Kitabı oku: «The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 19, No. 541, April 7, 1832», sayfa 3

His literary tastes bear a certain resemblance to, and have a certain analogy with, his gustatory—proving the truth of that intimate connexion between the stomach and the head, upon which physiologists are so delighted to dwell. In poetry the heresies and escapades of Lord Byron are too much for him, although as a Peer and a gentleman he always speaks well and deferentially of him. Shelley he can make nothing of, and therefore says, which is the strict truth in one sense at least, that he has never read him. He praises Campbell, Crabbe, and Rogers, and shakes his head at Tom Moore; but Pope is his especial favourite; and if anything in verse has his heart, it is the "Rape of the Lock." Peter Pindar he partly dislikes, but Anstey, the "Bath Guide," is high in his estimation; and with him "Gray's Odes" stand far above those of Collins'. Of the "Elegy in a Country Church" he thinks, as he says, "like the rest of the world." "Shenstone's Pastorals" he has read. Burns he praises, but in his heart thinks him a "wonderful clown," and shrugs his shoulders at his extreme popularity. He says as little about Shakespeare as he can, and has by heart some half dozen lines of Milton, which is all he really knows of him. In the drama he inclines to the "unities;" and of the English Theatre "Sheridan's School for Scandal," and Otway's "Venice Preserved," or Rowe's "Fair Penitent," are what he best likes in his heart. John Kemble is his favourite actor—Kean he thinks somewhat vulgar. In prose he thinks Dr. Johnson the greatest man that ever existed, and next to him he places Addison and Burke. His historian is Hume; and for morals and metaphysics he goes to Paley and Dr. Reid, or Dugald Stewart, and is well content. For the satires of Swift he has no relish. They discompose his ideas; and he of all things detests to have his head set a spinning like a tetotum, either by a book or by anything else. Bishop Berkeley once did this for him to such a tune, that he showed a visible uneasiness at the mention of the book ever after. In Tristram Shandy, however, he has a sort of suppressed delight, which he hardly likes to acknowledge, the magnet of attraction being, though he knows it not, in the characters of Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, and the Widow Wadman. His religious reading is confined to "Blair's Sermons," and the "Whole Duty of Man," in which he always keeps a little slip of double gilt-edged paper as a marker, without reflecting that it is a sort of proof that he has never got through either. His Pocket Bible always lies upon his toilet table. He knows a little of Mathematics in general, a little of Algebra, and a little of Fluxions, which is principally to be discovered from his having Emmerson, Simpson, and Bonnycastle's works in his library. In classical learning he confesses to having "forgotten" a good deal of Greek; but sports a Latin phrase upon occasion, and is something of a critic in languages. He prefers Virgil to Homer, and Horace to Pindar, and can, upon occasion, enter into a dissertation on the precise meaning of a "Simplex munditiis." He also delights in a pun, and most especially in a Latin one; and when applied to for payment of paving-rate, never fails to reply "Paveant illi, non paveam ego!" which, though peradventure repeated for the twentieth time, still serves to sweeten the adieu between his purse and its contents. He is also an amateur in etymologies and derivatives, and is sorry that the learned Selden's solution of the origin of the term "gentleman" seems to include in it something not altogether complimentary to religion. This is his only objection to it. He speaks French; and his accent is, he flatters himself, an approximation to the veritable Parisian. Modern novels he does not read, but has read "Waverley" and "Pelham."

His library is not large, but select; and as he does not sit in it excepting very occasionally, the fire grate is a movable one, and can be turned at will from parlour to library and vice versa,—a whim of his old acquaintance Dr. Trifle of Oxford. In it are his library table and stuffed chair; a bust of Pitt and another of Cicero; a patent inkstand and silver pen; an atlas, and maps upon rollers; a crimson screen, an improved "Secretaire;" a barometer and a thermometer. Upon the shelves may be found almost for certain Boswell's Johnson; Encyclopaedia Britannica; Peptic Precepts and Cook's Oracle; the Miseries of Human Life; Prideaux' Connexion of the Old and New Testament; Dr. Pearson's Culina Famulatrix Medecinae; Soame Jenyn's Essays; the Farrier's Guide; Selden's Table-talk; Archbishop Tillotson's Sermons; Henderson on Wines; Boscawen's Horace; Croker's Battles of Talavera and Busaco; Dictionary of Quotations; Lord Londonderry's Peninsular Campaigns; the Art of Shaving, with directions for the management of the Razor; Todd's Johnson's Dictionary; Peacham's Complete Gentleman; Harris' Hermes; Roget on the Teeth; Memoirs of Pitt; Jokeby, a Burlesque on Rokeby; English Proverbs; Paley's Moral Philosophy; Chesterfield's Letters; Buchan's Domestic Medicine; Debrett's Peerage; Colonel Thornton's Sporting Tour; Court Kalendar; the Oracle, or Three Hundred Questions explained and answered; Gordon's Tacitus an Elzevir Virgil; Epistolae obscurorum virorum; Martial's Epigrams; Tully's Offices; and Henry's Family Bible.

His general character for nicety is excellent, both in a moral and religious point of view: and he holds himself to have done a questionable thing in looking into a number of Harriette Wilson, in which a gay quondam friend of his figured. When he marries, the ceremony is performed by the Honourable and very Reverend the Dean of some place, to whom he claims a distant relationship. He takes his wine in moderation; never bets, nor plays above guinea points, and always at whist. He goes to church regularly; his pew is a square one, with green curtains. He dines upon fish on Good Friday, and declines visiting during Passion week in mixed parties. If he ever had any peccadilloes of any kind, they are buried in a cloud as snug as that which shrouded the pious Eneas when he paid his first visit to Queen Dido.

He dies, aged fifty-seven, of a pleuritic attack, complicated with angina pectoris; and having left fifty pounds to each of the principal charitable institutions of his neighbourhood, and fifty pounds to the churchwardens of his parish, to be distributed amongst the poor professing the religion of the Church of England, he is buried in his "family vault," and his last wish fulfilled,—that is to say, his epitaph is composed in Latin, and the inscription put up under the especial care and inspection of his friend Dr. Dusty of Oxford. Requiescat.

THE VILLAGE CEMETERY

In the New Monthly Magazine, just published is a powerful poem—the Splendid Village, by the author of "Corn-law Rhymes." from which we extract the following passage:

 
I sought the churchyard where the lifeless lie,
And envied them, they rest so peacefully.
"No wretch comes here, at dead of night." I said,
"To drag the weary from his hard-earn'd bed;
No schoolboys here with mournful relics play,
And kick the 'dome of thought' o'er common clay;
No city cur snarls here o'er dead men's bones;
No sordid fiend removes memorial stones.
The dead have here what to the dead belongs,
Though legislation makes not laws, but wrongs."
I sought a letter'd stone, on which my tears
Had fall'n like thunder-rain, in other years,
My mother's grave I sought, in my despair,
But found it not! our grave-stone was not there!
No we were fallen men, mere workhouse slaves,
And how could fallen men have names or graves?
I thought of sorrow in the wilderness,
And death in solitude, and pitiless
Interment in the tiger's hideous maw:
I pray'd, and, praying, turn'd from all I saw;
My prayers were curses! But the sexton came;
How my heart yearn'd to name my Hannah's name!
White was his hair, for full of days was he,
And walk'd o'er tombstones, like their history.
With well feign'd carelessness I rais'd a spade,
Left near a grave, which seem'd but newly made,
And ask'd who slept below? "You knew him well,"
The old man answer'd, "Sir, his name was Bell.
He had a sister—she, alas! is gone,
Body and soul. Sir! for she married one
Unworthy of her. Many a corpse he took
From this churchyard." And then his head he shook,
And utter'd—whispering low, as if in fear
That the old stones and senseless dead would hear—
A word, a verb, a noun, too widely famed,
Which makes me blush to hear my country named.
That word he utter'd, gazing on my face,
As if he loath'd my thoughts, then paus'd a space.
"Sir," he resumed, "a sad death Hannah died;
Her husband—kill'd her, or his own son lied.
Vain is your voyage o'er the briny wave,
If here you seek her grave—she had no grave!
The terror-stricken murderer fled before
His crime was known, and ne'er was heard of more.
The poor boy died, sir! uttering fearful cries
In his last dreams, and with his glaring eyes,
And troubled hands, seem'd acting, as it were,
His mother's fate. Yes, Sir, his grave is there."