touched by the following sad, sad lines, from the pen of John Rudolph Sutermeister, a young and gifted poet, whose mortal part has ‘been ashes these many a year,’ and whom the reader may remember as the author of a little poem widely quoted and admired many years ago, commencing:

 
‘O! for my bright and faded hours!
    When life was like a summer stream,
On whose gay banks the virgin flowers
    Blushed in the morning’s rosy beam,
Or danced upon the breeze that bare
    Its store of rich perfume along,
While the wood-robin poured on air
    The ravishing delights of song!’
 

To us, who are familiar with the painful circumstances under which they were written, and the deep affliction which they deplore, they seem almost to sob with irrepressible grief:

A LAMENT

I

 
Give not to me the wreath of green,
    The blooming vase of flowers;
They breathe of joy which once hath been,
    Of gone and faded hours!
I cannot love the rose; though rich,
    Its beauty will not last:
Give me—give me the bloom o’er which
    The early blight hath passed!
The yellow buds—give them to rest
On my cold brow and joyless breast,
    When life is failing fast!
 

II

 
Take far from me the wine-cup bright,
    In hours of revelry;
It suits glad brows, and bosoms light,
    It is not meet for me:
Oh! I can pledge the heart no more
    I pledged in days gone by;
Sorrow hath touched my bosom’s core,
    And I am left—to die!
Give me to drink of Lethe’s wave,
Give me the cold and cheerless grave,
    O’er which the night-winds sigh!
 

III

 
Wake not upon my tuneless ear
    Soft music’s stealing strain;
It cannot soothe, it cannot cheer
    This anguished heart again!
But place the Æolian harp upon
    The tomb of her I love;
There, when Heaven shrouds the dying sun,
    My weary steps will rove,
While o’er its chords Night pours its breath,
To list the serenade of death
    Her silent bourne above!
 

IV

 
Give me to seek the lonely tomb
    Where sleeps the sainted dead,
When the pale night-fall throws its gloom
    Above her narrow bed!
There, while the winds which sweep along,
    O’er the harp-strings are driven,
And the funereal soul of song
    Upon the air is given,
Oh! let my faint and parting breath
Be mingled with that song of death,
    And flee with it to heaven!
 

‘Who hath redness of eyes?’ This interrogative ‘portion of divine scripture’ is forcibly illustrated by an anecdote, related with most effective dryness by a friend of ours. An elderly gentleman, accustomed to ‘indulge,’ entered the bar-room of an inn in the pleasant city of H–, on the Hudson, where sat a grave Friend toasting his toes by the fire. Lifting a pair of green spectacles upon his forehead, rubbing his inflamed eyes, and calling for a hot brandy-toddy, he seated himself by the grate; and as he did so, he remarked to Uncle Broadbrim that ‘his eyes were getting weaker and weaker, and that even spectacles didn’t seem to do ‘em any good.’ ‘I’ll tell thee friend,’ rejoined the Quaker, ‘what I think. I think if thee was to wear thy spectacles over thy mouth for a few months, thy eyes would get sound again!’ The ‘complainant’ did not even return thanks for this medical counsel, but sipped his toddy in silence, and soon after left the room, ‘uttering never a word.’ ••• There have been various surmises, and sundry contradictory statements, in relation to the work superscribed ‘Count D’Orsay on Etiquette,’ which we noticed at some length in our December issue. Mr. Willis, of the ‘New Mirror’ weekly journal, seems to question its having been written by the Count, but expresses his belief that he may have loaned his name to the publishers ‘for a consideration;’ and this may possibly have been the fact with the latest London edition. The author of the work in question, however, is Mr. Charles William Day, an English gentleman, whose acquaintance with the usages of the best European society is personal and authentic; who has observed and travelled much; and who is moreover an artist of a high order; painting in miniature, and sketching with admirable skill. An esteemed friend and correspondent of this Magazine writes us from Boston, that the manner of the fraud is somewhat as follows: ‘Mr. Day is the author of a Journal of Travels, which Messrs. Longman and Company of London proposed to publish. As they treated him, however, in a dishonorable manner, he withdrew his MSS. from them and came to America. In retaliation, they sent orders to this country to have a spurious edition published of his work on ‘Etiquette,’ which they had formerly brought out, and which they truly supposed he designed to reprint in New-York or Boston. It has passed through more than twenty editions in London; a fact which I know, from having seen the Messrs. Longmans’ letters and accounts with the author. His own edition is now in press in Boston; and I learn that he has added some ‘Hints’ with an especial eye to Yankee manners.’ We have also received a letter from Mr. Day himself, in which, while he ‘forbears at present to make any comments on the conduct of the Messrs. Longman,’ he proves beyond a doubt that ‘the Count D’Orsay is not the writer of the ‘Hints on Etiquette,’ but that he himself is ‘the real, true author,’ past all peradventure. ••• A friend lately returned from the west, relates among other matters the following anecdote: ‘On board of one of the steam-boats on the Mississippi, I encountered a deck-hand, who went by the name of Barney. Like many of his class, he was a drinking, reckless fellow, but warm-hearted, good-natured, and generous to a fault. In early life he was in easy circumstances; was a husband, and the father of several children. But one night during a violent storm the house in which he resided was struck by lightning, and the whole family, save himself, were instantly killed. His own escape was considered a miracle at the time, not even a hair of his head having been singed. From that time, however, he took to drinking, and so sank lower and lower until he became what I found him. When I had heard his story, I felt somewhat interested in the man, and one day managed to draw him into conversation. He told me his early history with much natural pathos; and finding him in the ‘melting mood’ I endeavored to lead him to some serious thoughts upon the subject of his misfortunes, and especially of that one which had bereft him in so awful a manner of his wife and children. ‘Barney,’ said I, ‘don’t you think it was a signal mercy that you alone should have escaped unharmed from the bolt which destroyed all else you loved upon earth? Was there not at least something singular in the fact?’ ‘That’s what I said myself,’ replied Barney, in a tremulous voice; ‘I always thought it was very sing’lar. But the fact I suppose was this, Mr. Whitehat. The lightning, you see, was afraid of a man, and so like a d–d sneak, it went twisting about to scorch women and little children!’ ••• Blackwood has proclaimed in a late number, the ‘Characteristics of English Society,’ in language of truth and soberness, which goes explicitly to confirm the reports of nearly all American and other ‘foreigners’ who have visited England. We subjoin an extract contrasting English with French society:

‘We should indeed be sorry if our demeanor in those vast crowds, where English people flock together, rather, as it would seem, to assert a right, than to gratify an inclination, were to be taken as an index of our national character: the want of all ease and simplicity, those essential ingredients of agreeable society, which distinguish these dreary meetings have long been unfortunately notorious. Too busy to watch the feelings of others, and too earnest to moderate our own, that true politeness which pays respect to age; which tries to put the most insignificant person in company on a level with the most considerable—virtues which our neighbors possess in an eminent degree—are, except in a few favored instances, unknown among us; while affectation, in other countries the badge of ignorance and vulgarity, is ours, even in its worst shape, when it borrows the mien of rudeness, impertinence, and effrontery, the appendage of those whose station is most conspicuous, and whose dignity is best ascertained. There is more good breeding in the cottage of a French peasant than in all the boudoirs of Grosvenor square. ••• ‘Frivolity and insipidity are the prevailing characteristics of conversation; and nowhere in Europe, perhaps, does difference of fortune or of station produce more unsocial or illiberal separation. Very few of those whom fortune has released from the necessity of following some laborious profession are capable of passing their time agreeably without the assistance of company; not from the spirit of gaity which calls upon society for indulgence; not from any pleasure they take in conversation, where they are frequently languid and taciturn; but to rival each other in the luxury of the table, or by a great variety of indescribable airs, to make others feel the pain of mortification. They meet as if to fight the boundaries of their rank and fashion, and the less definite and perceptible is the line which divides them, the more punctilious is their pride. It is a great mistake to suppose that this low-minded folly is peculiar to people of rank; it is an English disease.’

No doubt of it; and the question naturally arises, ‘Are not these the proper people to talk about men and manners and society in America?’ ••• ‘Never mind, my dear,’ says Baron Pompolino, while endeavoring to fit the fairy slipper of the lovely Cinderella upon the long splay foot of one of his ungainly daughters, ‘never mind, my dear, she is not at all like you!’ The doting father, it will be remembered, gives this verdict as a flattering compliment. We have sometimes been amused, where the quo animo was apparent, with similar compliments at the hands of reciprocal critics of literature. Pleasant examples in this kind have been furnished lately. A very voluminous critic, very far ‘down east,’ spoke recently in a metropolitan journal of Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’ as ‘a very common-place poem, at the best, and only saved from utter and most contemptuous forgetfulness by two or three pleasantries about ‘broken tea-cups,’ etc., and by one single passage that smacks of sublimity!’ Of the poetry however of the author of ‘Man in his Various Aspects under the American Republic,’ he expresses in the same columns quite a different opinion. ‘There has been,’ he writes, ‘no English poetry better than his, within the memory of man!’ A writer in the last number of the ‘Southern Literary Messenger,’ likewise voluminous in prose and verse, if we rightly surmise, exhibits contrasts of judgment somewhat kindred with the foregoing, although certainly less violent. The author of ‘Man in his various Aspects,’ he tells us, ‘has a boldness that attracts;’ his are the ‘strong and struggling conceptions which seek utterance in new and original forms.’ He dares ‘to shun the beaten paths,’ and is not afraid to be obscure. His is not the poetry ‘which takes the popular ear without tasking the popular thought,’ like ‘the simple common-places of Longfellow.’ Such ‘criticism’ as this we have cited must needs ‘make the judicious’ laugh merely, being too impotent to make them ‘grieve.’ It is not perhaps assuming too much to suppose, that Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’ and Longfellow’s ‘Psalms of Life,’ simple though they be, will live and be cherished in generations of human hearts, when the volumes of our critics and their client that yet survive the recollection of any save their publishers, shall be ‘forgotten and clean out of mind.’ •••It is related of the celebrated clergyman, John Mason, that sitting at a steam-boat table on one occasion, just as the passengers were ‘falling to’ in the customary manner, he suddenly rapped vehemently upon the board with the end of his knife, and exclaimed: ‘Captain! is this boat out of the jurisdiction of God Almighty? If not, let us at least thank Him for his continued goodness;’ and he proceeded to pronounce ‘grace’ amidst the most reverent stillness. It is to be hoped, however, that his ‘grace’ was not like the few set words handed down from father to son, mumbled without emotion, and despatched with indecent haste, which one sometimes hears repeated over country repasts. ‘Bless this portion of food now in readiness for us; give it to us in thy love; let us eat and drink in thy fear—for Christ’s sake–Lorenzo, take your fingers out of that plate!’ was a grace once said in our hearing, but evidently not in that of the spoilt boy, ‘growing and always hungry,’ who could not wait to be served. We should prefer to such insensible flippancy the practice of an old divine in New-England, who in asking a blessing upon his meals, was wont to name each separate dish. Sitting down one day to a dinner, which consisted partly of clams, bear-steak, etc., he was forced in a measure to forego his usual custom of furnishing a ‘bill of particulars.’ ‘Bless to our use,’ said he, ‘these treasures hid in the sand; bless this–’ But the bear’s-meat puzzled him, and he concluded with: ‘Oh! Lord, thou only knowest what it is!’ ••• A favorite correspondent of this Magazine, who appears in the pages of the present number for the first time in several months, accompanies his excellent paper with a letter, from which we take these sentences: ‘Since you last heard from me, I have experienced a severe domestic affliction in the loss of my father, who died during the last summer. Day after day and night after night for two months I sat by his bed-side, hoping in vain for his recovery, until life’s star was extinguished in the darkness of the grave.’ Our cordial sympathies are with our correspondent; but sympathy for affliction such as his can carry with it little of consolation to the bereaved:

 
                –‘A friend is gone!
A father, whose authority, in show
When most severe, and must’ring all its force,
Was but the graver countenance of love;
Whose favor, like the clouds of spring, might lower,
And utter now and then an awful voice,
But had a blessing in his darkest frown,
Threat’ning at once, and nourishing the plant.’
 

Perchance our friend may now think with Cowper, that ‘although he loved, yet not enough, the gentle hand that reared him.’ ‘The chief thing that I have to reproach myself with,’ writes one who laments a kindred dispensation of the Supreme, ‘is a sort of inattention to my father’s feelings, occasionally, arising merely from the disparity of years between us, which I am sensible must at times have interfered with his enjoyments. I would gladly recall now, if I could, many opportunities I suffered to pass, of being more in his company, and more in the way of his advice and instruction.’ But he adds: ‘When I reflect on these things, it appears to me one of the strongest natural arguments for the immortality of the soul, and the renewal of our earthly relations in a world to come, that even where the greatest possible attachment subsists between parents and their children, the mere disparity of years inevitably prevents that complete association of feelings, and intimate fellowship of heart and soul, which is the cement and prerogative of all other friendships: in a world to come, but no where else, such attachments must receive their full completion.’ ••• Professor Gouraud, well known among us for his devotion to the interests of art and science, has perfected a System of Remembrance, which he designates by the term ‘Mnemotechny,’ and which we venture to predict will prove of the greatest service to nearly every class of society. No system of modern mnemonics bears any resemblance to, or comparison with it. Such is the astonishing effect of the plan, that young masters and misses, after a brief study of it, can with ease answer any question from score after score of close-printed pages, involving every variety of events, and all kinds of information. We ‘speak but the things which we do know,’ in this matter, for seeing is believing. As the scene of Prof. Gouraud’s operations is for the present the city, and as the daily journals have made his merits widely known to the community, we forbear farther comment at this time upon the useful art which he has brought to such wonderful perfection. New classes organize, we understand, at the Professor’s residence, No. 46, Second-street, on the fourth instant. They will be filled at once, and speedily followed by others. ••• There is an article in the last number of the Edinburgh Review upon ‘Theatres and the Drama,’ which is replete with wisdom, and evinces a thorough mastery of the theme. In alluding to the appeals which are now made to the eye by elaborate scenery, machinery, etc., less than to the mind and imagination by superior intellectual personation, the reviewer in effect remarks, that the first attempt at positive reality is fatal to pleasurable illusion. Every person in the pit is aware that the stage is a stage, ‘and all the men and women merely players.’ In ‘As you Like It,’ at Drury-Lane, an attempt was made to imitate the notes of birds. ‘Suppose the imitation had been so close as to deceive the audience into the belief that there were birds there singing; would not the contrast with trees of painted canvass have been revolting? These were not the conceptions of Shakspeare, when he made his chorus say:

 
                ‘Can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest, in little place, a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work:
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide one man,
And make imaginary puisance.
Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs in the receiving earth;
For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings—
Carry them here and there.’
 

Advice as necessary at the present day as then; for we may enlarge our stages, increase our supernumeraries, and engage ‘real horses;’ but we can never make any one believe the stage is other than the stage. The audience can realize for themselves. This trust in the all-sufficiency of imagination is precisely that acted on by children in their daily sports, where from the boundless wealth of the imagination, the rudest materials supply the place of the costliest. Whoever watches boys ‘playing horse,’ making a pocket-handkerchief dangling behind to represent the tail, and sees them stamping, snorting, prancing, and champing the imaginary bit, witnesses the alchymy of the imagination, an alchymy out-stripping all the wonders and out-weighing all the treasures of the prosaic positive chemistry, so longed for by the present generation. The child ‘supposes’ the handkerchief a tail, and it becomes a tail. He has but to say to his companion: ‘This shall be a whip and this shall be the harness,’ and the things are there; not as matters of literal fact, but of imaginative truth. He plays for the enjoyment of the game and the exercise of his imagination; and therefore the handkerchief serves every purpose. This is the procedure of nature. But the modern parent, anxious to realize for the child, and to instil a love of accuracy into his mind, gives him a superb horse-hair tail, bidding him at the same time be careful not to spoil it. What is the result? The child’s attention is called from the game, to the consideration of or delight in the tail, which, originally meant as a collateral aid, now takes the first place. The boy no doubt is delighted with his horse-hair tail; but (if it be not altogether superfluous,) it will soon destroy his game, so that the exercise, both of frame and imagination, is lost; the end becomes subordinate to the means. This is precisely what takes place with the drama. Observe also one important point: The tail is real; accuracy is attempted: but though the tail be real, the horse is not; the horse is played by a boy, and only by a boy; it is in this mimicry that the enjoyment consists. But how absurd to put a real tail on an unreal horse! How revolting this mixture of imagination and fact! It is equalled only by that ludicrous practice of placing the face of a real watch in the place of a church-clock in a landscape; where one may not only see the time of day, but may also hear it struck, and that amidst painted trees and houses! This effect, except to the most literal and prosaic minds, is revolting and discordant. But this the modern drama is strenuously endeavoring to produce. ‘In opera, ballet, and spectacle, scenery and illustrations must be effective, because they form elements of the piece. In the drama, where the source of entertainment is intellectual, they are merely accessories, and should be used in such wise as to keep up the harmony of effect, but never so as to distract attention from the drama to themselves.’ Here is a passage which is not less applicable in America than in England: ‘A few years ago it was not uncommon to see several performers of rival excellence supported by others of ability, all playing in the same piece. It is now a rare thing for rivals to play together. A single good actor, among a dozen bad, is deemed sufficient. Are we then to wonder that the regular drama does not pay?’ ••• Our readers will remember the order given by the Chinese Emperor to a corps of Mandarins, who were to exterminate the ‘barbarian Englishers’ in the harbor of Canton, by going down to the bank of the river in the night, and then and there ‘dive straight on board those foreign ships, and put every soul of them to death!’ Subsequently however the red-bristling foreigners managed to land, when, as it since turns out, it became necessary to adopt more sanguinary measures. The Emperor called up one of his ‘great generals,’ and gave him his dreadful orders: ‘You must dress your soldiers,’ said he, ‘in a very frightful manner, painting their faces with the most horrid figures, and depicting dragons and monsters on your banners: you must then rush upon the barbarians with fearful outcries, and terrify them so that they will fall down flat on their faces; and when they are once down,’ said the Imperial potentate, ‘their breeches are so tight that they can never get up again!’ ••• ‘I give you five minutes every day to look at the stars, but don’t particularize; for some in those far-off places send down their light long after they have been knocked out of existence, and you may be looking at a blank.’ So wrote ‘Julian’ in this department of our last number. Prof. Olmstead, of Yale-College, in a recent lecture before the ‘Mercantile Library Association,’ described the difficulty of ascertaining the distance of the stars from each other and from our earth; yet, he remarked, it had been done. The nearest star’s distance from us had been measured, and by the aid of light, by which it could alone be accomplished. That distance, he said, was immense, requiring ten years for light to traverse it! The planets, he had no doubt, were inhabited. Of what use was the reflection of the sun’s rays upon them, if there were no eyes there to behold it? What was the use of moons, which the planets certainly have? He spoke also of the fixed stars, which seem by the aid of a telescope to be innumerable. What was their purpose?—for a guide to mariners? No; for a very small portion of them could be seen by the unassisted eye. They were suns like our suns, to worlds like our worlds! To the inhabitants of those fixed stars our sun appears as a star, and the planetary system revolving around it, of which the earth is one, are unseen by them, as are those of theirs by us! Great God! ‘When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man, that thou visitest him!’ ••• Our correspondent who writes of ‘The Country,’ in preceding pages wields a facile pen. His allusion to the choice of names for a country-seat reminds us of the pleasant satire of ‘Thinks-I-to-myself’ upon this theme: ‘We lived, you must know,’ he writes, ‘in a Hall; not when I was born, however, nor till long afterward. My sister happened to have a correspondent at school near London, who finding it essentially necessary to the support of her dignity among her school-fellows, always directed her letters so; for the parents of one she found, lived at something House; and of another at What’s-its-name Place; and of another at Thingummy Lodge; of another at the Grange; of another at the Castle; of another at the Park; Miss Blaze, the daughter of a retired tallow-chandler, whose father lived at Candlewick-Castle, was continually throwing out hints that not to live at a ‘Castle,’ or a ‘Park,’ or a ‘Place,’ or a ‘House,’ or a ‘Lodge,’ unequivocally bespoke a low origin!’ Is this folly altogether indigenous to England? Let the high-sounding names of scores of painted pine palaces not a thousand miles from this metropolis make answer. ••• ‘It don’t weigh as much as I expected, and I always thought it wouldn’t!’ We were reminded of this remark of a person who desired a certain result, but was at the same time unwilling to relinquish his pride of opinion, by the note of our Mississippi correspondent, to whose long communication we alluded in our last number. We have ‘taken its measure,’ as we promised, and find it quite beyond our compass. ••• Our friend the Poetical Englishman is somewhat severe upon the godly inhabitants of ‘Botolph’s Town;’ yet we see nothing in his epistle that is not justified by recent occurrences in the ‘Literary Emporium.’ It is lamentable that Boston should be robbed of a decent theatre by an epidemic of pseudo-sanctity. Macready was compelled to play a recent engagement at a second-rate house, down in the ‘Wapping’ end of the town, whither all the beauty and fashion crowded nightly through the mud to see him. It strikes us that the ‘Purification Hymn,’ alluded to by our correspondent, must have been a choice production of some Mawworm of the day. Its reasoning is highly pellucid, and its dignity is past all question. ‘Mimic scenes, and mirth and joy,’ it would seem, ‘allure souls’ to endless perdition! Now against the licentiousness and drunkenness of the theatre too much cannot be said; but for ‘mimic scenes’ dragging men to –. But cui bono? ‘Your dull ass will never mend his pace with beating.’ By the by, we are well pleased to see our English friend’s preference for mind over matter, in the way of dramatic personations. Yet England has little reason to boast. What says ‘the Viscount’ to the Chevalier (d’industrie) Pip? ‘What’s the good of Shakspeare, Pip? I never read him. What the devil is it all about? There’s a lot of feet in Shakspeare’s verse, but there ain’t any legs worth mentioning in Shakspeare’s plays, are there, Pip? Juliet, Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, and all the rest of ’em, whatever their names are, might as well have no legs at all, for any thing the audience know about it. I’ll tell you what it is; what the people call dramatic poetry is a collection of sermons. Do I go to the theatre to be lectured? No; if I wanted that, I’d go to church. What’s the legitimate drama, Pip? Human nature. What are legs? Human nature. Then let us have plenty of leg-pieces, Pip, and I’ll stand by you, my buck!’ This is ‘the ticket’ in London, as well as in ‘Botolph his town.’ The ‘legs have it’ there as well as here. Meanwhile the sometime gallant Thespian is in a sad plight, from having little to do and little pay for it. Admirers fall off, one after another, under such circumstances; and even the gentle sex forget their old enthusiasm: