CHAPTER V.

Bought a pair of gloves; dry-goods stores the genuine schools of politeness—true Parisian manners there—got a pair of gloves and a pistareen’s worth of bows for a dollar—dog cheap!—Courtlandt street corner—famous place to see the belles go by—query, ever been shopping with a lady?—some account of it—ladies go into all the shops in the city to buy a pair of gloves—good way of spending time, if they have nothing else to do.—Oswego market—looks very much like a triumphal arch—some account of the manner of erecting them in ancient times; digression to the _arch_-duke Charles, and some account of the ancient Germans. N. B.—quote Tacitus on this subject.—Particular description of market-baskets, butcher’s blocks, and wheelbarrows;—mem. queer things run upon one wheel!—Saw a cartman driving full tilt through Broadway—run over a child—good enough for it—what business had it to be in the way?—Hint concerning the laws against pigs, goats, dogs, and cartmen,—grand apostrophe to the sublime science of jurisprudence;—comparison between legislators and tinkers; query, whether it requires greater ability to mend a law than to mend a kettle?—inquiry into the utility of making laws that are broken a hundred times a day with impunity;—my Lord Coke’s opinion on the subject; my Lord a very great man—so was Lord Bacon: a good story about a criminal named Hog claiming relationship with him.—Hogg’s porter-house;—a great haunt of Will Wizard; Will put down there one night by a sea-captain, in an argument concerning the era of the Chinese empire Whangpo;—Hogg’s a capital place for hearing the same stories, the same jokes, and the same songs every night in the year—mem. except Sunday nights; fine school for young politicians too—some of the longest and thickest heads in the city come there to settle the nation.—Scheme of _Ichabod Fungus_ to restore the balance of Europe;—digression;—some account of the balance of Europe; comparison between it and a pair of scales, with the Emperor Alexander in one and the Emperor Napoleon in the other: fine fellows—both of a weight, can’t tell which will kick the beam:—mem. don’t care much either—nothing to me:—_Ichabod_ very unhappy about it—thinks Napoleon has an eye on this country—capital place to pasture his horses, and provide for the rest of his family.—Dey street—ancient Dutch name of it, signifying murderers’ valley, formerly the site of a great peach orchard; my grandmother’s history of the famous _Peach war_—arose from an Indian stealing peaches out of this orchard; good cause as need be for a war; just as good as the balance of power. Anecdote of war between two Italian states about a bucket; introduce some capital new truisms about the folly of mankind, the ambition of kings, potentates, and princes; particularly Alexander, Cæsar, Charles the XIIth, Napoleon, little King Pepin, and the great Charlemagne.—Conclude with an exhortation to the present race of sovereigns to keep the king’s peace, and abstain from all those deadly quarrels which produce battle, murder, and sudden death—mem.—ran my nose against a lamp-post—conclude in great dudgeon.

FROM MY ELBOW-CHAIR.

Our cousin Pindar, after having been confined for some time past with a fit of the gout, which is a kind of keepsake in our family, has again set his mill going, as my readers will perceive. On reading his piece I could not help smiling at the high compliments which, contrary to his usual style, he has lavished on the dear sex. The old gentleman, unfortunately observing my merriment, stumped out of the room with great vociferation of crutch, and has not exchanged three words with me since. I expect every hour to hear that he has packed up his movables, and, as usual in all cases of disgust, retreated to his old country house.

Pindar, like most of the old Cockloft heroes, is wonderfully susceptible to the genial influence of warm weather. In winter he is one of the most crusty old bachelors under heaven, and is wickedly addicted to sarcastic reflections of every kind, particularly on the little enchanting foibles and whimwhams of women. But when the spring comes on, and the mild influence of the sun releases nature from her icy fetters, the ice of his bosom dissolves into a gentle current which reflects the bewitching qualities of the fair; as in some mild, clear evening, when nature reposes in silence, the stream bears in its pure bosom all the starry magnificence of heaven. It is under the control of this influence he has written his piece; and I beg the ladies, in the plenitude of their harmless conceit, not to flatter themselves that because the good Pindar has suffered them to escape his censures he had nothing more to censure. It is but sunshine and zephyrs which have wrought this wonderful change; and I am much mistaken if the first northeaster don’t convert all his good nature into most exquisite spleen.

FROM THE MILL OF PINDAR COCKLOFT, ESQ.

How often I cast my reflections behind, And call up the days of past youth to my mind, When folly assails in habiliments new, When fashion obtrudes some fresh whimwham to view; When the foplings of fashion bedazzle my sight, Bewilder my feelings—my senses benight; I retreat in disgust from the world of to-day, To commune with the world that has mouldered away; To converse with the shades of those friends of my love, Long gather’d in peace to the angels above. In my rambles through life should I meet with annoy, From the bold, beardless stripling—the turbid, pert boy— One reared in the mode lately reckon’d genteel, Which, neglecting the head, aims to perfect the heel; Which completes the sweet fopling while yet in his teens, And fits him for fashion’s light changeable scenes; Proclaims him a man to the near and the far, Can he dance a cotillon or smoke a cigar; And though brainless and vapid as vapid can be, To routs and to parties pronounces him free:— O, I think on the beaux that existed of yore, On those rules of the _ton_ that exist now no more! I recall with delight how each yonker at first In the cradle of science and virtue was nursed: —How the graces of person and graces of mind, The polish of learning and fashion combined, Till softened in manners and strengthened in head, By the classical lore of the living and dead, Matured in his person till manly in size, He _then_ was presented a beau to our eyes! My nieces of late have made frequent complaint That they suffer vexation and painful constraint, By having their circles too often distrest By some three or four goslings just fledged from the nest, Who, propp’d by the credit their fathers sustain, Alike tender in years and in person and brain, But plenteously stock’d with that substitute, brass, For true wits and critics would anxiously pass. They complain of that empty sarcastical slang, So common to all the coxcombical gang, Who the fair with their shallow experience vex, By thrumming forever their weakness of sex; And who boast of themselves, when they talk with proud air Of Man’s mental ascendency over the fair. ’Twas thus the young owlet produced in the nest, Where the eagle of Jove her young eaglets had prest, Pretended to boast of his royal descent, And vaunted that force which to eagles is lent. Though fated to shun with his dim visual ray, The cheering delights and the brilliance of day; To forsake the fair regions of ether and light, For dull moping caverns of darkness and night: Still talk’d of that eagle-like strength of the eye, Which approaches unwinking the pride of the sky, Of that wing which unwearied can hover and play In the noon-tide effulgence and torrent of day. Dear girls, the sad evils of which ye complain Your sex must endure from the feeble and vain, ’Tis the commonplace jest of the nursery scapegoat, ’Tis the commonplace ballad that croaks from his throat; He knows not that nature—that polish decrees, That women should always endeavor to please: That the law of their system has early imprest The importance of fitting themselves to each guest; And, of course, that full oft when ye trifle and play, ’Tis to gratify triflers who strut in your way. The child might as well of its mother complain, As wanting true wisdom and soundness of brain; Because that, at times, while it hangs on her breast, She with a “lullaby-baby” beguiles it to rest. ’Tis its weakness of mind that induces the strain, For wisdom to infants is prattled in vain. ’Tis true at odd times, when in frolicsome fit, In the midst of his gambols, the mischievous wit May start some light foible that clings to the fair Like cobwebs that fasten to objects most rare,— In the play of his fancy will sportively say Some delicate censure that pops in his way. He may smile at your fashions, and frankly express His dislike of a dance or a flaming red dress; Yet he blames not your want of man’s physical force, Nor complains though ye cannot in Latin discourse. He delights in the language of nature ye speak, Though not so refined as true classic Greek. He remembers that Providence never design’d Our females like suns to bewilder and blind; But like the mild orb of pale ev’ning serene, Whose radiance illumines, yet softens the scene, To light us with cheering and welcoming ray, Along the rude path when the sun is away. I own in my scribblings I lately have nam’d Some faults of our fair which I gently have blam’d, But be it forever by all understood, My censures were only pronounc’d for their good. I delight in the sex; ’tis the pride of my mind. To consider them gentle, endearing, refin’d; As our solace below, in the journey of life, To smooth its rough passes—to soften its strife: As objects intended our joys to supply, And to lead us in love to the temples on high. How oft have I felt, when two lucid blue eyes, As calm and as bright as the gems of the skies, Have beam’d their soft radiance into my soul, Impress’d with an awe like an angel’s control! Yes, fair ones, by this is forever defin’d The fop from the man of refinement and mind; The latter believes ye in bounty were given As a bond upon earth of our union with heaven; And if ye are weak and are frail, in his view ’Tis to call forth fresh warmth and his fondness renew. ’Tis his joy to support these defects of your frame, And his love at your weakness redoubles its flame; He rejoices the gem is so rich and so fair, And is proud that it claims his protection and care.

NO. XIII.—FRIDAY, AUGUST 14, 1807.

FROM MY ELBOW-CHAIR.

I was not a little perplexed, a short time since, by the eccentric conduct of my knowing coadjutor, Will Wizard. For two or three days he was completely in a quandary. He would come into old Cockloft’s parlor ten times a day, swinging his ponderous legs along, with his usual vast strides, clap his hands into his sides, contemplate the little shepherdesses on the mantel-piece for a few minutes, whistling all the while, and then sally out full sweep, without uttering a word. To be sure, a pish or a pshaw occasionally escaped him; and he was observed once to pull out his enormous tobacco-box, drum for a moment upon its lid with his knuckles, and then return it into his pocket without taking a quid. ’Twas evident Will was full of some mighty idea: not that his restlessness was any way uncommon; for I have often seen Will throw himself almost in a fever of heat and fatigue—doing nothing. But this inflexible taciturnity set the whole family, as usual, a wondering: as Will seldom enters the house without giving one of his “one thousand and one” stories. For my part, I began to think that the late _fracas_ at Canton had alarmed Will for the safety of his friends, Kinglun, Chinqua, and Consequa; or that something had gone wrong in the alterations of the theatre; or that some new outrage at Norfolk had put him in a worry; in short, I did not know what to think; for Will is such a universal busybody, and meddles so much in everything going forward, that you might as well attempt to conjecture what is going on in the North Star as in his precious pericranium. Even Mrs. Cockloft, who, like a worthy woman as she is, seldom troubles herself about anything in this world—saving the affairs of her household, and the correct deportment of her female friends—was struck with the mystery of Will’s behavior. She happened, when he came in and went out the tenth time, to be busy darning the bottom of one of the old red damask chairs; and notwithstanding this is to her an affair of vast importance, yet she could not help turning round and exclaiming—

“I wonder what can be the matter with Mr. Wizard?”

“Nothing,” replied old Christopher, “only we shall have an eruption soon.”

The old lady did not understand a word of this, neither did she care; she had expressed her wonder; and that, with her, is always sufficient.

I am so well acquainted with Will’s peculiarities that I can tell, even by his whistle, when he is about an essay for our paper, as certainly as a weather wiseacre knows that it is going to rain when he sees a pig run squeaking about with his nose in the wind. I, therefore, laid my account with receiving a communication from him before long; and sure enough, the evening before last I distinguished his freemason knock at my door. I have seen many wise men in my time, philosophers, mathematicians, astronomers, politicians, editors, and almanac-makers; but never did I see a man look half so wise as did my friend Wizard on entering the room. Had Lavater beheld him at that moment, he would have set him down, to a certainty, as a fellow who had just discovered the longitude or the philosopher’s stone.

Without saying a word, he handed me a roll of paper; after which he lighted his cigar, sat down, crossed his legs, folded his arms, and, elevating his nose to an angle of about forty-five degrees, began to smoke like a steam engine—Will delights in the picturesque. On opening his budget, and perceiving the motto, it struck me that Will had brought me one of his confounded Chinese manuscripts, and I was forthwith going to dismiss it with indignation; but accidentally seeing the name of our oracle, the sage Linkum, of whose inestimable folios we pride ourselves upon being the sole possessors, I began to think the better of it, and looked round to Will to express approbation. I shall never forget the figure he cut at that moment! He had watched my countenance, on opening his manuscript, with the argus eyes of an author: and, perceiving some tokens of disapprobation, began, according to custom, to puff away at his cigar with such vigor that in a few minutes he had entirely involved himself in smoke, except his nose and one foot which were just visible, the latter wagging with great velocity. I believe I have hinted before—at least I ought to have done so—that Will’s nose is a very goodly nose; to which it may be as well to add that, in his voyages under the tropics, it has acquired a copper complexion, which renders it very brilliant and luminous. You may imagine what a sumptuous appearance it made, projecting boldly, like the celebrated _promontorium nasidium_ at Samos, with a lighthouse upon it, and surrounded on all sides with smoke and vapor. Had my gravity been, like the Chinese philosopher’s, “within one degree of absolute frigidity,” here would have been a trial for it. I could not stand it, but burst into such a laugh as I do not indulge in above once in a hundred years. This was too much for Will; he emerged from his cloud, threw his cigar into the fire-place, and strode out of the room, pulling up his breeches, muttering something which, I verily believe, was nothing more than a horrible long Chinese malediction.

He, however, left his manuscript behind him, which I now give to the world. Whether he is serious on the occasion, or only bantering, no one, I believe, can tell; for, whether in speaking or writing, there is such an invincible gravity in his demeanor and style, that even I, who have studied him as closely as an antiquarian studies an old manuscript or inscription, am frequently at a loss to know what the rogue would be at. I have seen him indulge in his favorite amusement of quizzing for hours together, without any one having the least suspicion of the matter, until he would suddenly twist his phiz into an expression that baffles all description, thrust his tongue in his cheek, and blow up in a laugh almost as loud as the shout of the Romans on a certain occasion, which honest Plutarch avers frightened several crows to such a degree that they fell down stone dead into the Campus Martius. Jeremy Cockloft the younger, who, like a true modern philosopher, delights in experiments that are of no kind of use, took the trouble to measure one of Will’s risible explosions, and declared to me that, according to accurate measurement, it contained thirty feet square of solid laughter. What will the professors say to this?

PLANS FOR DEFENDING OUR HARBOR.

BY WILLIAM WIZARD, ESQ.

Long-fong teko buzz tor-pe-do, Fudge—— _Confucius._

We’ll blow the villains all sky-high; But do it with econo——my. _Link. Fid._

Surely never was a town more subject to midsummer fancies and dog-day whimwhams than this most excellent of cities; our notions, like our diseases, seem all epidemic; and no sooner does a new disorder or a new freak seize one individual but it is sure to run through all the community. This is particularly the case when the summer is at the hottest, and everybody’s head is in a vertigo and his brain in a ferment; ’tis absolutely necessary, then, the poor souls should have some bubble to amuse themselves with, or they would certainly run mad. Last year the poplar worm made its appearance most fortunately for our citizens; and everybody was so much in horror of being poisoned, and devoured, and so busied in making humane experiments on cats and dogs, that we got through the summer quite comfortably; the cats had the worst of it; every mouser of them was shaved, and there was not a whisker to be seen in the whole sisterhood. This summer everybody has had full employment in planning fortifications for our harbor. Not a cobbler or tailor in the city but has left his awl and his thimble, become an engineer outright, and aspired most magnanimously to the building of forts and the destruction of navies! Heavens! as my friend Mustapha would say, on what a great scale is everything in this country!

Among the various plans that have been offered, the most conspicuous is one devised and exhibited, as I am informed, by that notable confederacy, “The North River Society.”

Anxious to redeem their reputation from the foul suspicions that have for a long time overclouded it, these aquatic incendiaries have come forward, at the present alarming juncture, and announced a most potent discovery which is to guarantee our port from the visits of any foreign marauders. The Society have, it seems, invented a cunning machine, shrewdly yclept a _Torpedo_,[63] by which the stoutest line of battle ship, even a _Santissima Trinidada_, may be caught napping and decomposed in a twinkling; a kind of submarine powder-magazine to swim under water, like an aquatic mole, or water rat, and destroy the enemy in the moments of unsuspicious security.

This straw tickled the noses of all our dignitaries wonderfully; for to do our government justice, it has no objection to injuring and exterminating its enemies in any manner—provided the thing can be done economically.

It was determined the experiment should be tried, and an old brig was purchased for not more than twice its value, and delivered over into the hands of its tormentors, the North River Society, to be tortured, and battered, and annihilated, _secundum artem_. A day was appointed for the occasion, when all the good citizens of the wonder-loving city of Gotham were invited to the blowing-up; like the fat innkeeper in Rabelais, who requested all his customers to come on a certain day and see him burst.

As I have almost as great a veneration as the good Mr. Walter Shandy for all kinds of experiments that are ingeniously ridiculous, I made very particular mention of the one in question at the table of my friend Christopher Cockloft; but it put the honest old gentleman in a violent passion. He condemned it in toto as attempt to introduce a dastardly and exterminating mode of warfare. “Already have we proceeded far enough,” said he, “in the science of destruction; war is already invested with sufficient horrors and calamities. Let us not increase the catalogue; let us not, by these deadly artifices, provoke a system of insidious and indiscriminate hostility, that shall terminate in laying our cities desolate, and exposing our women, our children, and our infirm, to the sword of pitiless recrimination.” Honest old cavalier!—it was evident he did not reason as a true politician—but he felt as a Christian and philanthropist; and that was perhaps just as well.

It may be readily supposed, that our citizens did not refuse the invitation of the Society to the blow-up; it was the first naval action ever exhibited in our port, and the good people all crowded to see the British navy blown up in effigy. The young ladies were delighted with the novelty of the show, and declared that if war could be conducted in this manner, it would become a fashionable amusement; and the destruction of a fleet be as pleasant as a ball or a tea-party. The old folk were equally pleased with the spectacle—because it cost them nothing. Dear souls, how hard was it they should be disappointed! the brig most obstinately refused to be decomposed; the dinners were cold, and the puddings were overboiled, throughout the renowned city of Gotham; and its sapient inhabitants, like the honest Strasburghers, from whom most of them are doubtless descended, who went out to see the courteous stranger and his nose, all returned home after having threatened to pull down the flag-staff by way of taking satisfaction for their disappointment. By the way, there is not an animal in the world more discriminating in its vengeance than a freeborn mob.

In the evening I repaired to friend Hogg’s, to smoke a sociable cigar, but had scarcely entered the room when I was taken prisoner by my friend, Mr. Ichabod Fungus; who I soon saw was at his usual trade of prying into millstones. The old gentleman informed me that the brig had actually blown up, after a world of maneuvering, and had nearly blown up the Society with it; he seemed to entertain strong doubts as to the objects of the Society in the invention of these infernal machines—hinted a suspicion of their wishing to set the river on fire, and that he should not be surprised, on waking one of these mornings, to find the Hudson in a blaze.

“Not that I disapprove of the plan,” said he, “provided it has the end in view which they profess; no, no, an excellent plan of defense; no need of batteries, forts, frigates, and gun-boats; observe, sir, all that’s necessary is that the ships must come to anchor in a convenient place; watch must be asleep, or so complacent as not to disturb any boats paddling about them—fair wind and tide—no moonlight—machines well-directed—mustn’t flash in the pan—bang’s the word, and the vessel’s blown up in a moment!”

“Good,” said I, “you remind me of a lubberly Chinese who was flogged by an honest captain of my acquaintance, and who, on being advised to retaliate, exclaimed: ‘Hi yah! s’pose two men hold fast him captain, den very mush me bamboo he!’”

The old gentleman grew a little crusty, and insisted that I did not understand him; all that was requisite to render the effect certain was, that the enemy should enter into the project: or, in other words, be agreeable to the measure; so that if the machine did not come to the ship, the ship should go to the machine; by which means he thought the success of the machine would be inevitable—provided it struck fire.

“But do not you think,” said I, doubtingly, “that it would be rather difficult to persuade the enemy into such an agreement? Some people have an invincible antipathy to being blown up.”

“Not at all, not at all,” replied he, triumphantly; “got an excellent notion for that; do with them as we have done with the brig—buy all the vessels we mean to destroy, and blow ’em up as best suits our convenience. I have thought deeply on that subject, and have calculated to a certainty that if our funds hold out we may, in this way, destroy the whole British navy—by contract.”

By this time all the quidnuncs of the room had gathered around us, each pregnant with some mighty scheme for the salvation of his country. One pathetically lamented that we had no such men among us as the famous Toujoursdort and Grossitout; who, when the celebrated Captain Trenchement made war against the city of Kalacahabalaba, utterly discomfited the great king, Bigstaff, and blew up his whole army by sneezing. Another imparted a sage idea, which seems to have occupied more heads than one; that is, that the best way of fortifying the harbor was to ruin it at once—choke the channel with rocks and blocks; strew it with _chevaux-de-frise_ and torpedoes, and make it like a nursery-garden, full of men-traps and spring-guns. No vessel would then have the temerity to enter our harbor; we should not even dare to navigate it ourselves. Or, if no cheaper way could be devised, let Governor’s Island be raised by levers and pulleys—floated with empty casks, etc., towed down to the Narrows, and dropped plump in the very mouth of the harbor!

“But,” said I, “would not the prosecution of these whimwhams be rather expensive and dilatory?”

“Pshaw!” cried the other, “what’s a million of money to an experiment? The true spirit of our economy requires that we should spare no expense in discovering the cheapest mode of defending ourselves; and then if all these modes should fail, why, you know the worst we have to do is to return to the old-fashioned humdrum mode of forts and batteries.”

“By which time,” cried I, “the arrival of the enemy may have rendered their erection superfluous.”

A shrewd old gentleman who stood listening by, with a mischievously equivocal look, observed that the most effectual mode of repulsing a fleet from our ports would be to administer them a proclamation from time to time, till it operated.

Unwilling to leave the company without demonstrating my patriotism and ingenuity, I communicated a plan of defense; which, in truth, was suggested long since by that infallible oracle, Mustapha, who had as clear a head for cobweb weaving as ever dignified the shoulders of a projector. He thought the most effectual mode would be to assemble all the _slang-whangers_, great and small, from all parts of the State, and marshal them at the Battery, where they should be exposed pointblank to the enemy, and form a tremendous body of scolding infantry, similar to the _poissards_, or doughty champions of Billingsgate. They should be exhorted to fire away without pity or remorse, in sheets, half-sheets, columns, handbills, or squibs; great cannon, little cannon, pica, German text, stereotype, and to run their enemies through and through with sharp-pointed italics. They should have orders to show no quarter—to blaze away in their loudest epithets—“_miscreants!_” “_murderers!_” “_barbarians!_” “_pirates!_” “_robbers!_” “BLACKGUARDS!” and to do away all fear of consequences, they should be guaranteed from all dangers of pillory, kicking, cuffing, nose-pulling, whipping-post, or prosecution for libels. “If,” continued Mustapha, “you wish men to fight well and valiantly, they must be allowed those weapons they have been used to handle. Your countrymen are notoriously adroit in the management of the tongue and the pen, and conduct all their battles by speeches or newspapers. Adopt, therefore, the plan I have pointed out; and rely upon it that, let any fleet, however large, be but once assailed by this battery of slang-whangers, and if they have not entirely lost the sense of hearing, or a regard for their own characters and feelings, they will, at the very first fire, slip their cables, and retreat with as much precipitation as if they had unwarily entered into the atmosphere of the _Bohan upas_. In this manner may your wars be conducted with proper economy; and it will cost no more to drive off a fleet than to write up a party, or write down a bashaw with three tails.”

The sly old gentleman I have before mentioned, was highly delighted with this plan; and proposed, as an improvement, that mortars should be placed on the Battery, which, instead of throwing shells and such trifles, might be charged with newspapers, Tammany addresses, etc., by way of red-hot shot, which would undoubtedly be very potent in blowing up any powder magazine they might chance to come in contact with. He concluded by informing the company, that in the course of a few evenings, he would have the honor to present them with a scheme for loading certain vessels with newspapers, resolutions of “numerous and respectable meetings,” and other combustibles, which vessels were to be blown directly in the midst of the enemy by the bellows of the slang-whangers; and he was much mistaken if they would not be more fatal than fire-ships, bomb-ketches, gun-boats, or even torpedoes.

These are but two or three specimens of the nature and efficacy of the innumerable plans with which this city abounds. Everybody seems charged to the muzzle with gunpowder—every eye flashes fire-works and torpedoes—and every corner is occupied by knots of inflammatory projectors, not one of whom but has some preposterous mode of destruction, which he has proved to be infallible by a previous experiment in a tub of water!

Even Jeremy Cockloft has caught the infection, to the great annoyance of the inhabitants of Cockloft Hall, whither he retired to make his experiments undisturbed. At one time all the mirrors in the house were unhung—their collected rays thrown into the hot-house, to try Archimedes’ plan of burning-glasses; and the honest old gardener was almost knocked down by what he mistook for a stroke of the sun, but which turned out to be nothing more than a sudden attack of one of these tremendous jack-o’-lanterns. It became dangerous to walk through the court-yard for fear of an explosion; and the whole family was thrown into absolute distress and consternation, by a letter from the old housekeeper to Mrs. Cockloft, informing her of his having blown up a favorite Chinese gander, which I had brought from Canton, as he was majestically sailing in the duck-pond.

“In the multitude of counselors there is safety;” if so, the defenseless city of Gotham has nothing to apprehend; but much do I fear that so many excellent and infallible projects will be presented, that we shall be at a loss which to adopt; and the peaceable inhabitants fare like a famous projector of my acquaintance, whose house was unfortunately plundered while he was contriving a patent lock to secure his door.

FROM MY ELBOW-CHAIR. A RETROSPECT; OR, “WHAT YOU WILL.”

Lolling in my elbow-chair this fine summer noon, I feel myself insensibly yielding to that genial feeling of indolence the season is so well fitted to inspire. Every one who is blessed with a little of the delicious languor of disposition that delights in repose, must often have sported among the fairy scenes, the golden visions, the voluptuous reveries, that swim before the imagination at such moments, and which so much resemble those blissful sensations a Mussulman enjoys after his favorite indulgence of opium, which Will Wizard declares can be compared to nothing but “swimming in an ocean of peacocks’ feathers.” In such a mood everybody must be sensible it would be idle and unprofitable for a man to send his wits a gadding on a voyage of discovery into futurity, or even to trouble himself with a laborious investigation of what is actually passing under his eye. We are, at such times, more disposed to resort to the pleasures of memory than to those of the imagination; and, like the wayfaring traveller, reclining for a moment on his staff, had rather contemplate the ground we have travelled, than the region which is yet before us.

I could here amuse myself, and stultify my readers, with a most elaborate and ingenious parallel between authors and travellers; but in this balmy season, which makes men stupid and dogs mad, and when, doubtless, many of our most strenuous admirers have great difficulty in keeping awake through the day, it would be cruel to saddle them with the formidable difficulty of putting two ideas together and drawing a conclusion, or, in the learned phrase, forging _syllogisms in Baroco_—a terrible undertaking for the dog days! To say the truth, my observations were only intended to prove that this, of all others, is the most auspicious moment, and my present, the favorable mood for indulging in a retrospect. Whether, like certain great personages of the day, in attempting to prove one thing, I have exposed another; or whether, like certain other great personages, in attempting to prove a great deal, I have proved nothing at all, I leave to my readers to decide, provided they have the power and inclination so to do; but a _retrospect_ will I take, notwithstanding.

I am perfectly aware that in doing this I shall lay myself open to the charge of imitation, than which a man might be better accused of downright housebreaking; for it has been a standing rule with many of my illustrious predecessors, occasionally, and particularly at the conclusion of a volume, to look over their shoulder and chuckle at the miracles they had achieved. But, as I before professed, I am determined to hold myself entirely independent of all manner of opinions and criticisms, as the only method of getting on in this world in anything like a straight line. True it is, I may sometimes seem to angle a little for the good opinion of mankind, by giving them some excellent reasons for doing unreasonable things; but this is merely to show them, that although I may occasionally go wrong, it is not for want of knowing how to go right; and here I will lay down a maxim, which will forever entitle me to the gratitude of my inexperienced readers, namely, that a man always gets more credit in the eyes of this naughty world for sinning willfully than for sinning through sheer ignorance.

It will doubtless be insisted by many ingenious cavilers, who will be meddling with what does not at all concern them, that this retrospect should have been taken at the commencement of our second volume; it is usual, I know: moreover it is natural. So soon as a writer has once accomplished a volume, he forthwith becomes wonderfully increased in attitude! he steps upon his book as upon a pedestal, and is elevated in proportion to its magnitude. A duodecimo makes him one inch taller; an octavo, three inches; a quarto, six; but he who has made out to swell a folio looks down upon his fellow creatures from such a fearful height that, ten to one, the poor man’s head is turned forever afterward. From such a lofty situation, therefore, it is natural an author should cast his eyes behind, and having reached the first landing-place on the stairs of immortality, may reasonably be allowed to plead his privilege to look back over the height he has ascended. I have deviated a little from this venerable custom, merely that our retrospect might fall in the dog days—of all days in the year most congenial to the indulgence of a little self-sufficiency, inasmuch as people have then little to do but to retire within the sphere of self, and make the most of what they find there.

Let it not be supposed, however, that we think ourselves a whit the wiser or better since we have finished our volume than we were before; on the contrary, we seriously assure our readers that we were fully possessed of all the wisdom and morality it contains at the moment we commenced writing. It is the world which has grown wiser, not us; we have thrown our mite into the common stock of knowledge, we have shared our morsel with the ignorant multitude; and so far from elevating ourselves above the world, our sole endeavor has been to raise the world to our own level, and make it as wise as we, its disinterested benefactors.

To a moral writer like myself, who, next to his own comfort and entertainment, has the good of his fellow-citizens at heart, a retrospect is but a sorry amusement. Like the industrious husbandman, he often contemplates in silent disappointment his labors wasted on a barren soil, or the seeds he has carefully sown, choked by a redundancy of worthless weeds. I expected long ere this to have seen a complete reformation in manners and morals, achieved by our united efforts. My fancy echoed to the applauding voices of a retrieved generation; I anticipated, with proud satisfaction, the period, not far distant, when our work would be introduced into the academies with which every lane and alley of our cities abounds; when our precepts would be gently inducted into every unlucky urchin by force of birch, and my iron-bound physiognomy, as taken by Will Wizard, be as notorious as that of Noah Webster, junr. Esq. or his no less renowned predecessor, the illustrious Dilworth of spelling-book immortality.[64] But, well-a-day! to let my readers into a profound secret—the expectations of man are like the varied hues that tinge the distant prospect; never to be realized, never to be enjoyed but in perspective. Luckless Launcelot, that the humblest of the many air castles thou hast erected should prove a “baseless fabric!” Much does it grieve me to confess, that after all our lectures, precepts, and excellent admonitions, the people of New York are nearly as much given to backsliding and ill-nature as ever; they are just as much abandoned to dancing and tea-drinking; and as to scandal, Will Wizard informs me that, by a rough computation, since the last cargo of gunpowder-tea from Canton, no less than eighteen characters have been blown up, besides a number of others that have been wofully shattered.

The ladies still labor under the same scarcity of muslins, and delight in flesh-colored silk stockings; it is evident, however, that our advice has had very considerable effect on them, as they endeavor to act as opposite to it as possible; this being what Evergreen calls female independence. As to Straddles, they abound as much as ever in Broadway, particularly on Sundays; and Wizard roundly asserts that he supped in company with a knot of them a few evenings since, when they liquidated a whole Birmingham consignment, in a batch of imperial champagne. I have, furthermore, in the course of a month past, detected no less than three Giblet families making their first onset toward style and gentility in the very manner we have heretofore reprobated. Nor have our utmost efforts been able to check the progress of that alarming epidemic, the rage for punning, which, though doubtless originally intended merely to ornament and enliven conversation by little sports of fancy, threatens to overrun and poison the whole, like the baneful ivy which destroys the useful plant it first embellished. Now I look upon a habitual punster as a depredator upon conversation; and I have remarked sometimes one of these offenders, sitting silent on the watch for an hour together, until some luckless wight, unfortunately for the ease and quiet of the company, dropped a phrase susceptible of a double meaning; when—pop, our punster would dart out like a veteran mouser from her covert, seize the unlucky word, and after worrying and mumbling at it until it was capable of no further marring, relapse again into silent watchfulness, and lie in wait for another opportunity. Even this might be borne with, by the aid of a little philosophy; but the worst of it is, they are not content to manufacture puns and laugh heartily at them themselves; but they expect we should laugh with them, which I consider as an intolerable hardship, and a flagrant imposition on good-nature. Let those gentlemen fritter away conversation with impunity, and deal out their wits in sixpenny bits if they please; but I beg I may have the choice of refusing currency to their small change. I am seriously afraid, however, that our junto is not quite free from the infection—nay, that it has even approached so near as to menace the tranquillity of my elbow-chair; for Will Wizard, as we were in caucus the other night, absolutely electrified Pindar and myself with a most palpable and perplexing pun; had it been a torpedo, it could not have more discomposed the fraternity. Sentence of banishment was unanimously decreed; but on his confessing that, like many celebrated wits, he was merely retailing other men’s wares on commission, he was for that once forgiven on condition of refraining from such diabolical practices in future. Pindar is particularly outrageous against punsters; and quite astonished and put me to a nonplus a day or two since, by asking abruptly “whether I thought a punster could be a good Christian?” He followed up his question triumphantly by offering to prove, by sound logic and historical fact, that the Roman Empire owed its decline and fall to a pun; and that nothing tended so much to demoralize the French nation, as their abominable rage for _jeux de mots_.

But what, above everything else, has caused me much vexation of spirit, and displeased me most with this stiff-necked nation is, that in spite of all the serious and profound censures of the sage Mustapha, in his various letters—they _will talk_!—they will still wag their tongues, and chatter like very slang-whangers! This is a degree of obstinancy incomprehensible in the extreme; and is another proof how alarming is the force of habit, and how difficult it is to reduce beings, accustomed to talk, to that state of silence which is the very acme of human wisdom.

We can only account for these disappointments in our moderate and reasonable expectations, by supposing the world so deeply sunk in the mire of delinquency, that not even Hercules, were he to put his shoulder to the axletree, would be able to extricate it. We comfort ourselves, however, by the reflection that there are at least three good men left in this degenerate age to benefit the world by example, should precept ultimately fail. And borrowing, for once, an example from certain sleepy writers who, after the first emotions of surprise at finding their invaluable effusions neglected or despised, console themselves with the idea that ’tis a stupid age, and look forward to posterity for redress, we bequeath our volume to future generations—and much good may it do them. Heaven grant they may be able to read it! for, if our fashionable mode of education continues to improve, as of late, I am under serious apprehensions that the period is not far distant when the discipline of the dancing-master will supersede that of the grammarian; crotchets and quavers supplant the alphabet: and the heels, by an antipodean maneuver, obtain entire preeminence over the head. How does my heart yearn for poor, dear posterity, when this work shall become unintelligible to our grandchildren, as it seems to be their grandfathers and grandmothers.

In fact—for I love to be candid—we begin to suspect that many people read our numbers merely for their amusement, without paying any attention to the serious truths conveyed in every page. Unpardonable want of penetration! not that we wish to restrict our readers in the article of laughing, which we consider as one of the dearest prerogatives of man, and the distinguishing characteristic which raises him above all other animals: let them laugh, therefore, if they will, provided they profit at the same time, and do not mistake our object. It is one of our indisputable facts that it is easier to laugh ten follies out of countenance than to coax, reason, or flog a man out of one. In this odd, singular, and indescribable age,—which is neither the age of gold, silver, iron, brass, chivalry, or _pills_, as Sir John Carr asserts,—a grave writer who attempts to attack folly with the heavy artillery of moral reasoning, will fare like Smollett’s honest pedant, who clearly demonstrated by angles, etc., after the manner of Euclid, that it was wrong to do evil—and was laughed at for his pains. Take my word for it, a little well-applied ridicule, like Hannibal’s application of vinegar to rocks, will do more with certain hard heads and obdurate hearts, than all the logic or demonstrations in Longinus or Euclid. But the people of Gotham, wise souls! are so much accustomed to see Morality approach them clothed in formidable wigs and sable garbs, “with leaden eye that loves the ground,” that they can never recognize her when, drest in gay attire, she comes tripping toward them with smiles and sunshine in her countenance.—Well, let the rogues remain in happy ignorance, for “ignorance is bliss” as the poet says—and I put as implicit faith in poetry as I do in the almanac or the newspaper. We will improve them, without their being the wiser for it, and they shall become better in spite of their teeth, and without their having the least suspicion of the reformation working within them.

Among all our manifold grievances, however, still some small but vivid rays of sunshine occasionally brighten along our path; cheering our steps, and inviting us to persevere.

The public have paid some little regard to a few articles of our advice; they have purchased our numbers freely—so much the better for our publisher; they have read them attentively—so much the better for themselves. The melancholy fate of my dear aunt Charity has had a wonderful effect; and I have now before me a letter from a gentleman who lives opposite to a couple of old ladies, remarkable for the interest they took in his affairs; his apartments were absolutely in a state of blockade, and he was on the point of changing his lodgings, or capitulating, until the appearance of our ninth number, which he immediately sent over with his compliments. The good ladies took the hint, and have scarcely appeared at their window since. As to the wooden gentlemen, our friend, Miss Sparkle, assures me, they are wonderfully improved by our criticisms, and sometimes venture to make a remark, or attempt a pun in company, to the great edification of all who happen to understand them. As to the red shawls, they are entirely discarded from the fair shoulders of our ladies—ever since the last importation of finery—nor has any lady, since the cold weather, ventured to expose her elbows to the admiring gaze of scrutinizing passengers. But there is one victory we have achieved which has given us more pleasure than to have written down the whole administration: I am assured, from unquestionable authority, that our young ladies—doubtless in consequence of our weighty admonitions—have not once indulged in that intoxicating, inflammatory, and whirligig dance, the waltz—ever since hot weather commenced. True it is, I understand an attempt was made to exhibit it by some of the sable fair ones at the last African ball, but it was highly disapproved of by all the respectable elderly ladies present.

These are sweet sources of comfort to atone for the many wrongs and misrepresentations heaped upon us by the world—for even we have experienced its ill-nature. How often have we heard ourselves reproached for the insidious applications of the uncharitable! how often have we been accused of emotions which never found an entrance into our bosoms! how often have our sportive effusions been wrested to serve the purposes of particular enmity and bitterness! Meddlesome spirits! little do they know our disposition: we “lack gall” to wound the feelings of a single innocent individual; we can even forgive them from the very bottom of our souls; may they meet as ready a forgiveness from their own consciences! Like true and independent bachelors, having no domestic cares to interfere with our general benevolence, we consider it incumbent upon us to watch over the welfare of society; and although we are indebted to the world for little else than left-handed favors, yet we feel a proud satisfaction in requiting evil with good, and the sneer of illiberality with the unfeigned smile of good humor. With these mingled motives of selfishness and philanthropy we commenced our work, and if we cannot solace ourselves with the consciousness of having done much good, yet there is still one pleasing consolation left, which the world can neither give nor take away. There are moments—lingering moments of listless indifference and heavy-hearted despondency—when our best hopes and affections slipping, as they sometimes will, from their hold on those objects to which they usually cling for support, seem abandoned on the wide waste of cheerless existence, without a place to cast anchor; without a shore in view to excite a single wish, or to give a momentary interest to contemplation. We look back with delight upon many of these moments of mental gloom, whiled away by the cheerful exercise of our pen, and consider every such triumph over the spleen as retarding the furrowing hand of time in its insidious encroachments on our brows. If, in addition to our own amusement, we have, as we jogged carelessly laughing along, brushed away one tear of dejection and called forth a smile in its place—if we have brightened the pale countenance of a child of sorrow,—we shall feel almost as much joy and rejoicing as a slang-whanger does when he bathes his pen in the heart’s blood of a patron and benefactor, or sacrifices one more illustrious victim on the altar of party animosity.

TO READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS.

It is our misfortune to be frequently pestered, in our peregrinations about this blessed city, by certain critical gad-flies; who buzz around and merely attack the skin, without ever being able to penetrate the body. The reputation of our promising _protégé_, Jeremy Cockloft the younger, has been assailed by these skin-deep critics; they have questioned his claims to originality, and even hinted that the ideas for his New Jersey Tour were borrowed from a late work entitled “My Pocket-book.” As there is no literary offense more despicable in the eyes of the trio than borrowing, we immediately called Jeremy to an account; when he proved, by the dedication of the work in question, that it was first published in London in March, 1807; and that his “Stranger in New Jersey” had made its appearance on the 24th of the preceding February.

We were on the point of acquitting Jeremy with honor on the ground that it was impossible, knowing as he is, to borrow from a foreign work one month before it was in existence; when Will Wizard suddenly took up the cudgels for the critics, and insisted that nothing was more probable, for he recollected reading of an ingenious Dutch author who plainly convicted the ancients of stealing from his labors!—So much for criticism.

* * * * *

We have received a host of friendly and admonitory letters from different quarters, and among the rest a very loving epistle from George town, Columbia, signed Teddy M’Gundy, who addresses us by the name of Saul M’Gundy, and insists that we are descended from the same Irish progenitors, and nearly related. As friend Teddy seems to be an honest, merry rogue, we are sorry that we cannot admit his claims to kindred; we thank him, however, for his good-will, and should he ever be inclined to favor us with another epistle, we will hint to him, and at the same time to our other numerous correspondents, that their communications will be infinitely more acceptable if they will just recollect Tom Shuffleton’s advice, “pay the post-boy, Muggins.”

NO. XIV.—SATURDAY, SEPT. 16, 1807.

LETTER FROM MUSTAPHA RUB-A-DUB KELI KHAN, TO ASEM HACCHEM, PRINCIPAL SLAVE-DRIVER TO HIS HIGHNESS THE BASHAW OF TRIPOLI.

Health and joy to the friend of my heart! May the angel of peace ever watch over thy dwelling, and the star of prosperity shed its benignant lustre on all thy undertakings. Far other is the lot of thy captive friend: his brightest hopes extend but to a lengthened period of weary captivity, and memory only adds to the measure of his griefs, by holding up a mirror which reflects with redoubled charms the hours of past felicity. In midnight slumbers my soul holds sweet converse with the tender objects of its affections: it is then the exile is restored to his country: it is then the wide waste of waters that rolls between us disappears, and I clasp to my bosom the companion of my youth; I awake and find it but a vision of the night. The sigh will rise; the tear of dejection will steal adown my cheek; I fly to my pen, and strive to forget myself, and my sorrows, in conversing with my friend.

In such a situation, my good Asem, it cannot be expected that I should be able so wholly to abstract myself from my own feelings, as to give thee a full and systematic account of the singular people among whom my disastrous lot has been cast. I can only find leisure, from my own individual sorrows, to entertain thee occasionally with some of the most prominent features of their character; and now and then a solitary picture of their most preposterous eccentricities.

I have before observed, that among the distinguishing characteristics of the people of this logocracy, is their invincible love of talking; and, that I could compare the nation to nothing but a mighty windmill. Thou art doubtless at a loss to conceive how this mill is supplied with grist; or, in other words, how it is possible to furnish subjects to supply the perpetual motion of so many tongues.

The genius of the nation appears in its highest lustre in this particular in the discovery, or rather the application of a subject which seems to supply an inexhaustible mine of words. It is nothing more, my friend, than “politics”; a word which, I declare to thee, has perplexed me almost as much as the redoubtable one of economy. On consulting a dictionary of this language, I found it denoted the science of government; and the relations, situations, and dispositions of states and empires. Good! thought I; for a people who boast of governing themselves, there could not be a more important subject of investigation. I therefore listened attentively, expecting to hear from “the most enlightened people under the sun,”—for so they modestly term themselves,—sublime disputations on the science of legislation, and precepts of political wisdom that would not have disgraced our great prophet and legislator himself!—but, alas, Asem! how continually are my expectations disappointed! how dignified a meaning does this word bear in the dictionary; how despicable its common application; I find it extending to every contemptible discussion of local animosity, and every petty altercation of insignificant individuals. It embraces, alike, all manner of concerns; from the organization of a divan, the election of a bashaw, or the levying of an army, to the appointment of a constable, the personal disputes of two miserable slang-whangers, the cleaning of the streets, or the economy of a dirt cart. A couple of politicians will quarrel, with the most vociferous pertinacity, about the character of a bum-bailiff whom nobody cares for; or the deportment of a little great man whom nobody knows; and this is called talking politics; nay! it is but few days since that I was annoyed by a debate between two of my fellow lodgers, who were magnanimously employed in condemning a luckless wight to infamy, because he chose to wear a red coat, and to entertain certain erroneous opinions some thirty years ago. Shocked at their illiberal and vindictive spirit, I rebuked them for thus indulging in slander and uncharitablenesses, about the color of a coat, which had doubtless for many years been worn out; or the belief in errors, which in all probability had been long since atoned for and abandoned; but they justified themselves by alleging that they were only engaged in politics, and exerting that liberty of speech, and freedom of discussion, which was the glory and safeguard of their national independence. “O Mahomet!” thought I, “what a country must that be, which builds its political safety on ruined characters and the persecution of individuals!”

Into what transports of surprise and incredulity am I continually betrayed, as the character of this eccentric people gradually develops itself to my observations. Every new research increases the perplexities in which I am involved, and I am more than ever at a loss where to place them in the scale of my estimation. It is thus the philosopher, in pursuing truth through the labyrinth of doubt, error, and misrepresentation, frequently finds himself bewildered in the mazes of contradictory experience; and almost wishes he could quietly retrace his wandering steps, steal back into the path of honest ignorance, and jog on once more in contented indifference.

How fertile in these contradictions is this extensive logocracy! Men of different nations, manners, and languages, live in this country in the most perfect harmony; and nothing is more common than to see individuals, whose respective governments are at variance, taking each other by the hand and exchanging the offices of friendship. Nay, even on the subject of religion, which, as it affects our dearest interests, our earliest opinions and prejudices, some warmth and heart-burnings might be excused, which, even in our enlightened country, is so fruitful in difference between man and man!—even religion occasions no dissension among these people; and it has even been discovered, by one of their sages, that believing in one god or twenty gods “neither breaks a man’s leg nor picks his pocket.”[65] The idolatrous Persian may here bow down before his everlasting fire, and prostrate himself toward the glowing east. The Chinese may adore his Fo, or his Josh; the Egyptian his stork; and the Mussulman practice, unmolested, the divine precepts of our immortal prophet. Nay, even the forlorn, abandoned Atheist, who lies down at night without committing himself to the protection of Heaven, and rises in the morning without returning thanks for his safety! who hath no deity but his own will; whose soul, like the sandy desert, is barren of every flower of hope to throw a solitary bloom over the dead level of sterility and soften the wide extent of desolation; whose darkened views extend not beyond the horizon that bounds his cheerless existence; to whom no blissful perspective opens beyond the grave—even he is suffered to indulge in his desperate opinions, without exciting one other emotion than pity or contempt. But this mild and tolerating spirit reaches not beyond the pale of religion: once differ in politics, in mere theories, visions, and chimeras, the growth of interest, of folly, or madness, and deadly warfare ensues; every eye flashes fire, every tongue is loaded with reproach, and every heart is filled with gall and bitterness.

At this period several unjustifiable and serious injuries on the part of the barbarians of the British Island, have given a new impulse to the tongue and the pen, and occasioned a terrible wordy fever. Do not suppose, my friend, that I mean to condemn any proper and dignified expression of resentment for injuries. On the contrary, I love to see a word before a blow; for “in the fullness of the heart the tongue moveth.” But my long experience has convinced me, that people who talk the most about taking satisfaction for affronts, generally content themselves with talking instead of revenging the insult; like the street women of this country, who after a prodigious scolding, quietly sit down and fan themselves cool as fast as possible. But to return: the rage for talking has now, in consequence of the agressions I alluded to, increased to a degree far beyond what I have observed heretofore. In the gardens of His Highness of Tripoli are fifteen thousand bee-hives, three hundred peacocks, and a prodigious number of parrots and baboons; and yet I declare to thee, Asem, that their buzzing, and squalling, and chattering is nothing compared to the wild uproar and war of words, now raging within the bosom of this mighty and distracted logocracy. Politics pervade every city, every village, every temple, every porter house: the universal question is, “what is the news?” This is a kind of challenge to political debate; and as no two men think exactly alike, ’tis ten to one, but before they finish, all the polite phrases in the language are exhausted by way of giving fire and energy to argument. What renders this talking fever more alarming is, that the people appear to be in the unhappy state of a patient whose palate nauseates the medicine best calculated for the cure of his disease, and seem anxious to continue the full enjoyment of their chattering epidemic. They alarm each other by direful reports and fearful apprehensions; like I have seen a lot of old wives in this country entertain themselves with stories of ghosts and goblins until their imaginations were in a most agonizing panic. Every day begets some new tale, big with agitation; and the busy goddess, Rumor, to speak in the poetic language of the Christians, is constantly in motion. She mounts her rattling stage-wagon, and gallops about the country, freighted with a load of “hints,” “informations,” “extracts of letters from respectable gentlemen,” “observations of respectable correspondents,” and “unquestionable authorities;”—which her high-priests, the slang-whangers, retail to their sapient followers, with all the solemnity, and all the authenticity of oracles. True it is, the unfortunate slang-whangers are sometimes at a loss for food, to supply this insatiable appetite for intelligence; and are, not unfrequently, reduced to the necessity of manufacturing dishes suited to the taste of the times, to be served up as morning and evening repasts to their disciples.

When the hungry politician is thus full charged with important information, he sallies forth to give due exercise to his tongue; and tells all he knows, to everybody he meets. Now it is a thousand to one that every person he meets is just as wise as himself, charged with the same articles of information, and possessed of the same violent inclination to give it vent; for in this country every man adopts some particular slang-whanger, as the standard of his judgment, and reads everything he writes if he reads nothing else; which is doubtless the reason why the people of this logocracy are so marvelously enlightened. So away they tilt at each other with their borrowed lances, advancing to the combat with the opinions and speculations of their respective slang-whangers, which, in all probability, are diametrically opposite. Here then arises as fair an opportunity for a battle of words as heart could wish; and thou mayst rely upon it, Asem, they do not let it pass unimproved. They sometimes begin with argument; but in process of time, as the tongue begins to wax wanton, other auxiliaries become necessary; recrimination commences; reproach follows close at its heels; from political abuse they proceed to personal, and thus often is a friendship of years trampled down by this contemptible enemy, this gigantic dwarf of POLITICS, the mongrel issue of groveling ambition and aspiring ignorance!

There would be but little harm, indeed, in all this, if it ended merely in a broken head; for this might soon be healed, and the scar, if any remained, might serve as a warning ever after against the indulgence of political intemperance; at the worst, the loss of such heads as these would be a gain to the nation. But the evil extends far deeper; it threatens to impair all social intercourse, and even to sever the sacred union of family and kindred. The convivial table is disturbed; the cheerful fireside is invaded; the smile of social hilarity is chased away; the bond of social love is broken by the everlasting intrusion of this fiend of contention, who lurks in the sparkling bowl, crouches by the fireside, in the friendly circle, infests every avenue to pleasure; and, like the scowling incubus, sits on the bosom of society, pressing down and smothering every throb and pulsation of liberal philanthropy.

But thou wilt perhaps ask, “What can these people dispute about? One would suppose that, being all free and equal, they would harmonize as brothers; children of the same parent, and equal heirs of the same inheritance.” This theory is most exquisite, my good friend, but in practice it turns out the very dream of a madman. Equality, Asem, is one of the most consummate scoundrels that ever crept from the brain of a political juggler—a fellow who thrusts his hand into the pocket of honest industry, or enterprising talent, and squanders their hard-earned profits on profligate idleness or indolent stupidity. There will always be an inequality among mankind so long as a portion of it is enlightened and industrious, and the rest idle and ignorant. The one will acquire a larger share of wealth, and its attendant comforts, refinements, and luxuries of life, and the influence and power which those will always possess who have the greatest ability of administering to the necessities of their fellow creatures. These advantages will inevitably excite envy; and envy as inevitably begets ill-will—hence arises that eternal warfare which the lower orders of society are waging against those who have raised themselves by their own merits, or have been raised by the merits of their ancestors, above the common level. In a nation possessed of quick feelings and impetuous passions, the hostility might engender deadly broils and bloody commotions; but here it merely vents itself in high-sounding words, which lead to continual breaches of decorum, or in the insidious assassination of character, and a restless propensity among the base to blacken every reputation which is fairer than their own.

I cannot help smiling, sometimes, to see the solicitude with which the people of America, so called from the country having been first discovered by Christopher Columbus, battle about them when any election takes place, as if they had the least concern in the matter, or were to be benefited by an exchange of bashaws; they really seem ignorant that none but the bashaws and their dependents are at all interested in the event; and that the people at large will not find their situation altered in the least. I formerly gave thee an account of an election which took place under my eye. The result has been that the people, as some of the slang-whangers say, have obtained a glorious triumph, which, however, is flatly denied by the opposite slang-whangers, who insist that their party is composed of the true sovereign people; and that the others are all jacobins, Frenchmen, and Irish rebels. I ought to apprise thee that the last is a term of great reproach here; which, perhaps, thou wouldst not otherwise imagine, considering that it is not many years since this very people were engaged in a revolution; the failure of which would have subjected them to the same ignominious epithet, and a participation in which is now the highest recommendation to public confidence. By Mahomet, but it cannot be denied that the consistency of this people, like everything else appertaining to them, is on a prodigious great scale! To return, however, to the event of the election. The people triumphed; and much good has it done them. I, for my part expected to see wonderful changes, and most magical metamorphoses. I expected to see the people all rich, that they would be all gentleman bashaws, riding in their coaches and faring sumptuously every day, emancipated from toil, and reveling in luxurious ease. Wilt thou credit me, Asem, when I declare unto thee, that everything remains exactly in the same state it was before the last wordy campaign? except a few noisy retainers who have crept into office, and a few noisy patriots, on the other side, who have been kicked out, there is not the least difference. The laborer toils for his daily support; the beggar still lives on the charity of those who have any charity to bestow; and the only solid satisfaction the multitude have reaped is, that they have got a new governor, or bashaw, whom they will praise, idolize, and exalt for a while, and afterward, notwithstanding the sterling merits he really possesses, in compliance with immemorial custom, they will abuse, calumniate, and trample him under foot.

Such, my dear Asem, is the way in which the wise people of “the most enlightened country under the sun,” are amused with straws, and puffed up with mighty conceits; like a certain fish I have seen here, which having his belly tickled for a short time, will swell and puff himself up to twice his usual size, and become a mere bladder of wind and vanity.

The blessing of a true Mussulman light on thee, good Asem; ever, while thou livest, be true to thy prophet; and rejoice that, though the boasting political chatterers of this logocracy cast upon thy countrymen the ignominious epithet of slaves, thou livest in a country where the people instead of being at the mercy of a tyrant with a million of heads, have nothing to do but submit to the will of a bashaw of only three tails.

Ever thine, MUSTAPHA.

COCKLOFT HALL.

BY LAUNCELOT LANGSTAFF, ESQ.

Those who pass their time immured in the smoke of the city, amid the rattling of carts, the brawling of the multitude, and the variety of discordant sounds that prey insensibly upon the nerves, and beget a weariness of the spirits, can alone understand and feel that expansion of the heart, that physical renovation which a citizen experiences when he steals forth from his dusty prison, to breathe the free air of heaven, and enjoy the clear face of nature. Who that has rambled by the side of one of our majestic rivers, at the hour of sunset, when the wildly romantic scenery around is softened and tinted by the voluptuous mist of evening; when the bold and swelling outlines of the distant mountain seem melting into the glowing horizon, and a rich mantle of refulgence is thrown over the whole expanse of the heavens, but must have felt how abundant is nature in sources of pure enjoyment; how luxuriant in all that can enliven the senses or delight the imagination. The jocund zephyr full freighted with native fragrance, sues sweetly to the senses; the chirping of the thousand varieties of insects with which our woodlands abound forms a concert of simple melody; even the barking of the farm dog, the lowing of the cattle, the tinkling of their bells, and the strokes of the woodman’s axe from the opposite shore, seem to partake of the softness of the scene, and fall tunefully upon the ear; while the voice of the villager, chanting some rustic ballad, swells from a distance, in the semblance of the very music of harmonious love.

At such times I am conscious of the influence of nature upon the heart; a hallowed calm is diffused over my senses; I cast my eyes around, and every object is serene, simple, and beautiful; no warring passion, no discordant string, there vibrates to the touch of ambition, self-interest, hatred, or revenge; I am at peace with the whole world, and hail all mankind as friends and brothers. Blissful moments! ye recall the careless days of my boyhood, when mere existence was happiness, when hope was certainty, this world a paradise, and every woman a ministering angel! Surely man was designed for a tenant of the universe, instead of being pent up in these dismal cages, these dens of strife, disease, and discord. We were created to range the fields, to sport among the groves, to build castles in the air, and have every one of them realized!

A whole legion of reflections like these insinuated themselves into my mind, and stole me from the influence of the cold realities before me, as I took my accustomed walk a few weeks since on the Battery. Here, watching the splendid mutations of one of our summer skies, which emulated the boasted glories of an Italian sunset, I all at once discovered that it was but pack up my portmanteau, bid adieu for awhile to my elbow-chair, and in a little time I should be transported from the region of smoke, and noise, and dust, to the enjoyment of a far sweeter prospect and a brighter sky. The next morning I was off full tilt to Cockloft Hall, leaving my man Pompey to follow at his leisure with my baggage. I love to indulge in rapid transitions, which are prompted by the quick impulse of the moment; ’tis the only mode of guarding against that intruding and deadly foe to all parties of pleasure—anticipation.

Having now made good my retreat until the black frosts commence, it is but a piece of civility due to my readers, who I trust are, ere this, my friends, to give them a proper introduction to my present residence. I do this as much to gratify them as myself; well knowing a reader is always anxious to learn how his author is lodged, whether in a garret, a cellar, a hovel, or a palace; at least an author is generally vain enough to think so; and an author’s vanity ought sometimes to be gratified. Poor devil! it is often the only gratification he ever tastes in this world!

Cockloft Hall is the country residence of the family, or rather the paternal mansion; which, like the mother country, sends forth whole colonies to people the face of the earth. Pindar whimsically denominates it the family hive! and there is at least as much truth as humor in my cousin’s epithet; for many a swarm has it produced. I don’t recollect whether I have at any time mentioned to my readers, for I seldom look back on what I have written, that the fertility of the Cocklofts is proverbial. The female members of the family are most incredibly fruitful; and to use a favorite phrase of old Cockloft, who is excessively addicted to backgammon, they seldom fail “to throw doublets every time.” I myself have known three or four very industrious young men reduced to great extremities by some of these capital breeders; Heaven smiled upon their union, and enriched them with a numerous and hopeful offspring, who eat them out of doors.

But to return to the Hall. It is pleasantly situated on the banks of a sweet pastoral stream; not so near town as to invite an inundation of idle acquaintance, who come to lounge away an afternoon, nor so distant as to render it an absolute deed of charity or friendship to perform the journey. It is one of the oldest habitations in the country, and was built by my cousin Christopher’s grandfather, who was also mine by the mother’s side, in his latter days, to form, as the old gentleman expressed himself, “a snug retreat, where he meant to sit himself down in his old days, and be comfortable for the rest of his life.” He was at this time a few years over four-score; but this was a common saying of his, with which he usually closed his airy speculations. One would have thought, from the long vista of years through which he contemplated many of his projects, that the good man had forgot the age of the patriarchs had long since gone by, and calculated living a century longer at least. He was for a considerable time in doubt, on the question of roofing his house with shingles or slates: shingles would not last above thirty years! but then they were much cheaper than slates. He settled the matter by a kind of compromise, and determined to build with shingles first; “and when they are worn out,” said the old gentleman, triumphantly, “‘twill be time enough to replace them with more durable materials!” But his contemplated improvements surpassed everything; and scarcely had he a roof over his head when he discovered a thousand things to be arranged before he could “sit down comfortably.” In the first place, every tree and bush on the place was cut down or grubbed up by the roots, because they were not placed to his mind; and a vast quantity of oaks, chestnuts, and elms, set out in clumps, and rows, and labyrinths, which, he observed, in about five-and-twenty or thirty years at most, would yield a very tolerable shade, and, moreover, would shut out all the surrounding country; for he was determined, he said, to have all his views on his own land, and be beholden to no man for a prospect. This, my learned readers will perceive, was something very like the idea of Lorenzo de Medici, who gave as a reason for preferring one of his seats above all the others, “that all the ground within view of it was his own;” now, whether my grandfather ever heard of the Medici is more than I can say; I rather think, however, from the characteristic originality of the Cocklofts, that it was a whimwham of his own begetting. Another odd notion of the old gentleman was to blow up a large bed of rocks for the purpose of having a fish-pond, although the river ran at about one hundred yards’ distance from the house, and was well stored with fish; but there was nothing, he said, like having things to one’s self. So at it he went, with all the ardor of a projector who has just hit upon some splendid and useless whimwham. As he proceeded, his views enlarged; he would have a summer-house built on the margin of the fish-pond; he would have it surrounded with elms and willows; and he would have a cellar dug under it, for some incomprehensible purpose, which remains a secret to this day.[66] “In a few years,” he observed, “it would be a delightful piece of wood and water, where he might ramble on a summer’s noon, smoke his pipe, and enjoy himself in his old days;” thrice honest old soul!—he died of an apoplexy in his ninetieth year, just as he had begun to blow up the fish-pond.

Let no one ridicule the whimwhams of my grandfather. If—and of this there is no doubt, for wise men have said it—if life be but a dream, happy is he who can make the most of the illusion.

Since my grandfather’s death the Hall has passed through the hands of a succession of true old cavaliers, like himself, who gloried in observing the golden rules of hospitality; which, according to the Cockloft principle, consists in giving a guest the freedom of the house, cramming him with beef and pudding, and, if possible, laying him under the table with prime port, claret, or London Particular. The mansion appears to have been consecrated to the jolly god, and teems with monuments sacred to conviviality. Every chest of drawers, clothes-press, and cabinet is decorated with enormous China punch-bowls, which Mrs. Cockloft has paraded with much ostentation, particularly in her favorite red damask bed-chamber, in which a projector might, with great satisfaction, practice his experiments on fleets, diving-bells, and submarine boats.

I have before mentioned Cousin Christopher’s profound veneration for antique furniture; in consequence of which the old hall is furnished in much the same style with the house in town. Old-fashioned bedsteads, with high testers; massy clothes-presses, standing most majestically on eagles’ claws, and ornamented with a profusion of shining brass handles, clasps, and hinges; and around the grand parlor are solemnly arranged a set of high-backed, leather-bottomed, massy mahogany chairs, that always remind me of the formal, long-waisted belles who flourished in stays and buckram about the time they were in fashion.

If I may judge from their height, it was not the fashion for gentlemen in those days to loll over the back of a lady’s chair, and whisper in her ear what—might be as well spoken aloud; at least, they must have been Patagonians to have effected it. Will Wizard declares that he saw a little fat German gallant attempt once to whisper Miss Barbara Cockloft in this manner; but being unluckily caught by the chin, he dangled and kicked about for half a minute before he could find terra firma—but Will is much addicted to hyperbole, by reason of his having been a great traveller.

But what the Cocklofts most especially pride themselves upon, is the possession of several family portraits, which exhibit as honest a set of square, portly, well-fed looking gentlemen and gentlewomen as ever grew and flourished under the pencil of a Dutch painter. Old Christopher, who is a complete genealogist, has a story to tell of each, and dilates with copious eloquence on the great services of the general in large sleeves, during the old French war; and on the piety of the lady in blue velvet, who so attentively peruses her book, and was once so celebrated for a beautiful arm; but, much as I reverence my illustrious ancestors, I find little to admire in their biography, except my cousin’s excellent memory; which is most provokingly retentive of every uninteresting particular.

My allotted chamber in the Hall is the same that was occupied in days of yore by my honored uncle John. The room exhibits many memorials which recall to my remembrance the solid excellence and amiable eccentricities of that gallant old lad. Over the mantel-piece hangs the portrait of a young lady dressed in a flaring, long-waisted, blue silk gown; be-flowered, and be-furbelowed, and be-cuffed, in a most abundant manner; she holds in one hand a book, which she very complaisantly neglects, to turn and smile on the spectator; in the other a flower, which I hope, for the honor of Dame Nature, was the sole production of the painter’s imagination; and a little behind her is something tied to a blue ribbon, but whether a little dog, a monkey, or a pigeon, must be left to the judgment of future commentators. This little damsel, tradition says, was my uncle John’s third flame; and he would infallibly have run away with her, could he have persuaded her into the measure; but at that time ladies were not quite so easily run away with as Columbine; and my uncle, failing in the point, took a lucky thought, and with great gallantry ran off with her picture, which he conveyed in triumph to Cockloft Hall, and hung up in his bed-chamber as a monument of his enterprising spirit. The old gentleman prided himself mightily on this chivalric maneuver; always chuckled, and pulled up his stock when he contemplated the picture, and never related the exploit without winding up with—“I might, indeed, have carried off the original, had I chose to dangle a little longer after her chariot-wheels; for, to do the girl justice, I believe she had a liking for me; but I always scorned to coax, my boy—always—’twas my way.” My uncle John was of a happy temperament; I would give half I am worth for his talent at self-consolation.

The Miss Cocklofts have made several spirited attempts to introduce modern furniture into the Hall, but with very indifferent success. Modern style has always been an object of great annoyance to honest Christopher, and is ever treated by him with sovereign contempt, as an upstart intruder. It is a common observation of his, that your old-fashioned, substantial furniture bespeaks the respectability of one’s ancestors, and indicates that the family has been used to hold up its head for more than the present generation; whereas the fragile appendages of modern style seemed to be emblems of mushroom gentility, and, to his mind, predicted that the family dignity will moulder away and vanish with its transient finery. The same whimwham makes him averse to having his house surrounded with poplars; which he stigmatizes as mere upstarts, just fit to ornament the shingle palaces of modern gentry, and characteristic of the establishments they decorate. Indeed, so far does he carry his veneration for antique trumpery, that he can scarcely see the dust brushed from its resting-place on the old-fashioned testers, or a gray-bearded spider dislodged from its ancient inheritance, without groaning: and I once saw him in a transport of passion on Jeremy’s knocking down a mouldering martin-coop with his tennis-ball, which had been set up in the latter days of my grandfather. Another object of his peculiar affection is an old English cherry-tree, which leans against the corner of the Hall; and whether the house supports it, or it supports the house, would be, I believe, a question of some difficulty to decide. It is held sacred by friend Christopher because he planted and reared it himself, and had once well-nigh broken his neck by a fall from one of its branches. This is one of his favorite stories, and there is reason to believe, that if the tree was out of the way, the old gentleman would forget the whole affair—which would be a great pity. The old tree has long since ceased bearing, and is exceedingly infirm; every tempest robs it of a limb; and one would suppose from the lamentations of my old friend, on such occasions, that he had lost one of his own. He often contemplates it in a half-melancholy, half-moralizing humor—“together,” he says, “have we flourished, and together shall we wither away; a few years, and both our heads will be laid low, and, perhaps, my mouldering bones may, one day or other, mingle with the dust of the tree I have planted.” He often fancies, he says, that it rejoices to see him when he revisits the Hall, and that its leaves assume a brighter verdure, as if to welcome his arrival. How whimsically are our tenderest feelings assailed! At one time the old tree had obtruded a withered branch before Miss Barbara’s window, and she desired her father to order the gardener to saw it off. I shall never forget the old man’s answer, and the look that accompanied it. “What,” cried he, “lop off the limbs of my cherry-tree in its old age? Why do you not cut off the gray locks of your poor old father?”

Do my readers yawn at this long family detail? They are welcome to throw down our work, and never resume it again. I have no care for such ungratified spirits, and will not throw away a thought on one of them. Full often have I contributed to their amusement, and have not I a right, for once, to consult my own? Who is there that does not fondly turn, at times, to linger round those scenes which were once the haunt of his boyhood, ere his heart grew heavy and his head waxed gray; and to dwell with fond affection on the friends who have twined themselves round his heart—mingled in all his enjoyments—contributed to all his felicities? If there be any who cannot relish these enjoyments, let them despair; for they have been so soiled in their intercourse with the world, as to be incapable of tasting some of the purest pleasures that survive the happy period of youth.

To such as have not yet lost the rural feeling, I address this simple family picture; and in the honest sincerity of a warm heart, I invite them to turn aside from bustle, care, and toil, to tarry with me for a season, in the hospitable mansion of the Cocklofts.

* * * * *

[I was really apprehensive, on reading the following effusion of Will Wizard, that he still retained that pestilent hankering after puns of which we lately convicted him. He, however, declares that he is fully authorized by the example of the most popular critics and wits of the present age, whose manner and matter he has closely, and he flatters himself successfully, copied in the subsequent essay.]

THEATRICAL INTELLIGENCE.

BY WILLIAM WIZARD, ESQ.

The uncommon healthiness of the season, occasioned, as several learned physicians assure me, by the universal prevalence of the influenza, has encouraged the chieftain of our dramatic corps to marshal his forces, and to commence the campaign at a much earlier day than usual. He has been induced to take the field thus suddenly, I am told, by the invasion of certain foreign marauders, who pitched their tents at Vauxhall Garden during the warm months; and taking advantage of his army being disbanded and dispersed in summer quarters, committed sad depredations upon the borders of his territories, carrying off a considerable portion of his winter harvest, and murdering some of his most distinguished characters.

It is true, these hardy invaders have been reduced to great extremity by the late heavy rains, which injured and destroyed much of their camp equipage, besides spoiling the best part of their wardrobe. Two cities, a triumphal car, and a new moon for Cinderella, together with the barber’s boy who was employed every night to powder and make it shine white, have been entirely washed away, and the sea has become very wet and mouldy; insomuch that great apprehensions are entertained that it will never be dry enough for use. Add to this, the noble County Paris had the misfortune to tear his corduroy breeches, in the scuffle with Romeo, by reason of the tomb being very wet, which occasioned him to slip; and he and his noble rival possessing but one pair of satin ones between them, were reduced to considerable shifts to keep up the dignity of their respective houses. In spite of these disadvantages, and the untoward circumstances, they continued to enact most intrepidly; performing with much ease and confidence, inasmuch as they were seldom pestered with an audience to criticise and put them out of countenance. It is rumored that the last heavy shower absolutely dissolved the company, and that our manager has nothing further to apprehend from that quarter.

The theatre opened on Wednesday last, with great eclat, as we critics say, and almost vied in brilliancy with that of my superb friend Consequa in Canton, where the castles were all ivory, the sea mother of pearl, the skies gold and silver leaf, and the outside of the boxes inlaid with scollop shell-work. Those who want a better description of the theatre, may as well go and see it, and then they can judge for themselves. For the gratification of a highly respectable class of readers, who love to see everything on paper, I had indeed prepared a circumstantial and truly incomprehensible account of it, such as your traveller always fills his book with, and which I defy the most intelligent architect, even the great Sir Christopher Wren to understand. I had jumbled cornices, and pilasters, and pillars, and capitals, and triglyphs, and modules, and plinths, and volutes, and perspectives, and fore-shortenings, helter-skelter; and had set all the orders of architecture, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, etc., together by the ears, in order to work out a satisfactory description; but the manager having sent me a polite note requesting that I would not take off the sharp edge, as he whimsically expressed it, of public curiosity, thereby diminishing the receipts of his house, I have willingly consented to oblige him, and have left my description at the store of our publisher, where any person may see it—provided he applies at a proper hour.

I cannot refrain here from giving vent to the satisfaction I received from the excellent performances of the different actors, one and all; and particularly the gentlemen who shifted the scenes, who acquitted themselves throughout with great celerity, dignity, pathos, and effect. Nor must I pass over the peculiar merits of my friend John, who gallanted off the chairs and tables in the most dignified and circumspect manner. Indeed, I have had frequent occasion to applaud the correctness with which this gentleman fulfills the parts allotted him, and consider him as one of the best general performers in the company. My friend, the cockney, found considerable fault with the manner in which John shoved a huge rock from behind the scenes; maintaining that he should have put his left foot forward, and pushed it with his right hand, that being the method practiced by his contemporaries of the royal theatres, and universally approved by their best critics. He also took exception to John’s coat, which he pronounced too short by a foot at least, particularly when he turned his back to the company. But I look upon these objections in the same light as new readings, and insist that John shall be allowed to maneuver his chairs and tables, shove his rocks, and wear his skirts in that style which his genius best affects. My hopes in the rising merits of this favorite actor daily increase; and I would hint to the manager the propriety of giving him a benefit, advertising in the usual style of playbills, as a “springe to catch woodcocks,” that between the play and farce, John will make a bow—for that night only!

I am told that no pains have been spared to make the exhibitions of this season as splendid as possible. Several expert rat-catchers have been sent into different parts of the country to catch white mice for the grand pantomime of “Cinderella.” A nest full of little squab Cupids have been taken in the neighborhood of Communipaw; they are as yet but half fledged, of the true Holland breed, and it is hoped will be able to fly about by the middle of October; otherwise they will be suspended about the stage by the waistband, like little alligators in an apothecary’s shop, as the pantomime must positively be performed by that time. Great pains and expense have been incurred in the importation of one of the most portly pumpkins in New England; and the public may be assured there is now one on board a vessel from New Haven, which will contain Cinderella’s coach and six with perfect ease, were the white mice even ten times as large.

Also several barrels of hail, rain, brimstone, and gunpowder, are in store for melodramas, of which a number are to be played off this winter. It is furthermore whispered me that the great thunder drum has been new braced, and an expert performer on that instrument engaged, who will thunder in plain English, so as to be understood by the most illiterate hearer. This will be infinitely preferable to the miserable Italian thunderer, employed last winter by Mr. Ciceri, who performed in such an unnatural and outlandish tongue, that none but the scholars of Signor Da Ponte could understand him. It will be a further gratification to the patriotic audience to know that the present thunderer is a fellow-countryman, born at Dunderberg, among the echoes of the Highlands, and that he thunders with peculiar emphasis and pompous enunciation, in the true style of a Fourth of July orator.

In addition to all these additions, the manager has provided an entire new snow-storm, the very sight of which will be quite sufficient to draw a shawl over every naked bosom in the theatre; the snow is perfectly fresh, having been manufactured last August.

N.B. The outside of the theatre has been ornamented with a new chimney!!

NO. XV.—THURSDAY, OCTOBER 1, 1807.

SKETCHES FROM NATURE.

BY ANTHONY EVERGREEN, GENT.

The brisk northwesters, which prevailed not long since, had a powerful effect in arresting the progress of belles, beaux, and wild pigeons in their fashionable northern tour, and turning them back to the more balmy region of the south. Among the rest, I was encountered, full butt, by a blast which set my teeth chattering, just as I doubled one of the frowning bluffs of the Mohawk Mountains, in my route to Niagara, and facing about incontinently, I forthwith scud before the wind, and a few days since arrived at my old quarters in New York. My first care, on returning from so long an absence, was to visit the worthy family of the Cocklofts, whom I found safe burrowed in their country mansion. On inquiring for my highly respected coadjutor, Langstaff, I learned, with great concern, that he had relapsed into one of his eccentric fits of the spleen, ever since the era of a turtle dinner given by old Cockloft to some of the neighboring squires, wherein the old gentleman had achieved a glorious victory in laying honest Launcelot fairly under the table. Langstaff, although fond of the social board and cheerful glass, yet abominates any excess, and has an invincible aversion to getting mellow, considering it a willful outrage on the sanctity of the imperial mind, a senseless abuse of the body, and an unpardonable, because a voluntary, prostration of both mental and personal dignity. I have heard him moralize on the subject, in a style that would do honor to Michael Cassio himself; but I believe, if the truth were known, this antipathy rather rises from his having, as the phrase is, but a weak head, and nerves so extremely sensitive, that he is sure to suffer severely from a frolic, and will groan and make resolutions against it for a week afterward. He therefore took this waggish exploit of old Christopher’s, and the consequent quizzing which he underwent, in high dudgeon; had kept aloof from company for a fortnight, and appeared to be meditating some deep plan of retaliation upon his mischievous old crony. He had, however, for the last day or two, shown some symptoms of convalescence: had listened, without more than half a dozen twitches of impatience, to one of Christopher’s unconscionable long stories, and even was seen to smile, for the one hundred and thirtieth time, at a venerable joke originally borrowed from Joe Miller, but which, by dint of long occupancy, and frequent repetition, the old gentleman now firmly believes happened to himself somewhere in New England.

As I am well acquainted with Launcelot’s haunts, I soon found him out. He was lolling on his favorite bench, rudely constructed at the foot of an old tree, which is full of fantastical twists, and with its spreading branches forms a canopy of luxuriant foliage. This tree is a kind of chronicle of the short reigns of his uncle John’s mistresses; and its trunk is sorely wounded with carvings of true lovers’ knots, hearts, darts, names, and inscriptions!—frail memorials of the variety of the fair dames who captivated the wandering fancy of that old cavalier in the days of his youthful romance. Launcelot holds this tree in particular regard, as he does everything else connected with the memory of his good uncle John. He was reclining, in one of his usual brown studies, against its trunk, and gazing pensively upon the river that glided just by, washing the drooping branches of the dwarf willows that fringed its bank. My appearance roused him; he grasped my hand with his usual warmth, and with a tremulous but close pressure, which spoke that his heart entered into the salutation. After a number of affectionate inquiries and felicitations, such as friendship, not form, dictated, he seemed to relapse into his former flow of thought, and to resume the chain of ideas my appearance had broken for a moment.

“I was reflecting,” said he, “my dear Anthony, upon some observations I made in our last number; and considering whether the sight of objects once dear to the affections, or of scenes where we have passed different happy periods of early life, really occasions most enjoyment or most regret. Renewing our acquaintance with well-known and long separated objects, revives, it is true, the recollection of former pleasures, and touches the tenderest feelings of the heart; as the flavor of a delicious beverage will remain upon the palate long after the cup has parted from the lips. But on the other hand, my friend, these same objects are too apt to awaken us to a keener recollection of what we were, when they once delighted us; and to provoke a mortifying and melancholy contrast with what we are at present. They act, in a manner, as milestones of existence, showing us how far we have travelled in the journey of life—how much of our weary but fascinating pilgrimage is accomplished. I look round me, and my eye fondly recognizes the fields I once sported over, the river in which I once swam, and the orchard I intrepidly robbed in the halcyon days of boyhood. The fields are still green, the river still rolls unaltered and undiminished, and the orchard is still flourishing and fruitful;—it is I only am changed. The thoughtless flow of madcap spirits that nothing could depress, the elasticity of nerve that enabled me to bound over the field, to stem the stream and climb the tree—the ‘sunshine of the breast’ that beamed an illusive charm over every object, and created a paradise around me—where are they?—the thievish lapse of years has stolen them away, and left in return nothing but gray hairs, and a repining spirit.” My friend Launcelot concluded his harangue with a sigh, and as I saw he was still under the influence of a whole legion of the blues, and just on the point of sinking into one of his whimsical and unreasonable fits of melancholy abstraction, I proposed a walk. He consented, and slipping his left arm in mine, and waving in the other a gold-headed thorn cane, bequeathed him by his uncle John, we slowly rambled along the margin of the river.

Langstaff, though possessing great vivacity of temper, is most wofully subject to these “thick coming fancies;” and I do not know a man whose animal spirits do insult him with more jiltings, and coquetries, and slippery tricks. In these moods he is often visited by a whimwham which he indulges in common with the Cocklofts. It is that of looking back with regret, conjuring up the phantoms of good old times, and decking them out in imaginary finery, with the spoils of his fancy; like a good lady widow, regretting the loss of the “poor dear man;” for whom, while living, she cared not a rush. I have seen him and Pindar, and old Cockloft, amuse themselves over a bottle with their youthful days, until by the time they had become what is termed merry, they were the most miserable beings in existence. In a similar humor was Launcelot at present, and I knew the only way was to let him moralize himself out of it.

Our ramble was soon interrupted by the appearance of a personage of no little importance at Cockloft Hall—for, to let my readers into a family secret, friend Christopher is notoriously henpecked by an old negro, who has whitened on the place; and is his master, almanac, and counselor. My readers, if haply they have sojourned in the country and become conversant in rural manners, must have observed that there is scarce a little hamlet but has one of these old, weather-beaten wiseacres of negroes, who ranks among the great characters of the place. He is always resorted to as an oracle to resolve any question about the weather, fishing, shooting, farming, and horse-doctoring; and on such occasions will slouch his remnant of a hat on one side, fold his arms, roll his white eyes, and examine the sky, with a look as knowing as Peter Pindar’s magpie when peeping into a marrow-bone. Such a sage curmudgeon is old Cæsar, who acts as friend Cockloft’s prime master or grand vizier; assumes, when abroad, his master’s style and title; to wit, Squire Cockloft; and is, in effect, absolute lord and ruler of the soil.

As he passed us, he pulled off his hat with an air of something more than respect; it partook, I thought, of affection. “There, now, is another memento of the kind I have been noticing,” said Launcelot; “Cæsar was a bosom friend and chosen playmate of Cousin Pindar and myself, when we were boys. Never were we so happy as when, stealing away on a holiday to the Hall, we ranged about the fields with honest Cæsar. He was particularly adroit in making our quail-traps and fishing-rods; was always the ringleader in all the schemes of frolicsome mischief perpetrated by the urchins of the neighborhood; considered himself on an equality with the best of us; and many a hard battle have I had with him, about the division of the spoils of an orchard, or the title to a bird’s nest. Many a summer evening do I remember when, huddled together on the steps of the Hall door, Cæsar, with his stories of ghosts, goblins, and witches, would put us all in a panic, and people every lane, and churchyard, and solitary wood, with imaginary beings. In process of time, he became the constant attendant and Man Friday of Cousin Pindar, whenever he went a sparking among the rosy country girls of the neighboring farms; and brought up his rear at every rustic dance, when he would mingle in the sable group that always thronged the door of merriment; and it was enough to put to the rout a host of splenetic imps to see his mouth gradually dilate from ear to ear, with pride and exultation, at seeing how neatly Master Pindar footed it over the floor. Cæsar was likewise the chosen confidant and special agent of Pindar in all his love affairs, until, as his evil stars would have it, on being intrusted with the delivery of a poetic billet-doux to one of his patron’s sweethearts, he took an unlucky notion to send it to his own sable dulcinea, who, not being able to read it, took it to her mistress; and so the whole affair was blown. Pindar was universally roasted, and Cæsar discharged forever from his confidence.

“Poor Cæsar!—he has now grown old, like his young masters, but he still remembers old times; and will, now and then, remind me of them as he lights me to my room, and lingers a little while to bid me a good-night. Believe me, my dear Evergreen, the honest, simple old creature has a warm corner in my heart; I don’t see, for my part, why a body may not like a negro as well as a white man!”

By the time these biographical anecdotes were ended we had reached the stable, into which we had involuntarily strolled, and found Cæsar busily employed in rubbing down the horses; an office he would not intrust to anybody else, having contracted an affection for every beast in the stable, from their being descendants of the old race of animals, his youthful contemporaries. Cæsar was very particular in giving us their pedigrees, together with a panegyric on the swiftness, bottom, blood, and spirit of their sires. From these he digressed into a variety of anecdotes in which Launcelot bore a conspicuous part, and on which the old negro dwelt with all the garrulity of age. Honest Langstaff stood leaning with his arm over the back of his favorite steed, old Killdeer; and I could perceive he listened to Cæsar’s simple details with that fond attention with which a feeling mind will hang over narratives of boyish days. His eye sparkled with animation, a glow of youthful fire stole across his pale visage; he nodded with smiling approbation at every sentence; chuckled at every exploit; laughed heartily at the story of his once having smoked out a country singing-school with brimstone and assafœtida; and slipping a piece of money into old Cæsar’s hand to buy himself a new tobacco-box, he seized me by the arm and hurried out of the stable, brimful of good nature. “’Tis a pestilent old rogue for talking, my dear fellow,” cried he, “but you must not find fault with him—the creature means well.” I knew, at the very moment that he made this apology, honest Cæsar could not have given him half the satisfaction, had he talked like a Cicero or a Solomon.

Launcelot returned to the house with me in the best possible humor—the whole family, who in truth love and honor him from their very souls, were delighted to see the sunbeams once more play in his countenance. Every one seemed to vie who should talk the most, tell the longest stories, and be most agreeable; and Will Wizard, who had accompanied me in my visit, declared, as he lighted his cigar—which had gone out forty times in the course of one of his oriental tales—that he had not passed so pleasant an evening since the birthnight ball of the beauteous empress of Hayti.

* * * * *

[The following essay was written by my friend Langstaff, in one of the paroxysms of his splenetic complaint; and, for aught I know, may have been effectual in restoring him to good humor. A mental discharge of the kind has a remarkable tendency toward sweetening the temper—and Launcelot is, at this moment, one of the best-natured men in existence.

A. EVERGREEN.]

ON GREATNESS.

BY LAUNCELOT LANGSTAFF, ESQ.

We have more than once, in the course of our work, been most jocosely familiar with great personages; and, in truth, treated them with as little ceremony, respect, and consideration, as if they had been our most particular friends. Now, we would not suffer the mortification of having our readers even suspect us of any intimacy of the kind; assuring them we are extremely choice in our intimates and uncommonly circumspect in avoiding connections with all doubtful characters; particularly pimps, bailiffs, lottery-brokers, chevaliers of industry, and great men. The world, in general, is pretty well aware of what is to be understood by the former classes of delinquents; but as the latter has never, I believe, been specifically defined, and as we are determined to instruct our readers to the extent of our abilities, and their limited comprehension, it may not be amiss here to let them know what we understand by a great man.

First, therefore, let us—editors and kings are always plural—premise, that there are two kinds of greatness: one conferred by heaven—the exalted nobility of the soul—the other, a spurious distinction, engendered by the mob and lavished upon its favorites. The former of these distinctions we have already contemplated with reverence; the latter, we will take this opportunity to strip naked before our unenlightened readers; so that, if by chance any of them are held in ignominious thralldom by this base circulation of false coin, they may forthwith emancipate themselves from such inglorious delusion.

It is a fictitious value given to individuals by public caprice, as bankers give an impression to a worthless slip of paper; thereby gaining it a currency for infinitely more than its intrinsic value. Every nation has its peculiar coin, and peculiar great men; neither of which will, for the most part, pass current out of the country where they are stamped. Your true mob-created great man, is like a note of one of the little New England banks, and his value depreciates in proportion to the distance from home. In England, a great man is he who has most ribbons and gewgaws on his coat, most horses to his carriage, most slaves in his retinue, or most toad-eaters at his table; in France, he who can most dextrously flourish his heels above his head—Duport is most incontestably the greatest man in France!—when the Emperor is absent. The greatest man in China, is he who can trace his ancestry up to the moon; and in this country, our great men may generally hunt down their pedigree until it burrow in the dirt like a rabbit. To be concise: our great men are those who are most expert at crawling on all fours, and have the happiest facility of dragging and winding themselves along in the dirt. This may seem a paradox to many of my readers, who, with great good nature be it hinted, are too stupid to look beyond the mere surface of our invaluable writings; and often pass over the knowing allusions, and poignant meaning, that is slily couching beneath. It is for the benefit of such helpless ignorants, who have no other creed but the opinion of the mob, that I shall trace, as far as it is possible to follow him in his progress from insignificance—the rise, progress, and completion of a _little great man_.

In a logocracy, to use the sage Mustapha’s phrase, it is not absolutely necessary to the formation of a great man that he should be either wise or valiant, upright or honorable. On the contrary, daily experience shows, that these qualities rather impede his preferment; inasmuch as they are prone to render him too inflexibly erect, and directly at variance with that willow suppleness which enables a man to wind and twist through all the nooks and turns and dark winding passages that lead to greatness. The grand requisite for climbing the rugged hill of popularity—the summit of which is the seat of power—is to be useful. And here, once more, for the sake of our readers, who are, of course, not so wise as ourselves, I must explain what we understand by usefulness. The horse, in his native state, is wild, swift, impetuous, full of majesty, and of a most generous spirit. It is then the animal is noble, exalted, and useless. But entrap him, manacle him, cudgel him, break down his lofty spirit, put the curb into his mouth, the load upon his back, and reduce him into servile obedience to the bridle and the lash, and it is then he becomes useful. Your jackass is one of the most useful animals in existence. If my readers do not now understand what I mean by usefulness, I give them all up for most absolute nincoms.

To rise in this country a man must first descend. The aspiring politician may be compared to that indefatigable insect, called the tumbler, pronounced by a distinguished personage to be the only industrious animal in Virginia, which buries itself in filth, and works ignobly in the dirt, until it forms a little ball, which it rolls laboriously along, like Diogenes in his tub; sometimes head, sometimes tail foremost, pilfering from every rut and mud hole, and increasing its ball of greatness by the contributions of the kennel. Just so the candidate for greatness;—he buries himself in the mob; labors in dirt and oblivion, and makes unto himself the rudiments of a popular name from the admiration and praises of rogues, ignoramuses, and blackguards. His name once started, onward he goes, struggling and puffing, and pushing it before him; collecting new tribute from the dregs and offals of society as he proceeds, until having gathered together a mighty mass of popularity, he mounts it in triumph; is hoisted into office, and becomes a great man, and a ruler in the land. All this will be clearly illustrated by a sketch of a worthy of the kind, who sprung up under my eye, and was hatched from the dirt by the broad rays of popularity, which, like the sun, can “breed maggots in a dead dog.”

Timothy Dabble was a young man of very promising talents; for he wrote a fair hand, and had thrice won the silver medal at a country academy; he was also an orator, for he talked with emphatic volubility, and could argue a full hour, without taking either side, or advancing a single opinion; he had still further requisites for eloquence, for he made very handsome gestures, had dimples in his cheeks when he smiled, and enunciated most harmoniously through his nose. In short, nature had certainly marked him out for a great man; for though he was not tall, yet he added at least half an inch to his stature by elevating his head, and assumed an amazing expression of dignity by turning up his nose and curling his nostrils, in a style of conscious superiority. Convinced by these unequivocal appearances, Dabble’s friends, in full caucus, one and all, declared that he was undoubtedly born to be a great man, and it would be his own fault if he were not one. Dabble was tickled with an opinion which coincided so happily with his own—for vanity, in a confidential whisper, had given him the like intimation—and he reverenced the judgment of his friends because they thought so highly of himself. Accordingly he set out with a determination to become a great man, and to start in the scrub-race for honor and renown. How to attain the desired prize was however, the question. He knew, by a kind of instinctive feeling, which seems peculiar to groveling minds, that honor, and its better part—profit, would never seek him out; that they would never knock at his door and crave admittance, but must be courted, and toiled after, and earned. He therefore strutted forth into the highways, and market-places, and the assemblies of the people; ranted, like a true cockerel orator, about virtue, and patriotism, and liberty, and equality, and himself. Full many a political windmill did he battle with; and full many a time did he talk himself out of breath and his hearers out of patience. But Dabble found, to his vast astonishment, that there was not a notorious political pimp at a ward meeting but could out-talk him; and what was still more mortifying, there was not a notorious political pimp but was more noticed and caressed than himself. The reason was simple enough; while he harangued about principles, the others ranted about men; where he reprobated a political error, they blasted a political character. They were, consequently, the most useful; for the great object of our political disputes is not who shall have the honor of emancipating the community from the leading-strings of delusion, but who shall have the profit of holding the strings and leading the community by the nose.

Dabble was likewise very loud in his professions of integrity, incorruptibility, and disinterestedness; words which, from being filtered and refined through newspapers and election handbills, have lost their original signification, and in the political dictionary are synonymous with empty pockets, itching palms, and interested ambition. He, in addition to all this, declared that he would support none but honest men; but unluckily, as but few of these offered themselves to be supported, Dabble’s services were seldom required. He pledged himself never to engage in party schemes, or party politics, but to stand up solely for the broad interests of his country—so he stood alone; and what is the same thing, he stood still; for, in this country, he who does not side with either party is like a body in a _vacuum_ between two planets, and must forever remain motionless.

Dabble was immeasurably surprised that a man so honest, so disinterested, and so sagacious withal, and one, too, who had the good of his country so much at heart, should thus remain unnoticed and unapplauded. A little worldly advice, whispered in his ear by a shrewd old politician, at once explained the whole mystery. “He who would become great,” said he, “must serve an apprenticeship to greatness, and rise by regular gradation, like the master of a vessel, who commences by being scrub and cabin-boy. He must fag in the train of great men, echo all their sentiments, become their toad-eater and parasite—laugh at all their jokes, and, above all, endeavor to make them laugh; if you only make a great man laugh now and then, your fortune is made. Look about you, youngster, and you will not see a single little great man of the day, but his herd of retainers, who yelp at his heels, come at his whistle, worry whoever he points at, and think themselves fully rewarded by sometimes snapping up a crumb that falls from his table. Talk of patriotism, and virtue, and incorruptibility!—tut, man! they are the very qualities that scare munificence, and keep patronage at a distance. You might as well attempt to entice crowds with red rags and gunpowder. Lay all these scarecrow virtues aside, and let this be your maxim, that a candidate for political eminence is like a dried herring; he never becomes luminous until he is corrupt.”

Dabble caught with hungry avidity these congenial doctrines, and turned into his predestined channel of action with the force and rapidity of a stream which has for a while been restrained from its natural course. He became what nature had fitted him to be: his tone softened down from arrogant self-sufficiency to the whine of fawning solicitation. He mingled in the caucuses of the sovereign people; assumed a patriotic slovenliness of dress; argued most logically with those who were of his own opinion; and slandered, with all the malice of impotence, exalted characters whose orbit he despaired ever to approach—just as that scoundrel midnight thief, the owl, hoots at the blessed light of the sun, whose glorious lustre he dares never contemplate. He likewise applied himself to discharging, faithfully, the honorable duties of a partisan; he poached about for private slanders and ribald anecdotes; he folded handbills; he even wrote one or two himself, which he carried about in his pocket and read to everybody; he became secretary at ward meetings, set his hand to divers resolutions of patriotic import, and even once went so far as to make a speech, in which he proved that patriotism was a virtue—that the reigning bashaw was a great man—that this was a free country, and he himself an arrant and incontestible buzzard!

Dabble was now very frequent and devout in his visits to those temples of politics, popularity, and smoke—the ward porter-houses; those true dens of equality, where all ranks, ages, and talents are brought down to the level of rude familiarity. ’Twas here his talents expanded, and his genius swelled up to its proper size—like the toad, which, shrinking from balmy airs and jocund sunshine, finds his congenial home in caves and dungeons, and there nourishes his venom and bloats his deformity. ’Twas here he reveled with the swinish multitude in their debauches on patriotism and porter; and it became an even chance whether Dabble would turn out a great man or a great drunkard. But Dabble in all this kept steadily in his eye the only deity he ever worshipped—his interest. Having, by this familiarity, ingratiated himself with the mob, he became wonderfully potent and industrious at elections—knew all the dens and cellars of profligacy and intemperance—brought more negroes to the polls, and knew to a greater certainty where votes could be bought for beer, than any of his contemporaries. His exertions in the cause, his persevering industry, his degrading compliance, his unresisting humility, his steadfast dependence, at length caught the attention of one of the leaders of the party, who was pleased to observe that Dabble was a very useful fellow, who would go all lengths. From that moment his fortune was made—he was hand and glove with orators and slang-whangers; basked in the sunshine of great men’s smiles, and had the honor, sundry times, of shaking hands with dignitaries during elections, and drinking out of the same pot with them at a porter-house!!

I will not fatigue myself with tracing this caterpillar in his slimy progress from worm to butterfly: suffice it that Dabble bowed and bowed, and fawned, and sneaked, and smirked, and libeled, until one would have thought perseverance itself would have settled down into despair. There was no knowing how long he might have lingered at a distance from his hopes, had he not luckily got tarred and feathered for some electioneering maneuver. This was the making of him! Let not my readers stare; tarring and feathering here is equal to pillory and cropped ears in England; and either of these kinds of martyrdom will insure a patriot the sympathy and support of his faction. His partisans—for even he had his partisans—took his case into consideration. He had been kicked, and cuffed, and disgraced, and dishonored in the cause; he had licked the dust at the feet of the mob; he was a faithful drudge, slow to anger, of invincible patience, of incessant assiduity; a thorough-going tool, who could be curbed, and spurred, and directed at pleasure—in short, he had all the important qualifications for a little great man, and he was accordingly ushered into office amid the acclamations of the party. The leading men complimented his usefulness, the multitude his republican simplicity, and the slang-whangers vouched for his patriotism. Since his elevation, he has discovered indubitable signs of having been destined for a great man. His nose has acquired an additional elevation of several degrees, so that now he appears to have bidden adieu to this world, and to have set his thoughts altogether on things above; and he has swelled and inflated himself to such a degree that his friends are under apprehensions that he will, one day or other, explode and blow up like a torpedo.

NO. XVI.—THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15, 1807.

STYLE, AT BALLSTON.

BY WILLIAM WIZARD, ESQ.

Notwithstanding Evergreen has never been abroad, nor had his understanding enlightened, or his views enlarged by that marvelous sharpener of the wits, a salt water voyage, yet he is tolerably shrewd and correct, in the limited sphere of his observations; and now and then astounds me with a right pithy remark, which would do no discredit even to a man who had made the grand tour.

In several late conversations at Cockloft Hall, he has amused us exceedingly by detailing sundry particulars concerning that notorious slaughterhouse of time, Ballston Springs, where he spent a considerable part of the last summer. The following is a summary of his observations.

Pleasure has passed through a variety of significations at Ballston. It originally meant nothing more than a relief from pain and sickness; and the patient who had journeyed many a weary mile to the Springs, with a heavy heart and emaciated form, called it pleasure when he threw by his crutches, and danced away from them with renovated spirits, and limbs jocund with vigor. In process of time, pleasure underwent a refinement, and appeared in the likeness of a sober unceremonious country dance, to the flute of an amateur or the three-stringed fiddle of an itinerant country musician. Still everything bespoke that happy holiday which the spirits ever enjoy, when emancipated from the shackles of formality, ceremony, and modern politeness; things went on cheerily, and Ballston was pronounced a charming, humdrum, careless place of resort, where every one was at his ease, and might follow unmolested the bent of his humor—provided his wife was not there; when, lo! all on a sudden, Style made its baneful appearance in the semblance of a gig and tandem, a pair of leather breeches, a liveried footman, and a cockney! Since that fatal era pleasure has taken an entire new signification, and at present means nothing but STYLE.

The worthy, fashionable, dashing, good-for-nothing people of every state, who had rather suffer the martyrdom of a crowd than endure the monotony of their own homes, and the stupid company of their own thoughts, flock to the Springs; not to enjoy the pleasures of society, or benefit by the qualities of the waters, but to exhibit their equipages and wardrobes, and to excite the admiration, or, what is much more satisfactory, the envy of their fashionable competitors. This, of course, awakens a spirit of noble emulation between the eastern, middle, and southern States; and every lady hereupon finding herself charged in a manner with the whole weight of her country’s dignity and style, dresses and dashes, and sparkles, without mercy, at her competitors from other parts of the Union. This kind of rivalship naturally requires a vast deal of preparation and prodigious quantities of supplies. A sober citizen’s wife will break half a dozen milliners’ shops, and sometimes starve her family a whole season, to enable herself to make the Springs campaign in style. She repairs to the seat of war with a mighty force of trunks and bandboxes, like so many ammunition chests, filled with caps, hats, gowns, ribbons, shawls, and all the various artillery of fashionable warfare. The lady of a Southern planter will lay out the whole annual produce of a rice plantation in silver and gold muslins, lace veils, and new liveries; carry a hogshead of tobacco on her head, and trail a bale of sea-island cotton at her heels; while a lady of Boston or Salem will wrap herself up in the net proceeds of a cargo of whale oil, and tie on her hat with a quintal of codfish.

The planters’ ladies, however, have generally the advantage in this contest; for, as it is an incontestable fact, that whoever comes from the West or East Indies, or Georgia, or the Carolinas, or in fact any warm climate, is immensely rich, it cannot be expected that a simple cit of the North can cope with them in style. The planter, therefore, who drives four horses abroad, and a thousand negroes at home, and who flourishes up to the Springs, followed by half a score of black-a-moors, in gorgeous liveries, is unquestionably superior to the northern merchant, who plods on in a carriage and pair; which, being nothing more than is quite necessary, has no claim whatever to style. He, however, has his consolation in feeling superior to the honest cit, who dashes about in a simple gig; he, in return, sneers at the country squire, who jogs along with his scrubby, long-eared pony and saddlebags; and the squire, by way of taking satisfaction, would make no scruple to run over the unobtrusive pedestrian, were it not that the last, being the most independent of the whole, might chance to break his head by way of retort.

The great misfortune is, that this style is supported at such an expense as sometimes to encroach on the rights and privileges of the pocket; and occasions very awkward embarrassments to the tyro of fashion. Among a number of instances, Evergreen mentions the fate of a dashing blade from the South, who made his _entrée_ with a tandem and two outriders, by the aid of which he attracted the attention of all the ladies, and caused a coolness between several young couples who, it was thought before his arrival, had a considerable kindness for each other. In the course of a fortnight his tandem disappeared!—the class of good folk who seem to have nothing to do in this world but pry into other people’s affairs, began to stare. In a little time longer an outrider was missing!—this increased the alarm, and it was consequently whispered that he had eaten the horses and drank the negro. N. B. Southern gentlemen are very apt to do this on an emergency. Serious apprehensions were entertained about the fate of the remaining servant, which were soon verified by his actually vanishing; and in “one little month” the dashing Carolinian modestly took his departure in the stagecoach!—universally regretted by the friends who had generously released him from his cumbrous load of style.

Evergreen, in the course of his detail, gave very melancholy accounts of an alarming famine which raged with great violence at the Springs. Whether this was owing to the incredible appetites of the company, or the scarcity which prevailed at the inns, he did not seem inclined to say; but he declares, that he was for several days in imminent danger of starvation, owing to his being a little too dilatory in his attendance at the dinner-table. He relates a number of “moving accidents,” which befell many of the polite company in their zeal to get a good seat at dinner; on which occasion a kind of scrub-race always took place, wherein a vast deal of jockeying and unfair play was shown, and a variety of squabbles and unseemly altercations occurred. But when arrived at the scene of action, it was truly an awful sight to behold the confusion, and to hear the tumultuous uproar of voices crying some for one thing, and some for another, to the tuneful accompaniment of knives and forks, rattling with all the energy of hungry impatience. The feast of the Centaurs and the Lapithæ was nothing when compared with a dinner at the great house. At one time, an old gentleman, whose natural irascibility was a little sharpened by the gout, had scalded his throat, by gobbling down a bowl of hot soup in a vast hurry, in order to secure the first fruits of a roasted partridge before it was snapped up by some hungry rival; when just, as he was whetting his knife and fork, preparatory for a descent on the promised land, he had the mortification to see it transferred, bodily, to the plate of a squeamish little damsel who was taking the waters for debility and loss of appetite. This was too much for the patience of old Crusty; he lodged his fork into the partridge, whipt it into his dish, and cutting off a wing of it,—“There, Miss, there’s more than you can eat. Oons! what should such a little chalky-faced puppet as you do with a whole partridge!” At another time a mighty sweet disposed old dowager, who loomed most magnificently at the table, had a sauce-boat launched upon the capacious lap of a silver-sprigged muslin gown, by the maneuvering of a little politic Frenchman, who was dextrously attempting to make a lodgment under the covered way of a chicken-pie; human nature could not bear it!—the lady bounced round, and, with one box on the ear, drove the luckless wight to utter annihilation.

But these little cross accidents are amply compensated by the great variety of amusements which abounds at this charming resort of beauty and fashion. In the morning the company, each like a jolly Bacchanalian, with glass in hand, sally forth to the Springs: where the gentlemen, who wish to make themselves agreeable, have an opportunity of dipping themselves into the good opinion of the ladies: and it is truly delectable to see with what grace and adroitness they perform this ingratiating feat. Anthony says that it is peculiarly amazing to behold the quantity of water the ladies drink on this occasion, for the purpose of getting an appetite for breakfast. He assures me he has been present when a young lady, of unparalleled delicacy, tossed off, in the space of a minute or two, one-and-twenty tumblers and a wine-glass full. On my asking Anthony whether the solicitude of the bystanders was not greatly awakened as to what might be the effects of this debauch, he replied, that the ladies at Ballston had become such great sticklers for the doctrine of evaporation, that no gentleman ever ventured to remonstrate against this excessive drinking for fear of bringing his philosophy into contempt. The most notorious water-drinkers, in particular, were continually holding forth on the surprising aptitude with which the Ballston waters evaporated; and several gentlemen, who had the hardihood to question this female philosophy, were held in high displeasure.

After breakfast, every one chooses his amusement; some take a ride into the pine woods, and enjoy the varied and romantic scenery of burnt trees, post and rail fences, pine flats, potato patches, and log huts; others scramble up the surrounding sandhills, that look like the abodes of a gigantic race of ants;—take a peep at other sandhills beyond them;—and then—come down again. Others who are romantic,—and sundry young ladies insist upon being so whenever they visit the Springs, or go anywhere into the country—stroll along the borders of a little swampy brook that drags itself along like an Alexandrine, and that so lazily as not to make a single murmur, watching the little tadpoles as they frolic, right flippantly, in the muddy stream, and listening to the inspiring melody of the harmonious frogs that croak upon its borders. Some play at billiards, some play at the fiddle, and some—play the fool;—the latter being the most prevalent amusement at Ballston.

These, together with abundance of dancing, and a prodigious deal of sleeping of afternoons, make up the variety of pleasures at the Springs—a delicious life of alternate lassitude and fatigue; of laborious dissipation, and listless idleness; of sleepless nights, and days spent in that dozing insensibility which ever succeeds them. Now and then, indeed, the influenza, the fever-and-ague, or some such pale-faced intruder, may happen to throw a momentary damp on the general felicity; but on the whole, Evergreen declares that Ballston wants only six things, to wit: good air, good wine, good living, good beds, good company, and good humor, to be the most enchanting place in the world—excepting Botany Bay, Musquito Cove, Dismal Swamp, and the black-hole at Calcutta.

* * * * *

[The following letter from the sage Mustapha has cost us more trouble to decipher, and render into tolerable English, than any hitherto published. It was full of blots and erasures, particularly the latter part, which we have no doubt was penned in a moment of great wrath and indignation. Mustapha has often a rambling mode of writing, and his thoughts take such unaccountable turns, that it is difficult to tell one moment where he will lead you the next. This is particularly obvious in the commencement of his letters, which seldom bear much analogy to the subsequent parts; he sets off with a flourish, like a dramatic hero—assumes an air of great pomposity, and struts up to his subject mounted most loftily on stilts.

L. LANGSTAFF.]

LETTER FROM MUSTAPHA RUB-A-DUB KELI KHAN, TO ASEM HACCHEM, PRINCIPAL SLAVE-DRIVER TO HIS HIGHNESS THE BASHAW OF TRIPOLI.

Among the variety of principles by which mankind are actuated, there is one, my dear Asem, which I scarcely know whether to consider as springing from grandeur and nobility of mind, or from a refined species of vanity and egotism. It is that singular, although almost universal desire of living in the memory of posterity; of occupying a share of the world’s attention, when we shall long since have ceased to be susceptible either of its praise or censure. Most of the passions of the mind are bounded by the grave; sometimes, indeed, an anxious hope or trembling fear will venture beyond the clouds and darkness that rest upon our mortal horizon, and expatiate in boundless futurity; but it is only this active love of fame which steadily contemplates its fruition, in the applause or gratitude of future ages. Indignant at the narrow limits which circumscribe existence, ambition is forever struggling to soar beyond them; to triumph over space and time, and to bear a name, at least, above the irritable oblivion in which everything else that concerns us must be involved. It is this, my friend, which prompts the patriot to his most heroic achievements; which inspires the sublimest strains of the poet, and breathes ethereal fire into the productions of the painter and the statuary.

For this the monarch rears the lofty column; the laureled conqueror claims the triumphal arch; while the obscure individual, who moved in a humbler sphere, asks but a plain and simple stone to mark his grave, and bear to the next generation this important truth, that he was born, died—and was buried. It was this passion which once erected the vast Numidian piles, whose ruins we have so often regarded with wonder, as the shades of evening—fit emblems of oblivion—gradually stole over and enveloped them in darkness. It was this which gave being to those sublime monuments of Saracen magnificence, which nod in mouldering desolation, as the blast sweeps over our deserted plains.—How futile are all our efforts to evade the obliterating hand of time! As I traversed the dreary wastes of Egypt, on my journey to Grand Cairo, I stopped my camel for a while and contemplated, in awful admiration, the stupendous pyramids. An appalling silence prevailed around; such as reigns in the wilderness when the tempest is hushed, and the beasts of prey have retired to their dens. The myriads that had once been employed in rearing these lofty mementoes of human vanity, whose busy hum once enlivened the solitude of the desert—had all been swept from the earth by the irresistible arm of death—all were mingled with their native dust; all were forgotten! Even the mighty names which these sepulchres were designed to perpetuate had long since faded from remembrance; history and tradition afforded but vague conjectures, and the pyramids imparted a humiliating lesson to the candidate for immortality.—Alas! alas! said I to myself, how mutable are the foundations on which our proudest hopes of future fame are reposed! He who imagines he has secured to himself the meed of deathless renown, indulges in deluding visions, which only bespeak the vanity of the dreamer. The storied obelisk—the triumphal arch—the swelling dome, shall crumble into dust, and the names they would preserve from oblivion shall often pass away, before their own duration is accomplished.

Yet this passion for fame, however ridiculous in the eye of the philosopher, deserves respect and consideration, from having been the source of so many illustrious actions; and, hence it has been the practice in all enlightened governments to perpetuate by monuments, the memory of great men, as a testimony of respect for the illustrious dead, and to awaken in the bosoms of posterity an emulation to merit the same honorable distinction. The people of the American logocracy, who pride themselves upon improving on every precept or example of ancient or modern governments, have discovered a new mode of exciting this love of glory; a mode by which they do honor to their great men, even in their life-time!

Thou must have observed by this time, that they manage everything in a manner peculiar to themselves; and doubtless in the best possible manner, seeing they have denominated themselves “the most enlightened people under the sun.” Thou wilt, therefore, perhaps, be curious to know how they contrive to honor the name of a living patriot, and what unheard-of monument they erect in memory of his achievements. By the fiery beard of the mighty Barbarossa, but I can scarcely preserve the sobriety of a true disciple of Mahomet while I tell thee!—wilt thou not smile, O, Mussulman of invincible gravity, to learn that they honor their great men by eating, and that the only trophy erected to their exploits, is a public dinner! But, trust me, Asem, even in this measure, whimsical as it may seem, the philosophic and considerate spirit of this people is admirably displayed. Wisely concluding that when the hero is dead, he becomes insensible to the voice of fame, the song of adulation, or the splendid trophy, they have determined that he shall enjoy his quantum of celebrity while living and revel in the full enjoyment of a nine days’ immortality. The barbarous nations of antiquity immolated human victims to the memory of their lamented dead, but the enlightened Americans offer up whole hecatombs of geese and calves, and oceans of wine, in honor of the illustrious living; and the patriot has the felicity of hearing from every quarter, the vast exploits in gluttony and reveling that have been celebrated to the glory of his name.

No sooner does a citizen signalize himself in a conspicuous manner in the service of his country, than all the gormandizers assemble and discharge the national debt of gratitude, by giving him a dinner; not that he really receives all the luxuries provided on this occasion; no, my friend, it is ten chances to one that the great man does not taste a morsel from the table, and is, perhaps, five hundred miles distant; and, to let thee into a melancholy fact, a patriot under this economic government, may be often in want of a dinner, while dozens are devoured in his praise. Neither are these repasts spread out for the hungry and necessitous, who might otherwise be filled with food and gladness, and inspired to shout forth the illustrious name, which had been the means of their enjoyment; far from this, Asem; it is the rich only who indulge in the banquet; those who pay for the dainties are alone privileged to enjoy them; so that, while opening their purses in honor of the patriot, they at the same time fulfill a great maxim, which in this country comprehends all the rules of prudence, and all the duties a man owes to himself—namely, getting the worth of their money.

In process of time this mode of testifying public applause has been found so marvelously agreeable, that they extend it to events as well as characters, and eat in triumph at the news of a treaty—at the anniversary of any grand national era, or at the gaining of that splendid victory of the tongue—an election. Nay, so far do they carry it, that certain days are set apart when the guzzlers, the gormandizers, and the wine-bibbers meet together to celebrate a grand indigestion, in memory of some great event; and every man, in the zeal of patriotism, gets devoutly drunk—“as the act directs.” Then, my friend, mayest thou behold the sublime spectacle of love of country, elevating itself from a sentiment into an appetite, whetted to the quick with the cheering prospect of tables loaded with the fat things of the land. On this occasion every man is anxious to fall to work, cram himself in honor of the day, and risk a surfeit in the glorious cause. Some, I have been told, actually fast for four-and-twenty hours preceding, that they may be enabled to do greater honor to the feast; and, certainly, if eating and drinking are patriotic rites, he who eats and drinks most, and proves himself the greatest glutton, is, undoubtedly, the most distinguished patriot. Such, at any rate, seems to be the opinion here; and they act up to it so rigidly, that by the time it is dark, every kennel in the neighborhood teems with illustrious members of the sovereign people, wallowing in their congenial element of mud and mire.

These patriotic feasts, or rather national monuments, are patronized and promoted by certain inferior cadis, called “Aldermen;” who are commonly complimented with their direction. These dignitaries, as far as I can learn, are generally appointed on account of their great talents for eating, a qualification peculiarly necessary in the discharge of their official duties. They hold frequent meetings at taverns and hotels, where they enter into solemn consultations for the benefit of lobsters and turtles; establish wholesome regulations for the safety and preservation of fish and wild-fowl; appoint the seasons most proper for eating oysters; inquire into the economy of taverns, the characters of publicans, and the abilities of their cooks; and discuss, most learnedly, the merits of a bowl of soup, a chicken-pie, or a haunch of venison; in a word, the alderman has absolute control in all matters of eating, and superintends the whole police—of the belly. Having, in the prosecution of their important office, signalized themselves at so many public festivals; having gorged so often on patriotism and pudding, and entombed so many great names in their extensive maws, thou wilt easily conceive that they wax portly apace, that they fatten on the fame of mighty men, and that their rotundity, like the rivers, the lakes, and the mountains of their country, must be on a great scale! Even so, my friend; and when I sometimes see a portly alderman puffing along, and swelling as if he had the world under his waistcoat, I cannot help looking upon him as a walking monument, and am often ready to exclaim: “Tell me, thou majestic mortal, thou breathing catacomb! to what illustrious character, what mighty event, does that capacious carcass of thine bear testimony?”

But though the enlightened citizens of this logocracy eat in honor of their friends, yet they drink destruction to their enemies. Yea, Asem, woe unto those who are doomed to undergo the public vengeance at a public dinner. No sooner are the viands removed, than they prepare for merciless and exterminating hostilities. They drink the intoxicating juice of the grape, out of little glass cups, and over each draught pronounce a short sentence or prayer; not such a prayer as thy virtuous heart would dictate, thy pious lips give utterance to, my good Asem; not a tribute of thanks to all-bountiful Allah, nor a humble supplication for his blessing on the draught; no, my friend, it is merely a toast, that is to say, a fulsome tribute of flattery to their demagogues; a labored sally of affected sentiment or national egotism; or, what is more despicable, a malediction on their enemies, an empty threat of vengeance, or a petition for their destruction; for toasts, thou must know, are another kind of missive weapon in a logocracy, and are leveled from afar, like the annoying arrows of the Tartars.

O, Asem! couldst thou but witness one of these patriotic, these monumental dinners; how furiously the flame of patriotism blazes forth; how suddenly they vanquish armies, subjugate whole countries, and exterminate nations in a bumper, thou wouldst more than ever admire the force of that omnipotent weapon, the tongue. At these moments every coward becomes a hero, every ragamuffin an invincible warrior; and the most zealous votaries of peace and quiet, forget, for a while, their cherished maxims, and join in the furious attack. Toasts succeeds toast; kings, emperors, bashaws, are like chaff before the tempest; the inspired patriot vanquishes fleets with a single gunboat, and swallows down navies at a draught, until, overpowered with victory and wine, he sinks upon the field of battle—dead drunk in his country’s cause. Sword of the puissant Khalid! what a display of valor is here!—the sons of Afric are hardy, brave, and enterprising, but they can achieve nothing like this.

Happy would it be if this mania for toasting extended no further than to the expression of national resentment. Though we might smile at the impotent vaporing and windy hyperbole, by which it is distinguished, yet we would excuse it, as the unguarded overflowings of a heart, glowing with national injuries, and indignant at the insults offered to its country. But, alas, my friend, private resentment, individual hatred, and the illiberal spirit of party, are let loose on these festive occasions. Even the names of individuals, of unoffending fellow-citizens, are sometimes dragged forth to undergo the slanders and execrations of a distempered herd of revelers.[67] Head of Mahomet! how vindictive, how insatiably vindictive, must be that spirit which can drug the mantling bowl with gall and bitterness, and indulge an angry passion in the moment of rejoicing! “Wine,” says their poet, “is like sunshine to the heart, which, under its generous influence, expands with good will, and becomes the very temple of philanthropy.” Strange, that in a temple consecrated to such a divinity, there should remain a secret corner, polluted by the lurkings of malice and revenge,—strange, that in the full flow of social enjoyment, these votaries of pleasure can turn aside to call down curses on the head of a fellow-creature. Despicable souls! ye are unworthy of being citizens of this “most enlightened country under the sun:” rather herd with the murderous savages who prowl the mountains of Tibesti; who stain their midnight orgies with the blood of the innocent wanderer, and drink their infernal potations from the skulls of the victims they have massacred.

NOTE BY WILLIAM WIZARD, ESQ.

Footnote 67:

It would seem that, in this sentence, the sage Mustapha had reference to a patriotic dinner, celebrated last 4th of July, by some gentlemen of Baltimore, when they righteously drank perdition to an unoffending individual, and really thought “they had done the state some service.” This amiable custom of “eating and drinking damnation” to others, is not confined to any party: for a month or two after the 4th of July, the different newspapers file off their columns of patriotic toasts against each other, and take a pride in showing how brilliantly their partisans can blackguard public character in their cups—“They do but jest—poison in jest,” as Hamlet says.

And yet, trust me, Asem, this spirit of vindictive cowardice is not owing to any inherent depravity of soul, for on other occasions, I have had ample proof that this nation is mild and merciful, brave and magnanimous; neither is it owing to any defect in their political or religious precepts. The principles inculcated by their rulers, on all occasions, breathe a spirit of universal philanthropy; and as to their religion, much as I am devoted to the Koran of our divine prophet, still I cannot but acknowledge with admiration the mild forbearance, the amiable benevolence, the sublime morality bequeathed them by the founder of their faith. Thou rememberest the doctrines of the mild Nazarene, who preached peace and good-will to all mankind; who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; who blessed those who cursed him, and prayed for those who despitefully used and persecuted him! What, then, can give rise to this uncharitable, this inhuman custom among the disciples of a master so gentle and forgiving? It is that fiend _politics_, Asem—that baneful fiend which bewildereth every brain, and poisons every social feeling; which intrudes itself at the festive banquet, and like the detestable harpy, pollutes the very viands of the table; which contaminates the refreshing draught while it is inhaled; which prompts the cowardly assassin to launch his poisoned arrows from behind the social board: and which renders the bottle, that boasted promoter of good fellowship and hilarity, an infernal engine charged with direful combustion.

O, Asem! Asem! how does my heart sicken when I contemplate these cowardly barbarities! let me, therefore, if possible, withdraw my attention from them forever. My feelings have borne me from my subject; and from the monuments of ancient greatness, I have wandered to those of modern degradation. My warmest wishes remain with thee, thou most illustrious of slave-drivers; mayest thou ever be sensible of the mercies of our great prophet, who, in compassion to human imbecility, has prohibited his disciples from the use of the deluding beverage of the grape; that enemy to reason—that promoter of defamation—that auxiliary of POLITICS.

Ever thine, MUSTAPHA.

NO. XVII.—WEDNESDAY, NOV. 11, 1807.

AUTUMNAL REFLECTIONS.

BY LAUNCELOT LANGSTAFF, ESQ.

When a man is quietly journeying downward into the valley of the shadow of departed youth, and begins to contemplate, in a shortened perspective, the end of his pilgrimage, he becomes more solicitous than ever that the remainder of his wayfaring should be smooth and pleasant; and the evening of his life, like the evening of a summer’s day, fade away in mild uninterrupted serenity. If haply his heart has escaped uninjured through the dangers of a seductive world, it may then administer to the purest of his felicities, and its chords vibrate more musically for the trials they have sustained—like the viol which yields a melody sweet in proportion to its age.

To a mind thus temperately harmonized—thus matured and mellowed by a long lapse of years—there is something truly congenial in the quiet enjoyment of our early autumn, amid the tranquillities of the country. There is a sober and chastened air of gayety diffused over the face of nature, peculiarly interesting to an old man; and when he views the surrounding landscape withering under his eye, it seems as if he and nature were taking a last farewell of each other and parting with a melancholy smile; like a couple of old friends, who, having sported away the spring and summer of life together, part at the approach of winter with a kind of prophetic fear that they are never to meet again.

It is either my good fortune, or mishap, to be keenly susceptible to the influence of the atmosphere; and I can feel in the morning, before I open my window, whether the wind is easterly. It will not, therefore, I presume, be considered an extravagant instance of vainglory when I assert, that there are few men who can discriminate more accurately in the different varieties of damps, fogs, Scotch mists, and northeast storms, than myself. To the great discredit of my philosophy, I confess, I seldom fail to anathematize and excommunicate the weather, when it sports too rudely with my sensitive system; but then I always endeavor to atone therefor, by eulogizing it when deserving of approbation. And as most of my readers—simple folks!—make but one distinction, to wit, rain and sunshine; living in most honest ignorance of the various nice shades which distinguish one fine day from another, I take the trouble, from time to time, of letting them into some of the secrets of nature. So will they be the better enabled to enjoy her beauties, with the zest of connoisseurs, and derive at least as much information from my pages as from the weather-wise lore of the almanac.

Much of my recreation, since I retreated to the Hall, has consisted in making little excursions through the neighborhood; which abounds in the variety of wild, romantic, and luxuriant landscape that generally characterizes the scenery in the vicinity of our rivers. There is not an eminence within a circuit of many miles but commands an extensive range of diversified and enchanting prospect.

Often have I rambled to the summit of some favorite hill; and thence, with feelings sweetly tranquil, as the lucid expanse of the heavens that canopied me, have noted the slow and almost imperceptible changes that mark the waning year. There are many features peculiar to our autumn, and which give it an individual character. The “green and yellow melancholy” that first steals over the landscape—the mild and steady serenity of the weather, and the transparent purity of the atmosphere, speak, not merely to the senses, but the heart. It is the season of liberal emotions. To this succeeds fantastic gayety, a motley dress, which the woods assume, where green and yellow, orange, purple, crimson, and scarlet, are whimsically blended together. A sickly splendor this!—like the wild and broken-hearted gayety, that sometimes precedes dissolution,—or that childish sportiveness of superannuated age, proceeding, not from a vigorous flow of animal spirits, but from the decay and imbecility of the mind. We might, perhaps, be deceived by this gaudy garb of nature, were it not for the rustling of the falling leaf, which, breaking on the stillness of the scene, seems to announce, in prophetic whispers, the dreary winter that is approaching. When I have sometimes seen a thrifty young oak changing its hue of sturdy vigor for a bright, but transient glow of red, it has recalled to my mind the treacherous bloom that once mantled the cheek of a friend who is now no more; and which, while it seemed to promise a long life of jocund spirits, was the sure precursor of premature decay. In a little while, and this ostentatious foliage disappears; the close of autumn leaves but one wide expanse of dusky brown, save where some rivulet steals along, bordered with little strips of green grass; the woodland echoes no more to the carols of the feathered tribes that sported in the leafy covert, and its solitude and silence is uninterrupted except by the plaintive whistle of the quail, the barking of the squirrel, or the still more melancholy wintry wind, which, rushing and swelling through the hollows of the mountains, sighs through the leafless branches of the grove, and seems to mourn the desolation of the year.

To one who, like myself, is fond of drawing comparisons between the different divisions of life, and those of the seasons, there will appear a striking analogy, which connects the feelings of the aged with the decline of the year. Often, as I contemplate the mild, uniform, and genial lustre with which the sun cheers and invigorates us in the month of October, and the almost imperceptible haze which, without obscuring, tempers all the asperities of the landscape, and gives to every object a character of stillness and repose, I cannot help comparing it with that portion of existence when, the spring of youthful hope and the summer of the passions having gone by, reason assumes an undisputed sway, and lights us on with bright, but undazzling lustre, adown the hill of life. There is a full and mature luxuriance in the fields that fills the bosom with generous and disinterested content. It is not the thoughtless extravagance of spring, prodigal only in blossoms, nor the languid voluptuousness of summer, feverish in its enjoyments, and teeming only with immature abundance—it is that certain fruition of the labors of the past—that prospect of comfortable realities, which those will be sure to enjoy who have improved the beauteous smiles of heaven, nor wasted away their spring and summer in empty trifling or criminal indulgence.

Cousin Pindar, who is my constant companion in these expeditions, and who still possesses much of the fire and energy of youthful sentiment, and a buxom hilarity of the spirits, often, indeed, draws me from these half-melancholy reveries, and makes me feel young again by the enthusiasm with which he contemplates, and the animation with which he eulogizes the beauties of nature displayed before him. His enthusiastic disposition never allows him to enjoy things by halves, and his feelings are continually breaking out in notes of admiration and ejaculations that sober reason might perhaps deem extravagant. But, for my part, when I see a hale, hearty old man, who has jostled through the rough path of the world, without having worn away the fine edges of his feelings, or blunted his sensibility to natural and moral beauty, I compare him to the evergreen of the forest, whose colors, instead of fading at the approach of winter, seem to assume additional lustre, when contrasted with the surrounding desolation. Such a man is my friend Pindar; yet sometimes, and particularly at the approach of evening, even he will fall in with my humor; but he soon recovers his natural tone of spirits; and, mounting on the elasticity of his mind, like Ganymede on the eagle’s wing, he soars to the ethereal regions of sunshine and fancy.

One afternoon we had strolled to the top of a high hill in the neighborhood of the Hall, which commands an almost boundless prospect; and as the shadows began to lengthen around us, and the distant mountains to fade into mist, my cousin was seized with a moralizing fit. “It seems to me,” said he, laying his hand lightly on my shoulder, “that there is just at this season, and this hour, a sympathy between us and the world we are now contemplating. The evening is stealing upon nature as well as upon us; the shadows of the opening day have given place to those of its close; and the only difference is, that in the morning they were before us, now they are behind; and that the first vanished in the splendors of noonday, the latter will be lost in the oblivion of night. Our ‘May of life,’ my dear Launce, has forever fled; our summer is over and gone—but,” continued he, suddenly recovering himself, and slapping me gayly on the shoulder—“but why should we repine?—what? though the capricious zephyrs of spring, the heats and hurricanes of summer, have given place to the sober sunshine of autumn! and though the woods begin to assume the dappled livery of decay! yet the prevailing color is still green—gay, sprightly green.

“Let us then comfort ourselves with this reflection; that though the shades of the morning have given place to those of the evening—though the spring is past, the summer over, and the autumn come—still you and I go on our way rejoicing, and while, like the lofty mountains of our southern America, our heads are covered with snow, still, like them, we feel the genial warmth of spring and summer playing upon our bosoms.”

BY LAUNCELOT LANGSTAFF, ESQ.,

In the description which I gave some time since, of Cockloft Hall, I totally forgot to make honorable mention of the library, which I confess was a most inexcusable oversight; for in truth it would bear a comparison, in point of usefulness and eccentricity, with the motley collection of the renowned hero of La Mancha.

It was chiefly gathered together by my grandfather; who spared neither pains nor expense to procure specimens of the oldest, most quaint, and insufferable books in the whole compass of English, Scotch, and Irish literature. There is a tradition in the family that the old gentleman once gave a grand entertainment in consequence of having got possession of a copy of a phillipic, by Archbishop Anselm, against the unseemly luxury of long-toed shoes, as worn by the courtiers in the time of William Rufus, which he purchased of an honest brick-maker in the neighborhood, for a little less than forty times its value. He had undoubtedly a singular reverence for old authors, and his highest eulogium on his library was, that it consisted of books not to be met with in any other collection; and as the phrase is, entirely out of print. The reason of which was, I suppose, that they were not worthy of being reprinted.

Cousin Christopher preserves these relics with great care, and has added considerably to the collection; for with the Hall he has inherited almost all the whimwhams of its former possessor. He cherishes a reverential regard for ponderous _tomes_ of Greek and Latin; though he knows about as much of these languages, as a young Bachelor of Arts does a year or two after leaving college. A worm-eaten work in eight or ten volumes he compares to an old family, more respectable for its antiquity than its splendor; a lumbering folio he considers as a duke; a sturdy quarto, as an earl; and a row of gilded duodecimos, as so many gallant knights of the garter. But as to modern works of literature, they are thrust into trunks and drawers, as intruding upstarts, and regarded with as much contempt as mushroom nobility in England; who, having risen to grandeur, merely by their talents and services, are regarded as utterly unworthy to mingle their blood with those noble currents that can be traced without a single contamination through a long line of, perhaps, useless and profligate ancestors, up to William the Bastard’s cook, or butler, or groom, or some one of Rollo’s freebooters.

Will Wizard, whose studies are of a most uncommon complexion, takes great delight in ransacking the library; and has been, during his late sojournings at the Hall, very constant and devout in his visits to this receptacle of obsolete learning. He seemed particularly tickled with the contents of the great mahogany chest of drawers mentioned in the beginning of this work. This venerable piece of architecture has frowned in sullen majesty, from a corner of the library, time out of mind; and is filled with musty manuscripts, some in my grandfather’s handwriting and others evidently written long before his day.

It was a sight, worthy of a man’s seeing, to behold Will with his outlandish phiz poring over old scrawls that would puzzle a whole society of antiquarians to expound, and diving into receptacles of trumpery, which for a century past, had been undisturbed by mortal hand. He would sit for whole hours, with a phlegmatic patience unknown in these degenerate days, except, peradventure, among the High Dutch commentators, prying into the quaint obscurity of musty parchments, until his whole face seemed to be converted into a folio leaf of black letter; and occasionally, when the whimsical meaning of an obscure passage flashed on his mind, his countenance would curl up into an expression of gothic risibility, not unlike the physiognomy of a cabbage leaf wilting before a hot fire.

At such times there was no getting Will to join in our walks; or take any part in our usual recreations; he hardly gave us an oriental tale in a week, and would smoke so inveterately that no one else dared to enter the library under pain of suffocation. This was more especially the case when he encountered any knotty piece of writing; and he honestly confessed to me that one worm-eaten manuscript, written in a pestilent crabbed hand, had cost him a box of the best Spanish cigars before he could make it out; and after all, it was not worth a tobacco-stalk. Such is the turn of my knowing associate; only let him get fairly in the track of any odd out-of-the-way whimwham, and away he goes, whip and cut, until he either runs down his game, or runs himself out of breath; I never in my life met with a man who rode his hobby-horse more intolerably hard than Wizard.

One of his favorite occupations, for some time past, has been the hunting of black letter, which he holds in high regard; and he often hints, that learning has been on the decline ever since the introduction of the Roman alphabet. An old book printed three hundred years ago is a treasure; and a ragged scroll, about one-half unintelligible, fills him with rapture. O! with what enthusiasm will he dwell on the discovery of the Pandects of Justinian, and Livy’s history; and when he relates the pious exertions of the Medici, in recovering the lost treasures of Greek and Roman literature, his eye brightens, and his face assumes all the splendor of an illuminated manuscript.

Will had vegetated for a considerable time in perfect tranquillity among dust and cobwebs, when one morning as we were gathered on the piazza, listening with exemplary patience to one of Cousin Christopher’s long stories about the Revolutionary War, we were suddenly electrified by an explosion of laughter from the library. My readers, unless peradventure they have heard honest Will laugh, can form no idea of the prodigious uproar he makes. To hear him in a forest, you would imagine—that is to say if you were classical enough—that the satyrs and the dryads had just discovered a pair of rural lovers in the shade, and were deriding, with bursts of obstreperous laughter, the blushes of the nymph and the indignation of the swain,—or if it were suddenly, as in the present instance, to break upon the serene and pensive silence of an autumnal morning, it would cause a sensation something like that which arises from hearing a sudden clap of thunder in a summer’s day, when not a cloud is to be seen above the horizon. In short, I recommend Will’s laugh as a sovereign remedy for the spleen: and if any of our readers are troubled with that villainous complaint—which can hardly be, if they make good use of our works—I advise them earnestly to get introduced to him forthwith.

This outrageous merriment of Will’s, as may be easily supposed, threw the whole family into a violent fit of wondering; we all, with the exception of Christopher, who took the interruption in high dudgeon, silently stole up to the library; and bolting in upon him, were fain at the first glance to join in his aspiring roar. His face—but I despair to give an idea of his appearance!—and until his portrait, which is now in the hands of an eminent artist, is engraved, my readers must be content: I promise them they shall one day or other have a striking likeness of Will’s indescribable phiz, in all its native comeliness.

Upon my inquiring the occasion of his mirth, he thrust an old, rusty, musty, and dusty manuscript into my hand, of which I could not decipher one word out of ten, without more trouble than it was worth. This task, however, he kindly took off my hands; and, in a little more than eight-and-forty hours, produced a translation into fair Roman letters; though he assured me it had lost a vast deal of its humor by being modernized and degraded into plain English. In return for the great pains he had taken, I could not do less than insert it in our work. Will informs me that it is but one sheet of a stupendous bundle which still remains uninvestigated. Who was the author we have not yet discovered; but a note on the back, in my grandfather’s handwriting, informs us that it was presented to him as a literary curiosity by his particular friend, the illustrious Rip Van Dam, formerly lieutenant-governor of the colony of New Amsterdam; and whose fame, if it has never reached these latter days, it was only because he was too modest a man ever to do anything worthy of being particularly recorded.

CHAP. CIX.—OF THE CHRONICLES OF THE RENOWNED AND ANTIENT CITY OF GOTHAM.

How Gotham city conquered was, And how the folks turned apes—because. _Link. Fid._

Albeit, much about this time it did fall out that the thrice renowned and delectable city of Gotham did suffer great discomfiture, and was reduced to perilous extremity, by the invasion and assaults of the Hoppingtots. These are a people inhabiting a far distant country, exceedingly pleasaunte and fertile; but they being withal egregiously addicted to migrations, do thence issue forth in mighty swarms, like the Scythians of old, overrunning divers countries and commonwealths, and committing great devastations wheresoever they do go, by their horrible and dreadful feats and prowesses. They are specially noted for being right valorous in all exercises of the leg; and of them it hath been rightly affirmed that no nation in all Christendom or elsewhere, can cope with them in the adroit, dexterous, and jocund shaking of the heel.

This engaging excellence doth stand unto them a sovereign recommendation, by which they do insinuate themselves into universal favor and good countenance; and it is a notable fact, that, let a Hoppingtot but once introduce a foot into company, and it goeth hardly if he doth not contrive to flourish his whole body in thereafter. The learned Linkum Fidelius, in his famous and unheard-of treatise on man, whom he defineth, with exceeding sagacity, to be a corn-cutting, tooth-drawing animal, is particularly minute and elaborate in treating of the nation of the Hoppingtots, and betrays a little of the Pythagorean in his theory, inasmuch as he accounteth for their being so wonderously adroit in pedestrian exercises, by supposing that they did originally acquire this unaccountable and unparalleled aptitude for huge and unmatchable feats of the leg, by having heretofore been condemned for their numerous offenses against that harmless race of bipeds,—or quadrupeds, for herein the sage Linkum Fidelius appeareth to doubt and waver exceedingly—the frogs, to animate their bodies for the space of one or two generations.

He also giveth it as his opinion, that the name of Hoppingtots is manifestly derivative from this transmigration. Be this, however, as it may, the matter, albeit it has been the subject of controversy among the learned, is but little pertinent to the subject of this history; wherefore shall we treat and consider it as naughte.

Now these people being thereto impelled by a superfluity of appetite, and a plentiful deficiency of the wherewithal to satisfy the same, did take thought that the antient and venerable city of Gotham, was, peradventure, possessed of mighty treasures, and did, moreover, abound with all manner of fish and flesh, and eatables and drinkables, and such like delightsome and wholesome excellencies withal. Whereupon calling a council of the most active heeled warriors, they did resolve forthwith to put forth a mighty array, make themselves masters of the same, and revel in the good things of the land. To this were they hotly stirred up, and wickedly incited, by two redoubtable and renowned warriors, hight Pirouet and Rigadoon; ycleped in such sort, by reason that they were two mighty, valiant, and invincible little men; utterly famous for the victories of the leg which they had, on divers illustrious occasions, right gallantly achieved.

These doughty champions did ambitiously and wickedly inflame the minds of their countrymen, with gorgeous descriptions, in the which they did cunninglie set forth the marvelous riches and luxuries of Gotham; where Hoppingtots might have garments for their bodies, shirts to their ruffles, and might riot most merrily every day in the week on beef, pudding, and such like lusty dainties. They, Pirouet and Rigadoon, did likewise hold out hopes of an easy conquest; forasmuch as the Gothamites were as yet but little versed in the mystery and science of handling the legs; and being, moreover, like unto that notable bully of antiquity, Achilles, most vulnerable to all attacks on the heel, would doubtless surrender at the very first assault. Whereupon, on the hearing of this inspiriting counsel, the Hoppingtots did set up a prodigious great cry of joy, shook their heels in triumph, and were all impatience to dance on to Gotham and take it by storm.

The cunning Pirouet, and that arch caitiff Rigadoon, knew full well how to profit of this enthusiasm. They forthwith did order every man to arm himself with a certain pestilent little weapon called a fiddle; to pack up in his knapsack a pair of silk breeches, the like of ruffles, a cocked hat of the form of a half-moon, a bundle of catgut—and inasmuch as in marching to Gotham, the army might peradventure be smitten with scarcity of provisions, they did account it proper that each man should take especial care to carry with him a bunch of right merchantable onions. Having proclaimed these orders by sound of fiddle, they, Pirouet and Rigadoon, did accordingly put their army behind them, and striking up the right jolly and sprightful tune of _Ça Ira_, away they all capered toward the devoted city of Gotham, with a most horrible and appalling chattering of voices.

Of their first appearance before the beleaguered town, and of the various difficulties which did encounter them in their march, this history saith not; being that other matters of more weighty import require to be written. When that the army of the Hoppingtots did peregrinate within sight of Gotham, and the people of the city did behold the villainous and hitherto unseen capers and grimaces which they did make, a most horrific panic was stirred up among the citizens; and the sages of the town fell into great despondency and tribulation, as supposing that these invaders were of the race of the Jig-hees, who did make men into baboons when they achieved a conquest over them. The sages, therefore, called upon all the dancing-men and dancing-women, and exhorted them, with great vehemence of speech, to make heel against the invaders, and to put themselves upon such gallant defense, such glorious array, and such sturdy evolution, elevation, and transposition of the foot as might incontinently impester the legs of the Hoppingtots, and produce their complete discomfiture. But so it did happen, by great mischance, that divers light-heeled youths of Gotham, more especially those who are descended from three wise men, so renowned of yore for having most venturesomely voyaged over sea in a bowl, were, from time to time, captured and inveigled into the camp of the enemy; where, being foolishly cajoled and treated for a season with outlandish disports and pleasantries, they were sent back to their friends, entirely changed, degenerated, and turned topsy-turvy; insomuch that they thought thenceforth of nothing but their heels, always essaying to thrust them into the most manifest point of view; and, in a word, as might truly be affirmed, did forever after walk upon their heads outright.

And the Hoppingtots did day by day, and at late hours of the night, wax more and more urgent in this their investment of the city. At one time they would, in goodly procession, make an open assault by sound of fiddle in a tremendous contra-dance—and anon they would advance by little detachments and maneuvers to take the town by figuring in cotillons. But truly their most cunning and devilish craft and subtilty was made manifest in their strenuous endeavors to corrupt the garrison, by a most insidious and pestilent dance called the _Waltz_. This, in good truth, was a potent auxiliary; for, by it, were the heads of the simple Gothamites most villainously turned, their wits sent a wool-gathering, and themselves on the point of surrendering at discretion even unto the very arms of their invading foemen.

At length the fortifications of the town began to give manifest symptoms of decay; inasmuch as the breastwork of decency was considerably broken down, and the curtain works of propriety blown up. When that cunning caitiff, Pirouet, beheld the ticklish and jeopardized state of the city—“Now, by my leg,” quoth he,—he always swore by his leg, being that it was an exceedingly goodlie leg,—“now, by my leg,” quoth he, “but this is no great matter of recreation; I will show these people a pretty, strange, and new way, forsooth, presently, and will shake the dust off my pumps upon this most obstinate and uncivilized town. Whereupon he ordered, and did command his warriors, one and all, that they should put themselves in readiness, and prepare to carry the town by a GRAND BALL. They, in nowise to be daunted, do forthwith, at the word, equip themselves for the assault; and in good faith, truly, it was a gracious and glorious sight—a most triumphant and incomparable spectacle—to behold them gallantly arrayed in glossy and shining silk breeches tied with abundance of ribbon; with silken hose of the gorgeous color of the salmon; right goodlie morocco pumps, decorated with clasps or buckles of a most cunninge and secret contrivance, inasmuch as they did of themselves grapple to the shoe without any aid of fluke or tongue, marvelously ensembling witchcraft and necromancy. They had, withal, exuberant chitterlings, which puffed out at the neck and bosom, after a most jolly fashion, like unto the beard of an antient he-turkey; and cocked hats, the which they did carry not on their heads, after the fashion of the Gothamites, but under their arms, as a roasted fowl his gizzard.”

Thus being equipped and marshaled, they do attack, assault, batter, and belabor the town with might and main; most gallantly displaying the vigor of their legs, and shaking their heels at it most emphatically. And the manner of their attack was in this sort: first, they did thunder and gallop forward in a _contre-temps_—and anon, displayed column in a Cossack dance, a fandango, or a gavot. Whereat the Gothamites, in nowise understanding this unknown system of warfare, marveled exceedinglie, and did open their mouths incontinently, the full distance of a bow-shot, meaning a cross-bow, in sore dismay and apprehension. Whereupon, saith Rigadoon, flourishing his left leg with great expression of valor, and most magnific carriage: “My copesmates, for what wait we here? are not the townsmen already won to our favor? do not their women and young damsels wave to us from the walls in such sort that, albeit there is some show of defense, yet is it manifestly converted into our interests?” So saying, he made no more ado, but leaping into the air about a flight-shot, and crossing his feet six times, after the manner of the Hoppingtots, he gave a short partridge-run, and with mighty vigor and swiftness did bolt outright over the walls with a somerset. The whole army of Hoppingtots danced in after their valiant chieftain, with an enormous squeaking of fiddles, and a horrific blasting and brattling of horns; insomuch that the dogs did howl in the streets, so hideously were their ears assailed. The Gothamites made some semblance of defense, but their women having been all won over into the interest of the enemy, they were shortly reduced to make most abject submission; and delivered over to the coercion of certain professors of the Hoppingtots, who did put them under most ignominious durance, for the space of a long time, until they had learned to turn out their toes, and flourish their legs after the manner of their conquerors. And thus, after the manner I have related, was the mighty and puissant city of Gotham circumvented, and taken by a _coup de pied_: or, as it might be rendered, by force of legs.

The conquerors showed no mercy, but did put all ages, sexes, and conditions, to the fiddle and the dance; and, in a word, compelled and enforced them to become absolute Hoppingtots. “Habit,” as the ingenious Linkum Fidelius profoundly affirmeth, “is second nature.” And this original and invaluable observation hath been most aptly proved, and illustrated, by the example of the Gothamites, ever since this disastrous and unlucky mischance. In process of time, they have waxed to be most flagrant, outrageous, and abandoned dancers; they do ponder on naughte but how to gallantize it at balls, routs, and fandangoes; insomuch that the like was in no time or place ever observed before. They do moreover, pitifully devote their nights to the jollification of the legs, and their days forsooth to the instruction and edification of the heel. And to conclude; their young folk, who whilome did bestow a modicum of leisure upon the head, have of late utterly abandoned this hopeful task, and have quietly, as it were, settled themselves down into mere machines, wound up by a tune, and set in motion by a fiddle-stick!

NO. XVIII.—TUESDAY, NOV. 24, 1807.

THE LITTLE MAN IN BLACK.

BY LAUNCELOT LANGSTAFF, ESQ.

The following story has been handed down by family tradition for more than a century. It is one on which my cousin Christopher dwells with more than usual prolixity; and, being in some measure connected with a personage often quoted in our work, I have thought it worthy of being laid before my readers.

Soon after my grandfather, Mr. Lemuel Cockloft, had quietly settled himself at the Hall, and just about the time that the gossips of the neighborhood, tired of prying into his affairs, were anxious for some new tea-table topic, the busy community of our little village was thrown into a grand turmoil of curiosity and conjecture—a situation very common to little gossiping villages—by the sudden and unaccountable appearance of a mysterious individual.

The object of this solicitude was a little black-looking man, of a foreign aspect, who took possession of an old building, which having long had the reputation of being haunted, was in a state of ruinous desolation, and an object of fear to all true believers in ghosts. He usually wore a high sugarloaf hat with a narrow brim; and a little black cloak, which, short as he was, scarcely reached below his knees. He sought no intimacy or acquaintance with any one; appeared to take no interest in the pleasures or the little broils of the village; nor ever talked; except sometimes to himself in an outlandish tongue. He commonly carried a large book, covered with sheepskin, under his arm; appeared always to be lost in meditation; and was often met by the peasantry, sometimes watching the dawning of day, sometimes at noon seated under a tree, poring over his volume; and sometimes at evening gazing with a look of sober tranquillity at the sun as it gradually sunk below the horizon.

The good people of the vicinity beheld something prodigiously singular in all this; a profound mystery seemed to hang about the stranger which, with all their sagacity, they could not penetrate; and in the excess of worldly charity they pronounced it a sure sign “that he was no better than he should be;” a phrase innocent enough in itself: but which, as applied in common, signifies nearly everything that is bad. The young people thought him a gloomy misanthrope, because he never joined in their sports; the old men thought still more hardly of him because he followed no trade, and never seemed ambitious of earning a farthing; and as to the old gossips, baffled by the inflexible taciturnity of the stranger, they unanimously decreed that a man who could not or would not talk was no better than a dumb beast. The little man in black, careless of their opinions, seemed resolved to maintain the liberty of keeping his own secret; and the consequence was that, in a little while, the whole village was in an uproar; for in little communities of this description, the members have always the privilege of being thoroughly versed, and even of meddling in all the affairs of each other.

A confidential conference was held one Sunday morning after sermon, at the door of the village church, and the character of the unknown fully investigated. The schoolmaster gave it as his opinion that he was the wandering Jew; the sexton was certain that he must be a freemason, from his silence; a third maintained, with great obstinacy, that he was a high German doctor, and that the book which he carried about with him contained the secrets of the black art; but the most prevailing opinion seemed to be that he was a witch; a race of beings at that time abounding in those parts; and a sagacious old matron, from Connecticut, proposed to ascertain the fact by sousing him into a kettle of hot water.

Suspicion, when once afloat, goes with wind and tide, and soon becomes certainty. Many a stormy night was the little man in black seen by the flashes of lightning, frisking and curveting in the air upon a broomstick; and it was always observed that at those times the storm did more mischief than at any other. The old lady, in particular, who suggested the humane ordeal of the boiling kettle, lost on one of these occasions a fine brindle cow; which accident was entirely ascribed to the vengeance of the little man in black. If ever a mischievous hireling rode his master’s favorite horse to a distant frolic, and the animal was observed to be lame and jaded in the morning, the little man in black was sure to be at the bottom of the affair; nor could a high wind howl through the village at night but the old women shrugged up their shoulders, and observed, “the little man in black was in his _tantrums_.” In short, he became the bugbear of every house; and was as effectual in frightening little children into obedience and hysterics, as the redoubtable Raw-head-and-bloody-bones himself; nor could a housewife of the village sleep in peace except under the guardianship of a horseshoe nailed to the door.

The object of these direful suspicions remained for some time totally ignorant of the wonderful quandary he had occasioned; but he was soon doomed to feel its effects. An individual who is once so unfortunate as to incur the odium of a village is in a great measure outlawed and proscribed; and becomes a mark for injury and insult; particularly if he has not the power or the disposition to recriminate. The little venomous passions, which in the great world are dissipated and weakened by being widely diffused, act in the narrow limits of a country town with collected vigor, and become rancorous in proportion as they are confined in their sphere of action. The little man in black experienced the truth of this; every mischievous urchin returning from school had full liberty to break his windows; and this was considered as a most daring exploit; for in such awe did they stand of him, that the most adventurous schoolboy was never seen to approach his threshold, and at night would prefer going round by the cross-roads, where a traveller had been murdered by the Indians, rather than pass by the door of his forlorn habitation.

The only living creature that seemed to have any care or affection for this deserted being was an old turnspit—the companion of his lonely mansion and his solitary wandering—the sharer of his scanty meals, and—sorry I am to say it—the sharer of his persecutions. The turnspit, like his master, was peaceable and inoffensive; never known to bark at a horse, to growl at a traveller, or to quarrel with the dogs of the neighborhood. He followed close at his master’s heels when he went out, and when he returned stretched himself in the sunbeams at the door; demeaning himself in all things like a civil and well-disposed turnspit. But notwithstanding his exemplary deportment, he fell likewise under the ill report of the village, as being the familiar of the little man in black, and the evil spirit that presided at his incantations. The old hovel was considered as the scene of their unhallowed rites, and its harmless tenants regarded with a detestation which their inoffensive conduct never merited. Though pelted and jeered at by the brats of the village, and frequently abused by their parents, the little man in black never turned to rebuke them; and his faithful dog, when wantonly assaulted, looked up wistfully in his master’s face, and there learned a lesson of patience and forbearance.

The movements of this inscrutable being had long been the subject of speculation at Cockloft Hall, for its inmates were full as much given to wondering as their descendants. The patience with which he bore his persecutions particularly surprised them; for patience is a virtue but little known in the Cockloft family. My grandmother, who, it appears, was rather superstitious, saw in this humility nothing but the gloomy sullenness of a wizard who restrained himself for the present, in hopes of midnight vengeance; the parson of the village, who was a man of some reading, pronounced it the stubborn insensibility of a stoic philosopher; my grandfather, who, worthy soul, seldom wandered abroad in search of conclusions, took a data from his own excellent heart, and regarded it as the humble forgiveness of a Christian. But however different were their opinions as to the character of the stranger, they agreed in one particular, namely, in never intruding upon his solitude; and my grandmother, who was at that time nursing my mother, never left the room without wisely putting the large family Bible in the cradle—a sure talisman, in her opinion, against witchcraft and necromancy.

One stormy winter night, when a bleak northeast wind moaned about the cottages, and howled around the village steeple, my grandfather was returning from club, preceded by a servant with a lantern. Just as he arrived opposite the desolate abode of the little man in black, he was arrested by the piteous howling of a dog, which, heard in the pauses of a storm, was exquisitely mournful; and he fancied, now and then, that he caught the low and broken groans of some one in distress. He stopped for some minutes, hesitating between the benevolence of his heart and a sensation of genuine delicacy, which, in spite of his eccentricity, he fully possessed—and which forbade him to pry into the concerns of his neighbors. Perhaps, too, this hesitation might have been strengthened by a little taint of superstition; for surely, if the unknown had been addicted to witchcraft, this was a most propitious night for his vagaries. At length the old gentleman’s philanthropy predominated; he approached the hovel, and, pushing open the door—for poverty has no occasion for locks and keys—beheld, by the light of the lantern, a scene that smote his generous heart to the core.

On a miserable bed, with pallid and emaciated visage, and hollow eyes—in a room destitute of every convenience—without fire to warm or friend to console him, lay this helpless mortal, who had been so long the terror and wonder of the village. His dog was crouching on the scanty coverlet, and shivering with cold. My grandfather stepped softly and hesitatingly to the bedside, and accosted the forlorn sufferer in his usual accents of kindness. The little man in black seemed recalled by the tones of compassion from the lethargy into which he had fallen; for, though his heart was almost frozen, there was yet one chord that answered to the call of the good old man who bent over him; the tones of sympathy, so novel to his ear, called back his wandering senses, and acted like a restorative to his solitary feelings.

He raised his eyes, but they were vacant and haggard; he put forth his hand, but it was cold; he essayed to speak, but the sound died away in his throat; he pointed to his mouth with an expression of dreadful meaning, and, sad to relate, my grandfather understood that the harmless stranger, deserted by society, was perishing with hunger! With the quick impulse of humanity, he dispatched the servant to the Hall for refreshment. A little warm nourishment renovated him for a short time, but not long; it was evident his pilgrimage was drawing to a close, and he was about entering that peaceful asylum, where “the wicked cease from troubling.”

His tale of misery was short and quickly told; infirmities had stolen upon him, heightened by the rigors of the season: he had taken to his bed, without strength to rise and ask for assistance—“and if I had,” said he, in a tone of bitter despondency, “to whom should I have applied? I have no friend that I know of in the world! The villagers avoid me as something loathsome and dangerous; and here, in the midst of Christians, should I have perished, without a fellow-being to soothe the last moments of existence, and close my dying eyes, had not the howlings of my faithful dog excited your attention.”

He seemed deeply sensible of the kindness of my grandfather; and at one time, as he looked up into his old benefactor’s face, a solitary tear was observed to steal adown the parched furrows of his cheek. Poor outcast! it was the last tear he shed; but I warrant it was not the first by millions. My grandfather watched by him all night. Toward morning he gradually declined; and, as the rising sun gleamed through the window, he begged to be raised in his bed, that he might look at it for the last time. He contemplated it for a moment, with a kind of religious enthusiasm, and his lips moved as if engaged in prayer. The strange conjectures concerning him rushed on my grandfather’s mind; “he is an idolater,” thought he, “and is worshipping the sun!” He listened a moment, and blushed at his own uncharitable suspicion; he was only engaged in the pious devotions of a Christian. His simple orison being finished, the little man in black withdrew his eyes from the east, and, taking my grandfather’s hand in one of his, and making a motion with the other toward the sun: “I love to contemplate it,” said he; “’tis an emblem of the universal benevolence of a true Christian; and it is the most glorious work of Him, who is philanthropy itself!” My grandfather blushed still deeper at his ungenerous surmises; he had pitied the stranger at first, but now he revered him. He turned once more to regard him, but his countenance had undergone a change; the holy enthusiasm that had lighted up each feature had given place to an expression of mysterious import; a gleam of grandeur seemed to steal across his Gothic visage, and he appeared full of some mighty secret which he hesitated to impart. He raised the tattered night-cap that had sunk almost over his eyes, and waving his withered hand with a slow and feeble expression of dignity—“In me,” said he, with laconic solemnity—“in me you behold the last descendant of the renowned Linkum Fidelius!” My grandfather gazed at him with reverence; for though he had never heard of the illustrious personage, thus pompously announced, yet there was a certain black-letter dignity in the name that peculiarly struck his fancy and commanded his respect.

“You have been kind to me,” continued the little man in black, after a momentary pause, “and richly will I requite your kindness by making you heir to my treasures! In yonder large deal box are the volumes of my illustrious ancestor, of which I alone am the fortunate possessor. Inherit them, ponder over them, and be wise!” He grew faint with the exertion he had made, and sunk back almost breathless on his pillow. His hand, which, inspired with the importance of his subject, he had raised to my grandfather’s arm, slipped from its hold and fell over the side of the bed, and his faithful dog licked it, as if anxious to soothe the last moments of his dying master and testify his gratitude to the hand that had so often cherished him. The untaught caresses of the faithful animal were not lost upon his dying master; he raised his languid eyes, turned them on the dog, then on my grandfather; and having given this silent recommendation—closed them for ever.

The remains of the little man in black, notwithstanding the objections of many pious people, were decently interred in the churchyard of the village; and his spirit, harmless as the body it once animated, has never been known to molest a living being. My grandfather complied, as far as possible, with his last request; he conveyed the volumes of Linkum Fidelius to his library; he pondered over them frequently; but whether he grew wiser, the tradition doth not mention. This much is certain, that his kindness to the poor descendant of Fidelius was amply rewarded by the approbation of his own heart, and the devoted attachment of the old turnspit; who, transferring his affection from his deceased master to his benefactor, became his constant attendant, and was father to a long line of runty curs that still flourish in the family. And thus was the Cockloft library first enriched by the invaluable folios of the sage LINKUM FIDELIUS.

LETTER FROM MUSTAPHA RUB-A-DUB KELI KHAN, TO ASEM HACCHEM, PRINCIPAL SLAVE-DRIVER TO HIS HIGHNESS THE BASHAW OF TRIPOLI.

Though I am often disgusted, my good Asem, with the vices and absurdities of the men of this country, yet the women afford me a world of amusement. Their lively prattle is as diverting as the chattering of the red-tailed parrot; nor can the green-headed monkey of Timandi equal them in whim and playfulness. But, notwithstanding these valuable qualifications, I am sorry to observe they are not treated with half the attention bestowed on the before mentioned animals. These infidels put their parrots in cages and chain their monkeys; but their women, instead of being carefully shut up in harems and seraglios, are abandoned to the direction of their own reason, and suffered to run about in perfect freedom, like other domestic animals. This comes, Asem, of treating their women as rational beings, and allowing them souls. The consequence of this piteous neglect may easily be imagined; they have degenerated into all their native wildness, are seldom to be caught at home, and, at an early age, take to the streets and highways, where they rove about in droves, giving almost as much annoyance to the peaceable people as the troops of wild dogs that infest our great cities, or the flights of locusts that sometimes spread famine and desolation over whole regions of fertility.

This propensity to relapse into pristine wildness, convinces me of the untamable disposition of the sex, who may indeed be partially domesticated by a long course of confinement and restraint, but the moment they are restored to personal freedom, become wild as the young partridge of this country, which, though scarcely half-hatched, will take to the fields and run about with the shell upon its back.

Notwithstanding their wildness, however, they are remarkably easy of access, and suffer themselves to be approached at certain hours of the day, without any symptoms of apprehension; and I have even happily succeeded in detecting them at their domestic occupations. One of the most important of these, consists in thumping vehemently on a kind of musical instrument, and producing a confused, hideous, and indefinable uproar, which they call the description of a battle—a jest, no doubt, for they are wonderfully facetious at times, and make great practice of passing jokes upon strangers. Sometimes they employ themselves in painting little caricatures of landscapes, wherein they display their singular drollery in bantering nature fairly out of countenance; representing her tricked out in all the tawdry finery of copper skies, purple rivers, calico rocks, red grass, clouds that look like old clothes set adrift by the tempest, and foxy trees, whose melancholy foliage, drooping and curling most fantastically, reminds me of an undressed periwig that I have, now and then, seen hung on a stick in a barber’s window. At other times, they employ themselves in acquiring a smattering of languages spoken by nations on the other side of the globe, as they find their own language not sufficiently copious to supply their constant demands, and express their multifarious ideas. But their most important domestic avocation is, to embroider, on satin or muslin, flowers of a nondescript kind, in which the great art is to make them as unlike nature as possible—or to fasten little bits of silver, gold, tinsel and glass, on long strips of muslin, which they drag after them with much dignity whenever they go abroad—a fine lady, like a bird of paradise, being estimated by the length of her tail.

But do not, my friend, fall into the enormous error of supposing that the exercise of these arts is attended with any useful or profitable results; believe me, thou couldst not indulge an idea more unjust and injurious; for it appears to be an established maxim among the women of this country, that a lady loses her dignity when she condescends to be useful; and forfeits all rank in society the moment she can be convicted of earning a farthing. Their labors, therefore, are directed, not toward supplying their household, but in decking their persons, and—generous souls—they deck their persons, not so much to please themselves, as to gratify others, particularly strangers. I am confident thou wilt stare at this, my good Asem, accustomed as thou art to our eastern females, who shrink in blushing timidity even from the glance of a lover, and are so chary of their favors, that they even seem fearful of lavishing their smiles too profusely on their husbands. Here, on the contrary, the stranger has the first place in female regard, and, so far do they carry their hospitality that I have seen a fine lady slight a dozen tried friends and real admirers, who lived in her smiles and made her happiness their study, merely to allure the vague and wandering glances of a stranger, who viewed her person with indifference, and treated her advances with contempt. By the whiskers of our sublime bashaw, but this is highly flattering to a foreigner! and thou mayest judge how particularly pleasing to one who is, like myself, so ardent an admirer of the sex. Far be it from me to condemn this extraordinary manifestation of good-will—let their own countrymen look to that.

Be not alarmed, I conjure thee, my dear Asem, lest I should be tempted, by these beautiful barbarians, to break the faith I owe to the three-and-twenty wives, from whom my unhappy destiny has perhaps severed me forever. No, Asem, neither time, nor the bitter succession of misfortunes that pursue me, can shake from my heart the memory of former attachments. I listen with tranquil heart to the strumming and prattling of these fair sirens; their whimsical paintings touch not the tender chord of my affections; and I would still defy their fascinations, though they trailed after them tails as long as the gorgeous trappings which are dragged at the heels of the holy camel of Mecca; or as the tail of the great beast in our prophet’s vision, which measured three hundred and forty-nine leagues, two miles, three furlongs, and a hand’s breadth in longitude.

The dress of these women is, if possible, more eccentric and whimsical than their deportment; and they take an inordinate pride in certain ornaments which are probably derived from their savage progenitors. A woman of this country, dressed out for an exhibition, is loaded with as many ornaments as a Circassian slave when brought out for sale. Their heads are tricked out with little bits of horn or shell, cut into fantastic shapes, and they seem to emulate each other in the number of these singular baubles—like the women we have seen in our journeys to Aleppo, who cover their heads with the entire shell of a tortoise, and, thus equipped, are the envy of all their less fortunate acquaintance. They also decorate their necks and ears with coral, gold chains, and glass beads, and load their fingers with a variety of rings; though I must confess, I have never perceived that they wear any in their noses—as has been affirmed by many travellers. We have heard much of their painting themselves most hideously, and making use of bear’s grease in great profusion; but this, I solemnly assure thee, is a misrepresentation; civilization, no doubt, having gradually extirpated these nauseous practices. It is true, I have seen two or three of these females, who had disguised their features with paint; but then it was merely to give a tinge of red to their cheeks, and did not look very frightful; and as to ointment, they rarely use any now, except occasionally a little Grecian oil for their hair, which gives it a glossy, greasy, and, they think, very comely appearance. The last mentioned class of females, I take it for granted, have been but lately caught, and still retain strong traits of their original savage propensities.

The most flagrant and inexcusable fault, however, which I find in these lovely savages, is the shameless and abandoned exposure of their persons. Wilt thou not suspect me of exaggeration when I affirm—wilt thou not blush for them, most discreet Mussulman, when I declare to thee, that they are so lost to all sense of modesty, as to expose the whole of their faces, from their forehead to the chin, and they even go abroad with their hands uncovered! Monstrous indelicacy!

But what I am going to disclose will, doubtless, appear to thee still more incredible. Though I cannot forbear paying a tribute of admiration to the beautiful faces of these fair infidels, yet I must give it as my firm opinion that their persons are preposterously unseemly. In vain did I look around me, on my first landing, for those divine forms of redundant proportions, which answer to the true standard of Eastern beauty. Not a single fat fair one could I behold among the multitudes that thronged the streets; the females that passed in review before me, tripping sportively along, resembled a procession of shadows, returning to their graves at the crowing of the cock.

This meagreness I first ascribed to their excessive volubility; for I have somewhere seen it advanced by a learned doctor, that the sex were endowed with a peculiar activity of tongue, in order that they might practice talking as a healthful exercise, necessary to their confined and sedentary mode of life. This exercise, it was natural to suppose, would be carried to great excess in a logocracy. “Too true,” thought I, “they have converted what was undoubtedly meant as a beneficent gift, into a noxious habit, that steals the flesh from their bones and the rose from their cheeks—they absolutely talk themselves thin!” Judge, then, of my surprise when I was assured, not long since, that this meagreness was considered the perfection of personal beauty, and that many a lady starved herself, with all the obstinate perseverance of a pious dervise—into a fine figure! “Nay, more,” said my informer, “they will often sacrifice their healths in this eager pursuit of skeleton beauty, and drink vinegar, eat pickles, and smoke tobacco, to keep themselves within the scanty outlines of the fashions.” Faugh! Allah preserve me from such beauties, who contaminate their pure blood with noxious recipes—who impiously sacrifice the best gifts of Heaven, to a preposterous and mistaken vanity! Ere long I shall not be surprised to see them scarring their faces like the negroes of Congo, flattening their noses in imitation of the Hottentots, or, like the barbarians of Ab-al Timar, distorting their lips and ears out of all natural dimensions. Since I received this information, I cannot contemplate a fine figure without thinking of a vinegar cruet: nor look at a dashing belle without fancying her a pot of pickled cucumbers! What a difference, my friend, between these shades and the plump beauties of Tripoli—what a contrast between an infidel fair one and my favorite wife, Fatima, whom I bought by the hundred weight, and had trundled home in a wheelbarrow!

But enough for the present; I am promised a faithful account of the arcana of a lady’s toilette—a complete initiation into the arts, mysteries, spells, and potions; in short, the whole chemical process by which she reduces herself down to the most fashionable standard of insignificance; together with specimens of the strait-waistcoats, the lacings, the bandages, and the various ingenious instruments with which she puts nature to the rack, and tortures herself into a proper figure to be admired.

Farewell, thou sweetest of slave-drivers! The echoes that repeat to a lover’s ear the song of his mistress, are not more soothing than tidings from those we love. Let thy answer to my letters be speedy; and never, I pray thee, for a moment, cease to watch over the prosperity of my house, and the welfare of my beloved wives. Let them want for nothing, my friend; but feed them plentifully on honey, boiled rice, and water-gruel; so that when I return to the blessed land of my fathers, if that can ever be! I may find them improved in size and loveliness, and sleek as the graceful elephants that range the green valley of Abimar.

Ever thine, MUSTAPHA.

NO. XIX.—THURSDAY, DEC. 31, 1807.

FROM MY ELBOW-CHAIR.

Having returned to town, and once more formally taken possession of my elbow-chair, it behooves me to discard the rural feelings, and the rural sentiments, in which I have for some time past indulged, and devote myself more exclusively to the edification of the town. As I feel at this moment a chivalric spark of gallantry playing around my heart, and one of those dulcet emotions of cordiality, which an old bachelor will sometimes entertain toward the divine sex, I am determined to gratify the sentiment for once, and devote this number exclusively to the ladies. I would not, however, have our fair readers imagine that we wish to flatter ourselves into their good graces, devoutly as we adore them!—and what true cavalier does not?—and heartily as we desire to flourish in the mild sunshine of their smiles, yet we scorn to insinuate ourselves into their favor; unless it be as honest friends, sincere well-wishers, and disinterested advisers. If in the course of this number they find us rather prodigal of our encomiums, they will have the modesty to ascribe it to the excess of their own merits; if they find us extremely indulgent to their faults, they will impute it rather to the superabundance of our good nature, than to any servile and illiberal fear of giving offense.

The following letter of Mustapha falls in exactly with the current of my purpose. As I have before mentioned that his letters are without dates, we were obliged to give them very irregularly, without any regard to chronological order.

The present one appears to have been written not long after his arrival, and antecedent to several already published. It is more in the familiar and colloquial style than the others. Will Wizard declares he has translated it with fidelity, excepting that he has omitted several remarks on the waltz, which the honest Mussulman eulogizes with great enthusiasm, comparing it to certain voluptuous dances of the seraglio. Will regretted exceedingly, that the indelicacy of several of these observations compelled their total exclusion, as he wishes to give all possible encouragement to this popular and amiable exhibition.

LETTER FROM MUSTAPHA RUB-A-DUB KELI KHAN, TO MULEY HELIM AL RAGGI, SURNAMED THE AGREEABLE RAGAMUFFIN, CHIEF MOUNTEBANK AND BUFFA-DANCER TO HIS HIGHNESS.

The numerous letters which I have written to our friend the slave-driver, as well as those to thy kinsman the Snorer, and which, doubtless, were read to thee, honest Muley, have, in all probability, awakened thy curiosity to know further particulars concerning the manners of the barbarians, who hold me in such ignominious captivity. I was lately at one of their public ceremonies, which, at first, perplexed me exceedingly as to its object; but as the explanations of a friend have let me somewhat into the secret, and as it seems to bear no small analogy to thy profession, a description of it may contribute to thy amusement, if not to thy instruction.

A few days since, just as I had finished my coffee, and was perfuming my whiskers, preparatory to a morning walk, I was waited upon by an inhabitant of this place, a gay young infidel, who has of late cultivated my acquaintance. He presented me with a square bit of painted pasteboard, which, he informed me, would entitle me to admittance to the _City Assembly_. Curious to know the meaning of a phrase which was entirely new to me, I requested an explanation; when my friend informed me, that the assembly was a numerous concourse of young people of both sexes, who, on certain occasions, gathered together to dance about a large room with violent gesticulation, and try to outdress each other. “In short,” said he, “if you wish to see the natives in all their glory, there’s no place like the _City Assembly_; so you must go there, and sport your whiskers.” Though the matter of sporting my whiskers was considerably above my apprehension, yet I now began, as I thought, to understand him. I had heard of the war dances of the natives, which are a kind of religious institution, and had little doubt but that this must be a solemnity of the kind—upon a prodigious great scale. Anxious as I am to contemplate these strange people in every situation, I willingly acceded to his proposal, and to be the more at ease, I determined to lay aside my Turkish dress, and appear in plain garments of the fashion of this country, as is my custom whenever I wish to mingle in a crowd without exciting the attention of the gaping multitude.

It was long after the shades of night had fallen before my friend appeared to conduct me to the assembly. “These infidels,” thought I, “shroud themselves in mystery, and seek the aid of gloom and darkness, to heighten the solemnity of their pious orgies.” Resolving to conduct myself with that decent respect, which every stranger owes to the customs of the land in which he sojourns, I chastised my features into an expression of sober reverence, and stretched my face into a degree of longitude suitable to the ceremony I was about to witness. Spite of myself, I felt an emotion of awe stealing over my senses as I approached the majestic pile. My imagination pictured something similar to a descent into the cave of Dom-Daniel, where the necromancers of the East are taught their infernal arts. I entered with the same gravity of demeanor that I would have approached the holy temple at Mecca, and bowed my head three times as I passed the threshold. “Head of the mighty Amrou!” thought I, on being ushered into a splendid saloon, “what a display is here! surely I am transported to the mansions of the Houris, the elysium of the faithful!”—How tame appeared all the descriptions of enchanted palaces in our Arabian poetry!—wherever I turned my eyes, the quick glances of beauty dazzled my vision and ravished my heart; lovely virgins fluttered by me, darting imperial looks of conquest, or beaming such smiles of invitation, as did Gabriel when he beckoned our holy prophet to Heaven. Shall I own the weakness of thy friend, good Muley?—while thus gazing on the enchanted scene before me, I, for a moment, forgot my country; and even the memory of my three-and-twenty wives faded from my heart; my thoughts were bewildered and led astray by the charms of these bewitching savages, and I sunk, for a while, into that delicious state of mind, where the senses, all enchanted, and all striving for mastery, produce an endless variety of tumultuous, yet pleasing emotions. O Muley, never shall I again wonder that an infidel should prove a recreant to the single solitary wife allotted him, when, even thy friend, armed with all the precepts of Mahomet, can so easily prove faithless to three-and-twenty.

“Whither have you led me?” said I, at length, to my companion, “and to whom do these beautiful creatures belong? Certainly this must be the seraglio of the grand bashaw of the city, and a most happy bashaw must he be, to possess treasures which even his highness of Tripoli cannot parallel.”

“Have a care,” cried my companion, “how you talk about seraglios, or you’ll have all these gentle nymphs about your ears; for seraglio is a word which, beyond all others, they abhor. Most of them,” continued he, “have no lord and master, but come here to catch one—they’re in the market, as we term it.”

“Ah, hah!” said I, exultingly, “then you really have a fair, or slave-market, such as we have in the East, where the faithful are provided with the choicest virgins of Georgia and Circassia?—by our glorious sun of Afric, but I should like to select some ten or a dozen wives from so lovely an assemblage! Pray, what would you suppose they might be bought for?”—

Before I could receive an answer, my attention was attracted by two or three good-looking, middle-sized men, who, being dressed in black, a color universally worn in this country by the muftis and dervises, I immediately concluded to be high-priests, and was confirmed in my original opinion that this was a religious ceremony. These reverend personages are entitled managers, and enjoyed unlimited authority in the assemblies, being armed with swords, with which, I am told, they would infallibly put any lady to death, who infringed the laws of the temple. They walked round the room with great solemnity, and, with an air of profound importance and mystery, put a little piece of folded paper in each fair hand; which I concluded were religious talismans. One of them dropped on the floor, whereupon I slily put my foot on it, and, watching an opportunity, picked it up unobserved, and found it to contain some unintelligible words, and the mystic number 9. What were its virtues I know not; except that I put it in my pocket, and have hitherto been preserved from my fit of the lumbago, which I generally have about this season of the year, ever since I tumbled into the well of Zim-zim on my pilgrimage to Mecca. I inclose it to thee in this letter, presuming it to be particularly serviceable against the dangers of thy profession.

Shortly after the distribution of these talismans, one of the high-priests stalked into the middle of the room with great majesty, and clapped his hands three times; a loud explosion of music succeeded from a number of black, yellow, and white musicians, perched in a kind of cage over the grand entrance. The company were thereupon thrown into great confusion and apparent consternation. They hurried to and fro about the room, and at length formed themselves into little groups of eight persons, half male and half females; the music struck into something like harmony, and, in a moment, to my utter astonishment and dismay, they were all seized with what I concluded to be a paroxysm of religious phrenzy, tossing about their heads in a ludicrous style from side to side, and indulging in extravagant contortions of figure; now throwing their heels into the air, and anon whirling round with the velocity of the eastern idolaters, who think they pay a grateful homage to the sun by imitating his motions. I expected every moment to see them fall down in convulsions, foam at the mouth, and shriek with fancied inspiration. As usual, the women seemed most fervent in their religious exercises, and performed them with a melancholy expression of feature that was peculiarly touching; but I was highly gratified by the exemplary conduct of several male devotees, who, though their gesticulations would intimate a wild merriment of the feelings, maintained throughout as inflexible a gravity of countenance as so many monkeys of the island of Borneo at their antics.

“And pray,” said I, “who is the divinity that presides in this splendid mosque?”

“The divinity!—O, I understand—you mean the _belle_ of the evening; we have a new one every season; the one at present in fashion, is that lady you see yonder, dressed in white, with pink ribbons, and a crowd of adorers around her.”

“Truly,” cried I, “this is the pleasantest deity I have encountered in the whole course of my travels—so familiar, so condescending, and so merry withal; why, her very worshippers take her by the hand, and whisper in her ear.”

“My good Mussulman,” replied my friend, with great gravity, “I perceive you are completely in an error concerning the intent of this ceremony. You are now in a place of public amusement, not of public worship; and the pretty looking young men you see making such violent and grotesque distortions, are merely indulging in our favorite amusement of dancing.”

“I cry your mercy,” exclaimed I, “these then are the dancing-men and women of the town, such as we have in our principal cities, who hire themselves out for the entertainment of the wealthy; but, pray, who pays them for this fatiguing exhibition?”

My friend regarded me for a moment with an air of whimsical perplexity, as if doubting whether I was in jest or earnest. “’Sblood, man,” cried he, “these are some of our greatest people, our fashionables, who are merely dancing here for amusement.”

_Dancing for amusement!_ think of that, Muley!—thou, whose greatest pleasure is to chew opium, smoke tobacco, loll on a couch, and doze thyself into the regions of the Houris!—Dancing for amusement!—shall I never cease having occasion to laugh at the absurdities of these barbarians, who are laborious in their recreations, and indolent only in their hours of business? Dancing for amusement!—the very idea makes my bones ache, and I never think of it without being obliged to apply my handkerchief to my forehead, and fan myself into some degree of coolness.

“And pray,” said I, when my astonishment had a little subsided, “do these musicians also toil for amusement, or are they confined to their cage, like birds, to sing for the gratification of others? I should think the former was the case, from the animation with which they flourish their elbows.”

“Not so,” replied my friend, “they are well paid, which is no more than just, for I assure you they are the most important personages in the room. The fiddler puts the whole assembly in motion, and directs their movements, like the master of a puppet-show, who sets all his pasteboard gentry kicking by a jerk of his fingers. There now, look at that dapper little gentleman yonder, who appears to be suffering the pangs of dislocation in every limb: he is the most expert puppet in the room, and performs, not so much for his own amusement, as for that of the bystanders.” Just then, the little gentleman, having finished one of his paroxysms of activity, seemed to be looking round for applause from the spectators. Feeling myself really much obliged to him for his exertions, I made him a low bow of thanks, but nobody followed my example, which I thought a singular instance of ingratitude.

Thou wilt perceive, friend Muley, that the dancing of these barbarians is totally different from the science professed by thee in Tripoli; the country, in fact, is afflicted by numerous epidemical diseases, which travel from house to house, from city to city, with the regularity of a caravan. Among these, the most formidable is this dancing mania, which prevails chiefly throughout the winter. It at first seized on a few people of fashion, and being indulged in moderation, was a cheerful exercise; but in a little time, by quick advances, it infected all classes of the community, and became a raging epidemic. The doctors immediately, as is their usual way, instead of devising a remedy, fell together by the ears, to decide whether it was native or imported, and the sticklers for the latter opinion traced it to a cargo of trumpery from France, as they had before hunted down the yellow fever to a bag of coffee from the West Indies. What makes this disease the more formidable is, that the patients seem infatuated with their malady, abandon themselves to its unbounded ravages, and expose their persons to wintry storms and midnight airs—more fatal, in this capricious climate, than the withering Simoom blast of the desert.

I know not whether it is a sight most whimsical or melancholy to witness a fit of this dancing malady. The lady hops up to the gentleman, who stands at the distance of about three paces, and then capers back again to her place; the gentleman, of course, does the same; then they skip one way, then they jump another; then they turn their backs to each other; then they seize each other and shake hands; then they whirl round, and throw themselves into a thousand grotesque and ridiculous attitudes—sometimes on one leg, sometimes on the other, and sometimes on no leg at all—and this they call exhibiting the graces! By the nineteen thousand capers of the great mountebank of Damascus, but these graces must be something like the crooked-back dwarf, Shabrac, who is sometimes permitted to amuse His Highness by imitating the tricks of a monkey. These fits continue at short intervals for four or five hours, till at last the lady is led off, faint, languid, exhausted, and panting, to her carriage; rattles home; passes a night of feverish restlessness, cold perspirations, and troubled sleep; rises late next morning, if she rises at all, is nervous, petulant, or a prey to languid indifference all day—a mere household spectre, neither giving nor receiving enjoyment—in the evening hurries to another dance; receives an unnatural exhilaration from the lights, the music, the crowd, and the unmeaning bustle; flutters, sparkles, and blooms for a while until, the transient delirium being past, the infatuated maid droops and languishes into apathy again; is again led off to her carriage, and the next morning rises to go through exactly the same joyless routine.

And yet, wilt thou believe it, my dear Raggi, these are rational beings—nay, more, their countrymen would fain persuade me they have souls! Is it not a thousand times to be lamented that beings, endowed with charms that might warm even the frigid heart of a dervise—with social and endearing powers that would render them the joy and pride of the harem—should surrender themselves to a habit of heartless dissipation, which preys imperceptibly on the roses of the cheek—which robs the eye of its lustre, the mouth of its dimpled smile, the spirits of their cheerful hilarity, and the limbs of their elastic vigor—which hurries them off in the spring-time of existence; or, if they survive, yields to the arms of a youthful bridegroom a frame wrecked in the storms of dissipation, and struggling with premature infirmity. Alas, Muley! may I not ascribe to this cause, the number of little old women I meet with in this country from the age of eighteen to eight-and-twenty.

In sauntering down the room, my attention was attracted by a smoky painting, which, on nearer examination, I found consisted of two female figures crowning a bust with a wreath of laurel. “This, I suppose,” cried I, “was some famous dancer in his time?”

“O, no,” replied my friend, “he was only a general.”

“Good; but then he must have been great at a cotillon, or expert at a fiddle-stick, or why is his memorial here?”

“Quite the contrary,” answered my companion, “history makes no mention of his ever having flourished a fiddle-stick, or figured in a single dance. You have, no doubt, heard of him; he was the illustrious Washington, the father and deliverer of his country; and as our nation is remarkable for gratitude to great men, it always does honor to their memory, by placing their monuments over the doors of taverns, or in the corners of dancing rooms.”

From thence my friend and I strolled into a small apartment adjoining the grand saloon, where I beheld a number of grave-looking persons, with venerable gray heads, but without beards, which I thought very unbecoming, seated around a table, studying hieroglyphics. I approached them with reverence, as so many magi, or learned men, endeavoring to expound the mysteries of Egyptian science. Several of them threw down money, which I supposed was a reward proposed for some great discovery, when presently one of them spread his hieroglyphics on the table and exclaimed triumphantly, “Two bullets and a bragger!” and swept all the money into his pocket. He has discovered a key to the hieroglyphics, thought I; happy mortal! no doubt his name will be immortalized. Willing, however, to be satisfied, I looked round on my companion with an inquiring eye. He understood me, and informed me that these were a company of friends, who had met together to win each other’s money, and be agreeable. “Is that all?” exclaimed I, “why, then, I pray you, make way, and let me escape from this temple of abominations, or who knows but these people, who meet together to toil, worry, and fatigue themselves to death, and give it the name of pleasure—and who win each other’s money by way of being agreeable—may some one of them take a liking to me, and pick my pocket, or break my head in a paroxysm of hearty good-will!”

Thy friend, MUSTAPHA.

BY ANTHONY EVERGREEN, GENT.

“Nunc est bibendum nunc pede libero Pulsanda tellus.” _Hor._

“Now is the time for wine and myrthful sportes, For daunce, and song, and disportes of sych sortes.” _Link. Fid._

The winter campaign has opened. Fashion has summoned her numerous legions at the sound of trumpet, tambourine, and drum, and all the harmonious minstrelsy of the orchestra, to hasten from the dull, silent, and insipid glades and groves, where they have vegetated during the summer, recovering from the ravages of the last winter’s campaign. Our fair ones have hurried to town, eager to pay their devotions to the tutelary deity, and to make an offering at her shrine of the few pale and transient roses they gathered in their healthful retreat. The fiddler rosins his bow, the card-table devotee is shuffling her pack; the young ladies are industriously spangling muslins, and the tea-party heroes are airing their _chapeaux bras_ and pea-blossom breeches, to prepare for figuring in the gay circle of smiles, and graces, and beauty. Now the fine lady forgets her country friends, in the hurry of fashionable engagements, or receives the simple intruder, who has foolishly accepted her thousand pressing invitations, with such politeness that the poor soul determines never to come again. Now the gay buck, who erst figured at Ballston, and quaffed the pure spring, exchanges the sparkling water for still more sparkling champagne, and deserts the nymph of the fountain, to enlist under the standard of jolly Bacchus. In short, now is the important time of the year in which to harangue the bon-ton reader, and, like some ancient hero in front of the battle, to spirit him up to deeds of noble daring, or still more noble suffering, in the ranks of fashionable warfare.

Such, indeed, has been my intention, but the number of cases which have lately come before me, and the variety of complaints I have received from a crowd of honest and well-meaning correspondents, call for more immediate attention. A host of appeals, petitions, and letters of advice are now before me, and I believe the shortest way to satisfy my petitioners, memorialists, and advisers, will be to publish their letters, as I suspect the object of most of them is merely to get into print.

TO ANTHONY EVERGREEN GENT.

SIR:—

As you appear to have taken to yourself the trouble of meddling in the concerns of the beau monde, I take the liberty of appealing to you on a subject which, though considered merely as a very good joke, has occasioned me great vexation and expense. You must know I pride myself on being very useful to the ladies—that is, I take boxes for them at the theatre, go shopping with them, supply them with bouquets, and furnish them with novels from the circulating library. In consequence of these attentions I am become a great favorite, and there is seldom a party going on in the city without my having an invitation. The grievance I have to mention, is the exchange of hats which takes place on these occasions—for, to speak my mind freely, there are certain young gentlemen who seem to consider fashionable parties as mere places to barter old clothes: and, I am informed, that a number of them manage, by this great system of exchange, to keep their crowns decently covered without their hatter suffering in the least by it.

It was but lately that I went to a private ball with a new hat, and on returning in the latter part of the evening, and asking for it, the scoundrel of a servant, with a broad grin, informed me, that the new hats had been dealt out half an hour since, and they were then on the third quality, and I was in the end obliged to borrow a young lady’s beaver rather than go home with any of the ragged remnants that were left.

Now, I would wish to know if there is no possibility of having these offenders punished by law; and whether it would not be advisable for ladies to mention in their cards of invitation, as a postscript, “stealing of hats and shawls positively prohibited.” At any rate, I would thank you, Mr. Evergreen, to discountenance the thing totally, by publishing in your paper that stealing a hat is no joke.

Your humble servant, WALTER WITHERS.

My correspondent is informed, that the police have determined to take this matter into consideration, and have set apart Saturday mornings for the cognizance of fashionable larcenies.

MR. EVERGREEN:—

SIR—Do you think a married woman may lawfully put her husband right in a story, before strangers, when she knows him to be in the wrong; and can anything authorize a wife in the exclamation of—“Lord, my dear, how can you say so!”

MARGARET TIMSON.

DEAR ANTHONY:—

Going down Broadway this morning in a great hurry, I ran full against an object which at first put me to a prodigious nonplus. Observing it to be dressed in a man’s hat, a cloth overcoat, and spatterdashes, I framed my apology accordingly, exclaiming, “My dear sir, I ask ten thousand pardons—I assure you, sir, it was entirely accidental—pray excuse me, sir,” etc. At every one of these excuses, the thing answered me with a downright laugh; at which I was not a little surprised, until, on resorting to my pocket-glass, I discovered that it was no other than my old acquaintance, Clarinda Trollop. I never was more chagrined in my life; for, being an old bachelor, I like to appear as young as possible, and am always boasting of the goodness of my eyes. I beg of you, Mr. Evergreen, if you have any feeling for your contemporaries, to discourage this hermaphrodite mode of dress; for really, if the fashion take, we poor bachelors will be utterly at a loss to distinguish a woman from a man. Pray let me know your opinion, sir, whether a lady who wears a man’s hat and spatterdashes before marriage, may not be apt to usurp some other article of his dress afterward.

Your humble servant, RODERICK WORRY.

DEAR MR. EVERGREEN:—

The other night, at Richard the Third, I sat behind three gentlemen who talked very loud on the subject of Richard’s wooing Lady Ann directly in the face of his crimes against that lady. One of them declared such an unnatural scene would be hooted at in China. Pray, sir, was that Mr. Wizard?

SELINA BADGER.

P. S. The gentleman I allude to had a pocket-glass, and wore his hair fastened behind by a tortoise-shell comb, with two teeth wanting.

MR. EVERGREEN:—

SIR—Being a little curious in the affairs of the toilette, I was much interested by the sage Mustapha’s remarks, in your last number, concerning the art of manufacturing a modern fine lady. I would have you caution your fair readers, however, to be very careful in the management of their machinery, as a deplorable accident happened, last assembly, in consequence of the architecture of a lady’s figure not being sufficiently strong. In the middle of one of the cotillons, the company was suddenly alarmed by a tremendous crash at the lower end of the room; and on crowding to the place, discovered that it was a fine figure which had unfortunately broken down from two great exertion in a pigeon-wing, By great good luck I secured the corset, which I carried home in triumph; and the next morning had it publicly dissected, and a lecture read on it at Surgeon’s Hall. I have since commenced a dissertation on the subject, in which I shall treat of the superiority of those figures manufactured by steel, stap-tape, and whalebone, to those formed by Dame Nature. I shall show clearly that the Venus de Medicis has no pretension to beauty of form, as she never wore stays, and her waist is in exact proportion to the rest of her body. I shall inquire into the mysteries of compression, and how tight a figure can be laced without danger of fainting, and whether it would not be advisable for a lady, when dressing for a ball, to be attended by the family physician, as culprits are when tortured on the rack, to know how much more nature will endure. I shall prove that ladies have discovered the secret of that notorious juggler, who offered to squeeze himself into a quart bottle; and I shall demonstrate, to the satisfaction of every fashionable reader, that there is a certain degree of heroism in purchasing a preposterously slender waist at the expense of an old age of decrepitude and rheumatics. This dissertation shall be published, as soon as finished, and distributed gratis among boarding-school madams, and all worthy matrons who are ambitious that their daughters should sit straight, move like clock-work and “do credit to their bringing up.” In the mean time, I have hung up the skeleton of the corset in the museum beside a dissected weasel and a stuffed alligator, where it may be inspected by all those naturalists who are fond of studying the “human form divine.”

Yours, etc. JULIAN COGNOUS.

P. S. By accurate calculation I find it is dangerous for a fine figure, when full dressed, to pronounce a word of more than three syllables. Fine Figure, if in love, may indulge in a gentle sigh; but a sob is hazardous. Fine Figure may smile with safety, may even venture as far as a giggle; but must never risk a loud laugh. Figure must never play the part of a confidante; as at a tea-party, some fine evenings since, a young lady whose unparalleled impalpability of waist was the envy of the drawing-room, burst with an important secret, and had three ribs—of her corset!—fractured on the spot.

MR. EVERGREEN:—

SIR—I am one of those industrious gemmen who labor hard to obtain currency in the fashionable world. I have went to great expense in little boots, short vests, and long breeches; my coat is regularly imported, per stage, from Philadelphia, duly insured against all risks, and my boots are smuggled from Bond Street. I have lounged in Broadway with one of the most crooked walking-sticks I could procure, and have sported a pair of salmon-colored small clothes, and flame-colored stockings, at every concert and ball to which I could purchase admission. Being affeared that I might possibly appear to less advantage as a pedestrian, in consequence of my being rather short and a little bandy, I have lately hired a tall horse with cropped ears and a cocked tail, on which I have joined the cavalcade of pretty gemmen, who exhibit bright stirrups every fine morning in Broadway, and take a canter of two miles per day, at the rate of three hundred dollars per annum. But, sir, all this expense has been laid out in vain, for I can scarcely get a partner at an assembly, or an invitation to a tea-party. Pray, sir, inform me what more I can do to acquire admission into the true stylish circles, and whether it would not be advisable to charter a curricle for a month, and have my cipher put on it, as is done by certain dashers of my acquaintance.

Yours to serve, MALVOLIO DUBSTER.

TEA.

A POEM

FROM THE MILL OF PINDAR COCKLOFT, ESQ.

_And earnestly recommended to the attention of Maidens of a certain age._

Old time, my dear girls, is a knave who in truth From the fairest of beauties will pilfer their youth; Who, by constant attention and wily deceit, Forever is coaxing some grace to retreat; And, like crafty seducer, with subtle approach, The further indulged, will still further encroach. Since this “thief of the world” has made off with your bloom, And left you some score of stale years in its room— Has depriv’d you of all those gay dreams, that would dance In your brains at fifteen, and your bosoms entrance; And has forced you almost to renounce, in despair, The hope of a husband’s affection and care— Since such is the case, and a case rather hard! Permit one who holds you in special regard, To furnish such hints in your loveless estate As may shelter your names from distraction and hate. Too often our maidens grow aged, I ween, Indulge to excess in the workings of spleen; And at times, when annoy’d by the slights of mankind, Work off their resentment—by speaking their mind: Assemble together in snuff-taking clan, And hold round the tea-urn a solemn divan. A convention of tattle—a tea-party hight, Which, like meeting of witches, is brew’d up at night, Where each matron arrives, fraught with tales of surprise, With knowing suspicion and doubtful surmise; Like the broomstick-whirl’d hags that appear in Macbeth, Each bearing some relic of venom or death, “To stir up the toil and to double the trouble, That fire may burn, and that cauldron may bubble.” When the party commences, all starch’d and all glum, They talk of the weather, their corns, or sit mum: They will tell you of cambric, of ribbons, of lace, How cheap they were sold—and will name you the place. They discourse of their colds, and they hem and they cough, And complain of their servants to pass the time off; Or list to the tale of some doting mamma, How her ten weeks old baby will laugh and say taa! But tea, that enlivener of wit and of soul— More loquacious by far than the draughts of the bowl, Soon unloosens the tongue and enlivens the mind, And enlightens their eyes to the faults of mankind. ’Twas thus with the Pythia, who served at the fount That flow’d near the far-famed Parnassian mount, While the steam was inhal’d of the sulphuric spring, Her vision expanded, her fancy took wing:— By its aid she pronounced the oracular will That Apollo commanded his sons to fulfill. But alas! the sad vestal, performing the rite, Appeared like a demon—terrific to sight. E’en the priests of Apollo averted their eyes, And the temple of Delphi resounded her cries. But quitting the nymph of the tripod of yore, We return to the dames of the tea-pot once more. In harmless chit-chat an acquaintance they roast, And serve up a friend, as they serve up a toast; Some gentle faux pas, or some female mistake, Is like sweetmeats delicious, or relished as cake; A bit of broad scandal is like a dry crust, It would stick in the throat, so they butter it first With a little affected good-nature, and cry “Nobody regrets the thing deeper than I.” Our young ladies nibble a good name in play As for pastime they nibble a biscuit away: While with shrugs and surmises, the toothless old dame, As she mumbles a crust she will mumble a name And as the fell sisters astonished the Scot, In predicting of Banquo’s descendants the lot, Making shadows of kings, amid flashes of light To appear in array and to frown in his sight, So they conjure up spectres all hideous in hue, Which, as shades of their neighbors, are passed in review. The wives of our cits of inferior degree, Will soak up repute in a little bohea; The potion is vulgar, and vulgar the slang With which on their neighbors’ defects they harangue; But the scandal improves, a refinement in wrong; As our matrons are richer and rise to souchong. With hyson—a beverage that’s still more refin’d. Our ladies of fashion enliven their mind, And by nods, innuendoes, and hints, and what not, Reputations and tea send together to pot, While madam in cambrics and laces array’d With her plate and her liveries in splendid parade, Will drink in imperial a friend at a sup, Or in gunpowder blow them by dozens all up. Ah me! how I groan when with full swelling sail Wafted stately along by the favoring gale, A China ship proudly arrives in our bay, Displaying her streamers and blazing away, O! more fell to our port, is the cargo she bears, Than grenadoes, torpedoes, or warlike affairs: Each chest is a bombshell thrown into our town To shatter repute and bring character down. Ye Samquas, ye Chinquas, ye Chouquas, so free, Who discharge on our coast your cursed quantums of tea, O think, as ye waft the sad weed from your strand, Of the plagues and vexations ye deal to our land. As the Upas’ dread breath, o’er the plain where it flies, Empoisons and blasts each green blade that may rise, So wherever the leaves of your shrubs find their way, The social affections soon suffer decay: Like to Java’s drear waste they embarren the heart, Till the blossoms of love and of friendship depart. Ah, ladies, and was it by heaven design’d, That ye should be merciful, loving and kind? Did it form you like angels, and send you below To prophesy peace—to bid charity flow? And have ye just left your primeval estate, And wandered so widely—so strangely of late? Alas! the sad cause I too plainly can see— These evils have all come upon you through tea? Cursed weed, that can make our faint spirits resign The character mild of their mission divine; That can blot from their bosoms that tenderness true, Which from female to female forever is due! O how nice is the texture—how fragile the frame Of that delicate blossom, a female’s fair fame! ’Tis the sensitive plant, it recoils from the breath And shrinks from the touch as if pregnant with death. How often, how often, has innocence sigh’d; Has beauty been reft of its honor—its pride; Has virtue, though pure as an angel of light, Been painted as dark as a demon of night: All offer’d up victims, an _auto de fe_, At the gloomy cabals—the dark orgies of tea! If I, in the remnant that’s left me of life, Am to suffer the torments of slanderous strife, Let me fall, I implore, in the slang-whanger’s claw, Where the evil is open, and subject to law. Not nibbled, and mumbled, and put to the rack, By the sly underminings of tea-party clack: Condemn me, ye gods, to a newspaper roasting, But spare me! O, spare me, a tea-table toasting!

NO. XX.—MONDAY, JANUARY 25, 1808.

FROM MY ELBOW-CHAIR.

“Extremum hunc mihi concede laborem.”—_Virg._

“Soft you, a word or two before we part.”

In this season of festivity, when the gate of time swings open on its hinges, and an honest rosy-faced New Year comes waddling in, like a jolly fat-sided alderman, loaded with good wishes, good humor, and minced pies,—at this joyous era it has been the custom, from time immemorial, in this ancient and respectable city, for periodical writers, from reverend, grave, and potent essayists like ourselves, down to the humble but industrious editors of magazines, reviews, and newspapers, to tender their subscribers the compliments of the season; and when they have slily thawed their hearts with a little of the sunshine of flattery, to conclude by delicately dunning them for their arrears of subscription money. In like manner the carriers of newspapers, who undoubtedly belong to the ancient and honorable order of literati, do regularly at the commencement of the year, salute their patrons with abundance of excellent advice, conveyed in exceedingly good poetry, for which the aforesaid good-natured patrons are well pleased to pay them exactly twenty-five cents. In walking the streets I am every day saluted with good wishes from old gray-headed negroes, whom I never recollect to have seen before; and it was but a few days ago, that I was called to receive the compliments of an ugly old woman, who last spring was employed by Mrs. Cockloft to whitewash my room and put things in order; a phrase which, if rightly understood, means little else than huddling everything into holes and corners, so that if I want to find any particular article, it is, in the language of a humble but expressive saying—“looking for a needle in a haystack.” Not recognizing my visitor, I demanded by what authority she wished me a “Happy New Year!” Her claim was one of the weakest she could have urged, for I have an innate and mortal antipathy to this custom of putting things to rights; so giving the old witch a pistareen, I desired her forthwith to mount her broomstick, and ride off as fast as possible.

Of all the various ranks of society, the bakers alone, to their immortal honor be it recorded, depart from this practice of making a market of congratulations; and in addition to always allowing thirteen to the dozen, do with great liberality, instead of drawing on the purses of their customers at the New Year, present them with divers large, fair, spiced cakes; which, like the shield of Achilles, or an Egyptian obelisk, are adorned with figures of a variety of strange animals, that, in their conformation, out-marvel all the wild wonders of nature.

This honest gray-beard custom of setting apart a certain portion of this good-for-nothing existence for the purposes of cordiality, social merriment, and good cheer, is one of the inestimable relics handed down to us from our worthy Dutch ancestors. In perusing one of the manuscripts from my worthy grandfather’s mahogany chest of drawers, I find the New Year was celebrated with great festivity during that golden age of our city, when the reins of government were held by the renowned Rip Van Dam, who always did honor to the season by seeing out the old year; a ceremony which consisted in plying his guests with bumpers, until not one of them was capable of seeing. “Truly,” observes my grandfather, who was generally of these parties,—“Truly, he was a most stately and magnificent burgomaster! inasmuch, as he did right lustily carouse it with his friends about New Year; roasting huge quantities of turkeys; baking innumerable minced pies; and smacking the lips of all fair ladies the which he did meet, with such sturdy emphasis that the same might have been heard the distance of a stone’s throw.” In his days, according to my grandfather, first were invented these notable cakes, hight new-year-cookies, which originally were impressed on one side with the honest burly countenance of the illustrious Rip; and on the other with that of the noted St. Nicholas, vulgarly called Santa Claus, of all the saints of the calendar the most venerated by true Hollanders and their unsophisticated descendants. These cakes are to this time given on the first of January to all visitors, together with a glass of cherry-bounce, or raspberry-brandy. It is with great regret, however, I observe that the simplicity of this venerable usage has been much violated by modern pretenders to style, and our respectable new-year-cookies and cherry-bounce elbowed aside by plum-cake and outlandish liqueurs, in the same way that our worthy old Dutch families are out-dazzled by modern upstarts and mushroom cockneys.

In addition to this divine origin of New Year festivity, there is something exquisitely grateful, to a good-natured mind, in seeing every face dressed in smiles; in hearing the oft-repeated salutations that flow spontaneously from the heart to the lips; in beholding the poor, for once, enjoying the smiles of plenty, and forgetting the cares which press hard upon them, in the jovial revelry of the feelings; the young children, decked out in their Sunday clothes, and freed from their only cares, the cares of the school, tripping through the streets on errands of pleasure; and even the very negroes, those holiday-loving rogues, gorgeously arrayed in cast-off finery, collected in juntos, at corners, displaying their white teeth, and making the welkin ring with bursts of laughter loud enough to crack even the icy cheek of old winter. There is something so pleasant in all this, that I confess it would give me real pain, to behold the frigid influence of modern style cheating us of this jubilee of the heart; and converting it, as it does every other article of social intercourse, into an idle and unmeaning ceremony. ’Tis the annual festival of good humor; it comes in the dead of winter, when nature is without a charm, when our pleasures are contracted to the fireside, and when everything that unlocks the icy fetters of the heart, and sets the genial current flowing, should be cherished, as a stray lamb found in the wilderness; or a flower blooming among thorns and briers.

Animated by these sentiments, it is with peculiar satisfaction I perceived that the last New Year was kept with more than ordinary enthusiasm. It seemed as if the good old times had rolled back again, and brought with them all the honest, unceremonious intercourse of those golden days, when people were more open and sincere, more moral and more hospitable than now; when every object carried about it a charm which the hand of time has stolen away, or turned to a deformity; when the women were more simple, more domestic, more lovely, and more true; and when even the sun, like a hearty old blade as he is, shone with a genial lustre unknown in these degenerate days,—in short, those fairy times when I was a madcap boy, crowding every enjoyment into the present moment; making of the past an oblivion; of the future a heaven; and careless of all that was “Over the hills and far away.” Only one thing was wanting to make every part of the celebration accord with its ancient simplicity. The ladies, who—I write it with the most piercing regret—are generally at the head of all domestic innovations, most fastidiously refused that mark of good-will, that chaste and holy salute which was so fashionable in the happy days of Governor Rip and the patriarchs. Even the Miss Cocklofts, who belong to a family that is the last intrenchment behind which the manners of the good old school have retired, made violent opposition; and whenever a gentleman entered the room, immediately put themselves in a posture of defense. This, Will Wizard, with his usual shrewdness, insists was only to give the visitor a hint that they expected an attack; and declares he has uniformly observed, that the resistance of those ladies, who make the greatest noise and bustle, is most easily overcome. This sad innovation originated with my good aunt Charity, who was as arrant a tabby as ever wore whiskers; and I am not a little afflicted to find that she has found so many followers, even among the young and beautiful.

In compliance with an ancient and venerable custom, sanctioned by time and our ancestors, and more especially by my own inclinations, I will take this opportunity to salute my readers with as many good wishes as I can possibly spare; for, in truth, I have been so prodigal of late, that I have but few remaining. I should have offered my congratulations sooner; but, to be candid, having made the last New Year’s campaign, according to custom, under Cousin Christopher, in which I have seen some pretty hard service, my head has been somewhat out of order of late, and my intellects rather cloudy for clear writing. Besides, I may allege as another reason, that I have deferred my greetings until this day, which is exactly one year since we introduced ourselves to the public; and surely periodical writers have the same right of dating from the commencement of their works, that monarchs have from the time of their coronation, or our most puissant republic from the declaration of its independence.

These good wishes are warmed into more than usual benevolence by the thought that I am now, perhaps, addressing my old friends for the last time. That we should thus cut off our work in the very vigor of its existence, may excite some little matter of wonder in this enlightened community. Now, though we could give a variety of good reasons for so doing, yet it would be an ill-natured act to deprive the public of such an admirable opportunity to indulge in their favorite amusement of conjecture; so we generously leave them to flounder in the smooth ocean of glorious uncertainty. Besides, we have ever considered it as beneath persons of our dignity to account for our movements or caprices; thank heaven, we are not like the unhappy rulers of this enlightened land, accountable to the mob for our actions, or dependent on their smiles for support!—this much, however, we will say, it is not for want of subjects that we stop our career. We are not in the situation of poor Alexander the Great, who wept, as well indeed he might, because there were no more worlds to conquer; for, to do justice to this queer, odd, rantipole city, and to this whimsical country, there is matter enough in them to keep our risible muscles and our pens going till doomsday.

Most people, in taking a farewell which may, perhaps, be forever, are anxious to part on good terms; and it is usual, on such melancholy occasions, for even enemies to shake hands, forget their previous quarrels, and bury all former animosities in parting regrets. Now, because most people do this, I am determined to act in quite a different way; for, as I have lived, so I should wish to die, in my own way, without imitating any person, whatever may be his rank, talents, or reputation. Besides, if I know our trio, we have no enmities to obliterate, no hatchet to bury; and as to all injuries—those we have long since forgiven. At this moment there is not an individual in the world, not even the Pope himself, to whom we have any personal hostility. But if, shutting their eyes to the many striking proofs of good-nature displayed through the whole course of this work, there should be any persons so singularly ridiculous as to take offense at our strictures, we heartily forgive their stupidity; earnestly entreating them to desist from all manifestations of ill-humor, lest they should, peradventure, be classed under some one of the denominations of recreants, we have felt it our duty to hold up to public ridicule. Even at this moment, we feel a glow of parting philanthropy stealing upon us; a sentiment of cordial good-will toward the numerous host of readers that have jogged on at our heels during the last year; and in justice to ourselves must seriously protest, that if at any time we have treated them a little ungently, it was purely in that spirit of hearty affection, with which a schoolmaster drubs an unlucky urchin, or a humane muleteer his recreant animal, at the very moment when his heart is brimful of loving kindness. If this is not considered an ample justification, so much the worse; for in that case I fear we shall remain forever unjustified—a most desperate extremity, and worthy of every man’s commiseration!

One circumstance, in particular, has tickled us mightily as we jogged along; and that is, the astonishing secrecy with which we have been able to carry on our lucubrations! fully aware of the profound sagacity of the public of Gotham, and their wonderful faculty of distinguishing a writer by his style, it is with great self-congratulation we find that suspicion has never pointed to us as the authors of SALMAGUNDI. Our gray-beard speculations have been most bountifully attributed to sundry smart young gentlemen, who, for aught we know, have no beards at all; and we have often been highly amused when they were charged with the sin of writing what their harmless minds never conceived, to see them affect all the blushing modesty and beautiful embarrassment of detected virgin authors. The profound and penetrating public, having so long been led away from truth and nature by a constant perusal of those delectable histories, and romances, from beyond seas, in which human nature is, for the most part, wickedly mangled and debauched, have never once imagined this work was a genuine and most authentic history; that the Cocklofts were a real family, dwelling in the city, paying scot and lot, entitled to the right of suffrage, and holding several respectable offices in the corporation. As little do they suspect that there is a knot of merry old bachelors seated snugly in the old-fashioned parlor of an old-fashioned Dutch house, with a weathercock on the top that came from Holland; who amuse themselves of an evening by laughing at their neighbors, in an honest way, and who manage to jog on through the streets of our ancient and venerable city, without elbowing or being elbowed by a living soul.

When we first adopted the idea of discontinuing this work, we determined, in order to give the critics a fair opportunity for dissection, to declare ourselves, one and all, absolutely defunct: for it is one of the rare and invaluable privileges of a periodical writer, that by an act of innocent suicide he may lawfully consign himself to the grave, and cheat the world of posthumous renown. But we abandoned this scheme for many substantial reasons, In the first place, we care but little for the opinion of critics, whom we consider a kind of freebooters in the republic of letters; who, like deer, goats, and divers other graminivorous animals, gain subsistence by gorging upon the buds and leaves of the young shrubs of the forest, thereby robbing them of their verdure, and retarding their progress to maturity. It also occurred to us, that though an author might lawfully, in all countries, kill himself outright, yet this privilege did not extend to the raising himself from the dead, if he was ever so anxious; and all that is left him in such a case, is to take the benefit of the metempsychosis act, and revive under a new name and form.

Far be it, therefore, from us to condemn ourselves to useless embarrassments, should we ever be disposed to resume the guardianship of this learned city of Gotham, and finish this invaluable work, which is yet but half completed. We hereby openly and seriously declare, that we are not dead, but intend, if it please Providence, to live for many years to come, to enjoy life with the genuine relish of honest souls, careless of riches, honors, and everything but a good name, among good fellows, and with the full expectation of shuffling off the remnant of existence after the excellent fashion of that merry Grecian, who died laughing.

TO THE LADIES.

BY ANTHONY EVERGREEN, GENT.

Next to our being a knot of independent old bachelors, there is nothing on which we pride ourselves more highly than upon possessing that true chivalric spirit of gallantry which distinguished the days of King Arthur and his valiant Knights of the Round Table. We cannot, therefore, leave the lists where we have so long been tilting at folly, with giving a farewell salutation to those noble dames and beauteous damsels who have honored us with their presence at the tourney. Like true knights, the only recompense we crave is the smile of beauty, and the approbation of those gentle fair ones, whose smile and whose approbation far excels all the trophies of honor, and all the rewards of successful ambition. True it is that we have suffered infinite perils, in standing forth as their champions, from the sly attacks of sundry arch caitiffs, who, in the overflowings of their malignity, have even accused us of entering the lists as defenders of the very foibles and faults of the sex. Would that we could meet with these recreants hand to hand; they should receive no more quarter than giants and enchanters in romance.

Had we a spark of vanity in our natures, here is a glorious occasion to show our skill in refuting these illiberal insinuations; but there is something manly and ingenuous in making an honest confession of one’s offenses when about retiring from the world; and so, without any more ado, we doff our helmets, and thus publicly plead guilty to the deadly sin of GOOD-NATURE; hoping and expecting forgiveness from our good-natured readers—yet careless whether they bestow it or not. And in this we do but imitate sundry condemned criminals, who, finding themselves convicted of a capital crime, with great openness and candor, do generally, in their last dying speech, make a confession of all their previous offenses, which confession is always read with great delight by all true lovers of biography.

Still, however, notwithstanding our notorious devotion to the gentle sex, and our indulgent partiality, we have endeavored, on divers occasions, with all the polite and becoming delicacy of true respect, to reclaim them from many of those delusive follies and unseemly peccadilloes in which they are unhappily too prone to indulge. We have warned them against the sad consequences of encountering our midnight damps and withering wintry blasts; we have endeavored, with pious hands, to snatch them from the wildering mazes of the waltz, and thus rescuing them from the arms of strangers, to restore them to the bosoms of their friends; to preserve them from the nakedness, the famine, the cobweb muslins, the vinegar cruet, the corset, the stay-tape, the buckram, and all the other miseries and racks of a fine figure. But, above all, we have endeavored to lure them from the mazes of a dissipated world, where they wander about, careless of their value, until they lose their original worth; and to restore them, before it is too late, to the sacred asylum of home, the soil most congenial to the opening blossom of female loveliness, where it blooms and expands in safety, in the fostering sunshine of maternal affection, and where its heavenly sweets are best known and appreciated.

Modern philosophers may determine the proper destination of the sex; they may assign to them an extensive and brilliant orbit, in which to revolve, to the delight of the million and the confusion of man’s superior intellect; but when on this subject we disclaim philosophy, and appeal to the higher tribunal of the heart—and what heart that had not lost its better feelings, would ever seek to repose its happiness on the bosom of one whose pleasures all lay without the threshold of home—who snatched enjoyment only in the whirlpool of dissipation, and amid the thoughtless and evanescent gayety of a ball-room? The fair one who is forever in the career of amusement may for a while dazzle, astonish, and entertain; but we are content with coldly admiring, and fondly turn from glitter and noise, to seek the happy fireside of social life, there to confide our dearest and best affections.

Yet some there are—and we delight to mention them—who mingle freely with the world, unsullied by its contaminations; whose brilliant minds, like the stars of the firmament, are destined to shed their light abroad and gladden every beholder with their radiance—to withhold them from the world would be doing it injustice—they are inestimable gems, which were never formed to be shut up in caskets, but to be the pride and ornament of elegant society.

We have endeavored always to discriminate between a female of this superior order and the thoughtless votary of pleasure, who, destitute of intellectual resources, is servilely dependent on others for every little pittance of enjoyment; who exhibits herself incessantly amid the noise, the giddy frolic, and capricious vanity of fashionable assemblages; dissipating her languid affection on a crowd; lavishing her ready smiles with indiscriminate prodigality on the worthy or the undeserving; and listening with equal vacancy of mind to the conversation of the enlightened, the frivolity of the coxcomb, and the flourish of the fiddle-stick.

There is a certain artificial polish—a commonplace vivacity acquired by perpetually mingling in the _beau monde_, which, in the commerce of the world, supplies the place of natural suavity or good humor; but is purchased at the expense of all original and sterling traits of character. By a kind of fashionable discipline the eye is taught to brighten, the lip to smile, and the whole countenance to irradiate with the semblance of friendly welcome, while the bosom is unwarmed by a single spark of genuine kindness or good-will. The elegant simulation may be admired by the connoisseur of human character as a perfection of art, but the heart is not to be deceived by the superficial illusion; it turns with delight to the timid, retiring fair one, whose smile is the smile of nature; whose blush is the soft suffusion of delicate sensibility; and whose affections, unblighted by the chilling effects of dissipation, glow with all the tenderness and purity of artless youth. Hers is a singleness of mind, a native innocence of manners, and a sweet timidity that steal insensibly upon the heart, and lead it a willing captive; though venturing occasionally among the fairy haunts of pleasure, she shrinks from the broad glare of notoriety, and seems to seek refuge among her friends, even from the admiration of the world.

These observations bring to mind a little allegory in one of the manuscripts of the sage Mustapha, which, being in some measure applicable to the subject of this essay, we transcribe for the benefit of our fair readers.

Among the numerous race of the Bedouins, who people the vast tracts of Arabia Deserta, is a small tribe, remarkable for their habits of solitude and love of independence. They are of a rambling disposition, roving from waste to waste, slaking their thirst at such scanty pools as are found in those cheerless plains, and glory in the unenvied liberty they enjoy. A youthful Arab of this tribe, a simple son of nature, at length growing weary of his precarious and unsettled mode of life, determined to set out in search of some permanent abode. “I will seek,” said he, “some happy region, some generous clime, where the dews of heaven diffuse fertility; I will find out some unfailing stream, and, forsaking the joyless life of my forefathers, settle on its borders, dispose my mind to gentle pleasures and tranquil enjoyments, and never wander more.”

Enchanted with this picture of pastoral felicity, he departed from the tents of his companions; and having journeyed during five days, on the sixth, as the sun was just rising in all the splendors of the East, he lifted up his eyes and beheld extended before him, in smiling luxuriance, the fertile regions of Arabia the Happy. Gently swelling hills, tufted with blooming grove, swept down into luxuriant vales, enameled with flowers of never-withering beauty. The sun, no longer darting his rays with torrid fervor, beamed with a genial warmth that gladdened and enriched the landscape. A pure and temperate serenity, an air of voluptuous repose, a smile of contented abundance, pervaded the face of nature, and every zephyr breathed a thousand delicious odors. The soul of the youthful wanderer expanded with delight—he raised his eyes to heaven, and almost mingled with his tribute of gratitude, a sigh of regret that he had lingered so long amid the sterile solitudes of the desert.

With fond impatience he hastened to make choice of a stream where he might fix his habitation, and taste the promised sweets of this land of delight. But here commenced an unforeseen perplexity; for, though he beheld inumerable streams on every side, yet not one could he find which completely answered his high-raised expectations. One abounded with wild and picturesque beauty, but it was capricious and unsteady in its course; sometimes dashing its angry billows against the rocks, and often raging and overflowing its banks. Another flowed smoothly along, without even a ripple or a murmur; but its bottom was soft and muddy, and its current dull and sluggish. A third was pure and transparent, but its waters were of a chilling coldness, and it had rocks and flints in its bosom. A fourth was dulcet in its tinklings, and graceful in its meanderings; but it had a cloying sweetness that palled upon the taste; while a fifth possessed a sparkling vivacity, and a pungency of flavor, that deterred the wanderer from repeating his draught.

The youthful Bedouin began to weary with fruitless trials and repeated disappointments, when his attention was suddenly attracted by a lively brook whose dancing waves glittered in the sunbeams, and whose pratting current communicated an air of bewitching gayety to the surrounding landscape. The heart of the wayworn traveller beat with expectation; but on regarding it attentively on its course, he found that it constantly avoided the embowering shade, loitering with equal fondness, whether gliding through the rich valley, or over the barren sand; that the fragrant flower, the fruitful shrub, and the worthless bramble were alike fostered by its waves, and that its current was often interrupted by unprofitable weeds. With idle ambition it expanded itself beyond its proper bounds, and spread into a shallow waste of water, destitute of beauty or utility, and babbling along with uninteresting vivacity and vapid turbulence.

The wandering son of the desert turned away with a sigh of regret, and pitied a stream which, if content within its natural limits, might have been the pride of the valley, and the object of all his wishes. Pensive, musing, and disappointed, he slowly pursued his now almost hopeless pilgrimage, and had rambled for some time along the margin of a gentle rivulet, before he became sensible of its beauties. It was a simple pastoral stream, which, shunning the noonday glare, pursued its unobtrusive course through retired and tranquil vales; now dimpling among flowery banks and tufted shrubbery; now winding among spicy groves, whose aromatic foliage fondly bent down to meet the limpid wave. Sometimes, but not often, it would venture from its covert to stray through a flowery meadow; but quickly, as if fearful of being seen, stole back again into its more congenial shade, and there lingered with sweet delay. Wherever it bent its course, the face of nature brightened into smiles, and a perennial spring reigned upon its borders. The warblers of the woodland delighted to quit their recesses and carol among its bowers; while the turtle-dove, the timid fawn, the soft-eyed gazelle, and all the rural populace, who joy in the sequestered haunts of nature, resorted to its vicinity. Its pure transparent waters rolled over snow-white sands, and heaven itself was reflected in its tranquil bosom.

The simple Arab threw himself upon its verdant margin; he tasted the silver tide, and it was like nectar to his lips; he bounded with transport, for he had found the object of his wayfaring. “Here,” cried he, “will I pitch my tent: here will I pass my days; for pure, O fair stream, is thy gentle current; beauteous are thy borders; and the grove must be a paradise that is refreshed by thy meanderings!”

* * * * *

“Pendant opera interrupta.”—_Virg._

“The work’s all aback.”—_Link. Fid._

“How hard it is,” exclaims the divine Confutsé, better known among the illiterate by the name of Confucius, “for a man to bite off his own nose!” At this moment I, William Wizard, Esq., feel the full force of this remark, and cannot but give vent to my tribulation at being obliged, through the whim of friend Langstaff, to stop short in my literary career, when at the very point of astonishing my country, and reaping the brightest laurels of literature. We daily hear of shipwrecks, of failures and bankruptcies; they are trifling mishaps which, from their frequency, excite but little astonishment or sympathy; but it is not often that we hear of a man’s letting immortality slip through his fingers; and when he does meet with such a misfortune, who would deny him the comfort of bewailing his calamity?

Next to embargo, laid upon our commerce, the greatest public annoyance is the embargo laid upon our work; in consequence of which, the produce of my wits, like that of my country, must remain at home; and my ideas, like so many merchantmen in port, or redoubtable frigates in the Potomac, moulder away in the mud of my own brain. I know of few things in this world more annoying than to be interrupted in the middle of a favorite story, at the most interesting part, where one expects to shine or to have a conversation broken off just when you are about coming out, with a score of excellent jokes, not one of which but was good enough to make every fine figure in corsets literally split her sides with laughter. In some such predicament am I placed at present; and I do protest to you, my good-looking and well beloved readers, by the chop-sticks of the immortal Josh, I was on the very brink of treating you with a full broadside of the most ingenious and instructive essays that your precious noddles were ever bothered with.

In the first place, I had, with infinite labor and pains, and by consulting the divine Plato, Sanconiathon, Apollonius Rhodius, Sir John Harrington, Noah Webster, Linkum Fidelius, and others, fully refuted all those wild theories respecting the first settlement of our venerable country; and proved, beyond contradiction, that America, so far from being, as the writers of upstart Europe denominate it, the new world, is at least as old as any country in existence, not excepting Egypt, China, or even the land of the Assiniboins; which, according to the traditions of that ancient people, has already assisted at the funerals of thirteen suns, and four hundred and seventy thousand moons!

I had likewise written a long dissertation on certain hieroglyphics discovered on those fragments of the moon, which have lately fallen, with singular propriety, in a neighboring State, and have thrown considerable light on the state of literature and the arts in that planet, showing that the universal language which prevails there is high Dutch; thereby proving it to be the most ancient and original tongue, and corroborating the opinion of a celebrated poet, that it is the language in which the serpent tempted our grandmother Eve.

To support the theatric department, I had several very judicious critiques, ready written, wherein no quarter was shown either to authors or actors; and I was only waiting to determine at what plays or performances they should be leveled. As to the grand spectacle of Cinderella, which is to be represented this season, I had given it a most unmerciful handling, showing that it was neither tragedy, comedy, nor farce; that the incidents were highly improbable, that the prince played like a perfect harlequin, that the white mice were merely powdered for the occasion, and that the new moon had a most outrageous copper nose.

But my most profound and erudite essay in embryo is an analytical, hypercritical review of these Salmagundi lucubrations; which I had written partly in revenge for the many waggish jokes played off against me by my confederates, and partly for the purpose of saving much invaluable labor to the Zoiluses and Dennises of the age, by detecting and exposing all the similarities, resemblances, synonymies, analogies, coincidences, etc., which occur in this work.

I hold it downright plagiarism for any author to write, or even to think, in the same manner with any other writer that either did, doth, or may exist. It is a sage maxim of law—“_Ignorantia neminem excusat_”—and the same has been extended to literature: so that if an author shall publish an idea that has been ever hinted by another, it shall be no exculpation for him to plead ignorance of the fact. All, therefore, that I had to do was to take a good pair of spectacles, or a magnifiying glass, and with SALMAGUNDI in hand and a tableful of books before me, to muse over them alternately, in a corner of Cockloft library: carefully comparing and contrasting all odd ends and fragments of sentences. Little did honest Launce suspect, when he sat lounging and scribbling in his elbow-chair with no other stock to draw upon than his own brain, and no other authority to consult than the sage Linkum Fidelius—little did he think that his careless, unstudied effusions would receive such scrupulous investigation.

By laborious researches, and patiently collating words, where sentences and ideas did not correspond, I have detected sundry sly disguises and metamorphoses of which, I’ll be bound, Langstaff himself is ignorant. Thus, for instance—the little man in black is evidently no less a personage than old Goody Blake or Goody something, filched from the Spectator, who confessedly filched her from Otway’s “wrinkled hag with age grown double.” My friend Launce has taken the honest old woman, dressed her up in the cast-off suit worn by Twaits, in Lampedo, and endeavored to palm the imposture upon the enlightened inhabitants of Gotham. No further proof of the fact need be given, than that Goody Blake was taken for a witch, and the little man in black for a conjurer; and that they both lived in villages, the inhabitants of which were distinguished by a most respectful abhorrence of hobgoblins and broomsticks; to be sure the astonishing similarity ends here, but surely that is enough to prove that the little man in black is no other than Goody Blake in the disguise of a white witch.

Thus, also, the sage Mustapha, in mistaking a brag-party for a convention of magi studying hieroglyphics, may pretend to originality of idea and to a familiar acquaintance with the black-letter literati of the East. But this Tripolitan trick will not pass here; I refer those who wish to detect his larceny to one of those wholesale jumbles, or hodge-podge collections of science, which, like a tailor’s pandemonium or a giblet-pie, are receptacles for scientific fragments of all sorts and sizes. The reader, learned in dictionary studies, will at once perceive I mean an encyclopædia. There, under the title of Magi, Egypt, Cards, or Hieroglyphics, I forget which, will be discovered an idea similar to that of Mustapha, as snugly concealed as truth at the bottom of a well, or the mistletoe amid the shady branches of an oak; and it may at any time be drawn from its lurking-place, by those hewers of wood, and drawers of water, who labor in humbler walks of criticism. This is assuredly a most unpardonable error of the sage Mustapha, who had been the captain of a ketch; and, of course, as your nautical men are for the most part very learned, ought to have known better. But this is not the only blunder of the grave Mussulman who swears by the head of Amrou, the beard of Barbarossa, and the sword of Khalid, as glibly as our good Christian soldiers anathematize body and soul, or a sailor his eyes and odd limbs. Now I solemnly pledge myself to the world, that in all my travels through the East, in Persia, Arabia, China, and Egypt, I never heard man, woman, or child, utter any of those preposterous and newfangled asseverations; and that, so far from swearing by any man’s head, it is considered, throughout the East, the greatest insult that can be offered to either the living or dead to meddle in any shape even with his beard. These are but two or three specimens of the exposures I would have made; but I should have descended still lower; nor would have spared the most insignificant and, or but, or nevertheless, provided I could have found a ditto in the “Spectator” or the dictionary; but all these minutiæ I bequeath to the Lilliputian literati of this sagacious community, who are fond of hunting “such small deer,” and I earnestly pray they may find full employment for a twelvemonth to come.

But the most outrageous plagiarisms of friend Launcelot are those made on sundry living personages. Thus: Tom Straddle has been evidently stolen from a distinguished Brummagem emigrant, since they both ride on horseback; Dabble, the little great man, has his origin in a certain aspiring counselor, who is rising in the world as rapidly as the heaviness of his head will permit; mine uncle John will bear a tolerable comparison, particularly as it respects the sterling qualities of his heart, with a worthy yeoman of Westchester County; and to deck out Aunt Charity, and the amiable Miss Cocklofts, he has rifled the charms of half the ancient vestals in the city. Nay, he has taken unpardonable liberties with my own person!—elevating me on the substantial pedestals of a worthy gentleman from China, and tricking me out with claret coats, tight breeches, and silver-sprigged dickeys, in such sort that I can scarcely recognize my own resemblance; whereas I absolutely declare that I am an exceeding good-looking man, neither too tall nor too short, too old nor too young, with a person indifferently robust, a head rather inclining to be large, an easy swing in my walk, and that I wear my own hair, neither queued, nor cropped, nor turned up, but in a fair, pendulous oscillating club, tied with a yard of ninepenny black ribbon.

And now having said all that occurs to me on the present pathetic occasion—having made my speech, wrote my eulogy, and drawn my portrait, I bid my readers an affectionate farewell; exhorting them to live honestly and soberly—paying their taxes, and reverencing the state, the church, and the corporation—reading diligently the Bible and almanac, the newspaper and SALMAGUNDI; which is all the reading an honest citizen has occasion for—and eschewing all spirit of faction, discontent, irreligion, and criticism.

Which is all at present From their departed friend, WILLIAM WIZARD.

THE END.

Footnote 1:

The title of a newspaper published in New York, the columns of which, among other miscellaneous topics, occasionally contained strictures on the performances at the theatres.—_Paris Ed._

Footnote 2:

David Longworth, an eccentric bookseller, had filled a large apartment with the valuable engravings of “Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery,” magnificently framed, and had nearly obscured the front of his house with a huge sign—a colossal painting in _chiaroscuro_, of the crowning of Shakespeare. Longworth had an extraordinary propensity to publish elegant works, to the great gratification of persons of taste, and the no small diminution of his own slender fortune. He alludes ironically to this circumstance in the present notice.—_Paris Ed._ Longworth’s store was in Park Row, near the Park Theatre. He was the dramatic publisher of New York in his day, and long issued the City Directory.

Footnote 3:

It was not originally the intention of the authors to insert the above address in the work; but, unwilling that a _morceau_ so precious should be lost to posterity, they have been induced to alter their minds. This will account for any repetition of idea that may appear in the introductory essay.—_Note to original Ed._

Footnote 4:

Amongst the amusements of the citizens in times gone by was that of making excursions in the winter evenings, on sleighs, to some neighboring village, where the social party had a ball and supper. Kissing-bridge had its name from the circumstance that here the beaux exacted from their fair companions the forfeiture of a kiss before permitting their travelling vehicles to pass over.—_Paris Ed._

The Rev. Andrew Burnaby, Vicar of Greenwich, in his “Travels through the Middle Settlements in North America, in the years 1759 and 1760,” has this mention of the spot, fixing the locality near Fiftieth street, near the site of old Cato’s. “The amusements of the New Yorkers,” says Burnaby, “are balls and sleighing expeditions in the winter; in the summer, going in parties upon the water and fishing, or making excursions into the country. There are several houses pleasantly suited upon East River, near New York, where it is common to have turtle feasts: these happen once or twice in a week. Thirty or forty gentlemen and ladies meet and dine together, drink tea in the afternoon, fish and amuse themselves till evening, and then return home in Italian chaises, a gentleman and lady in each chaise. In the way there is a bridge, about three miles distant from New York, which you always pass over as you return, called the Kissing-bridge, where it is a part of the etiquette to salute the lady who has put herself under your protection.” From this it would appear that the privileges of Kissing-bridge were not confined to sleighing parties.

Footnote 5:

_Old_ Vauxhall stood at the corner of Warren and Greenwich streets, and was originally the residence of Sir Peter Warren. It fell into the hands of Sam Fraunces, the famous tavern-keeper, who kept it as a public garden. Fraunces was the steward of General Washington. A later Vauxhall was kept in the neighborhood of Broome Street by Delacroix, who removed the establishment about 1808 to the better known Vauxhall Garden, which extended from the Bowery to Broadway, crossing the present Lafayette Place and site of the Astor Library. The Bull’s Head, the chief cattle mart, occupied the site of the Bowery Theatre, and has travelled upward with the growth of city, making one or two halting-places on that avenue on its way to its present position in the Fifth Avenue.

Footnote 6:

Two fashionable milliners of rival celebrity in the city of New York.—_Paris Ed._

Footnote 7:

In this instance, as well as on several other occasions, a little innocent pleasantry is indulged at Mr. Jefferson’s expense. The allusion made here is to the red velvet small clothes with which the President, in defiance of good taste, used to attire himself on levee days and other public occasions.—_Paris Ed._

In one of his splenetic moods in Virginia, John Randolph once vented his complaint of Jefferson, with an allusion to the old scandal. “I cannot live,” said he, “in this miserable undone country, where, as the Turks follow their sacred standard, which is a pair of Mahomet’s green breeches, we are governed by the old red breeches of that prince of projectors, St. Thomas of Cantingbury; and surely, Becket himself never had more pilgrims at his shrine, than the saint of Monticello.”

As for the proboscis of Paine, “I shall secure him to a nicety,” said Jarvis, when he was about to take the bust of Paine, now in the New York Historical Society, “if I can get plaster enough for his carbuncled nose.” Dr. Francis, who relates the anecdote in one of the interesting historical sketches which he has given to the public, also furnishes a couplet sung by the boys in the street:—

“Tom Paine is come from far, from far; His nose is like a blazing star!”

Footnote 8:

An imaginary association, the object of which was to set the North River (the Hudson) on fire. A number of young men of some fashion, little talent, and great pretension, were ridiculed as members.—_Paris Ed._

Footnote 9:

This edifice, the corner-stone of which was laid by Mayor Edward Livingston in 1803, was not finished till 1812.

Footnote 10:

An emblematical device, suspended from a poplar in front of the shop of Paff, a music-seller in Broadway.—_Paris Ed._

Footnote 11:

The numbers of Salmagundi were originally published in this form.

Footnote 12:

Cockloft Hall had its origin in a favorite resort of Irving and his companions, in an old country house, once the residence of the Kembles, on the Passaic, near Newark. It was then known, says the writer of a pleasant reminiscence in the Newark Advertiser, as the “Gouverneur Place,” from which family it had descended to Mr. Gouverneur Kemble; but during most of the time referred to it was not inhabited by the family, but was in charge of a respectable couple, who kept it in order, and acted as host and hostess to Irving, Paulding, and the three or four others, constituting their coterie. Mr. Irving, in a letter to the New Jersey Historical Society, referring to these visits, remarked, “With Newark are associated in my mind many pleasant recollections of early days, and of social meetings at an old mansion on the banks of the Passaic.”

Footnote 13:

Several Tripolitan prisoners, taken by an American squadron, in an action off Tripoli, were brought to New York, where they lived at large, objects of the curiosity and hospitality of the inhabitants, until an opportunity presented to restore them to their own country.—_Paris Ed._

Footnote 14:

This is another allusion to the primitive habits of Mr. Jefferson, who, even while the first magistrate of the Republic, and on occasions when a little of the “pomp and circumstance” of office would not have been incompatible with that situation, was accustomed to dress in the plainest garb, and when on horseback to be without an attendant; so that it not unfrequently happened that he might be seen, when the business of the state required his personal presence, riding up alone to the government house at Washington, and having tied his steed to the nearest post, proceed to transact the important business of the nation.—_Paris Ed._

Footnote 15:

Dyde’s public-house was in Park Row. It was brought into notice by a famous coalition supper of the Burrites and Clintonians. A pamphlet was published giving an account of the Dyde Supper.

Footnote 16:

The “Weekly Inspector,” here alluded to, was a neatly printed octavo journal, chiefly political, conducted by Thomas Green Fessenden. It was commenced Aug. 30, 1806, and was published in New York by Ezra Sargent, 39 Wall Street, with the motto from Hamilton: “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greater number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people—commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.”

Feb. 7, 1807, a fortnight after its publication, Fessenden notices SALMAGUNDI, a “new literary publication,” with an opening fling or two at the club of wits who profess themselves supremely indifferent to the reception of their work. In the next number but one of the “Inspector” the attack is followed up by an article—“SALMAGUNDI—_alias_ BUBBLE AND SQUEAK—again.” In reply to the notice of the former which had appeared in the interim in SALMAGUNDI, Christopher Caustic raves in his extraordinary slang at these “frothy productions.” “The disease,” he says, “is becoming epidemic, the fever rising to frenzy, spreading from fool to fool; a numberless number of nameless names have already caught the infection, and from one end of the town to the other, all is nonsense and ‘Salmagundi.’” He calls it “a mere hodge-podge of train oil and garlic, instead of ‘Salmagundi.’... This is, in English, a ‘gibe cat,’ smothered in onions and eaten with fennel, rue, and caraway seed. In fact, there was one Huddesford, an English wit, who wrote a poem with _that are_ title, which this worst of wizards may have purloined in some of their rambles, and thus gained a _legal_ claim to the wit it contains.” He proposes, to his own great delight, “Silly-kickaby” as a substitute for “Salmagundi.” Having dispatched ‘Salmagundi’ or _Silly-kickaby_, we come next to ‘Whimwhams and Opinions.’ What a broken-backed metaphor! It is as bad as to have christened your nonsense _Apple Dumpling_; or _Flights of Fancy_.

‘Atque idem jungat vulpes Et mulgeat hircos’—

That is, in English:—

This sorry set of silly shoats, Should be employed to milk _he-goats_, Or sent to Carolina bogs, To yoke ox-teams of prairie dogs.

‘Whimwhams’ is taken by this junto of notables from an English publication. Launcelot Langstaff is a vile daub of a caricature of Isaac Bickerstaff. Will Honeycomb sat for Anthony Evergreen; Will Wizard’s original may be found in the British classics; and in short, the prototype of every other character, with the exception of a few scurrilous personalities. The work ought to have been styled _Silly-kickaby_, alias _Tag-locks of common English Publications_, compiled by Dunderpate, Doughhead, Dumpling and Co., published by Peter Pettyman, sold at the sign of the Ditch delving driveller, Caughnawaugher Slip, dedicated, and to be devoted, to a certain goddess. The Doctor ends with abusing the metre of Pindar Cockloft, and then asserting that it was stolen from “Dr. Caustic’s nick-nackatory.”

We shall see in a future number how the Doctor’s literary billingsgate was followed up in SALMAGUNDI. The “Weekly Inspector” replies in the small shot of a handful of “squibs” in his number for March 6, leveled at “the lilliputian journal,” alluding to the small page of the original edition of SALMAGUNDI, and the war dies out.

The “Inspector” makes his exit at the close of his second volume, Aug. 22, 1807.

These mutual random hits and editorial discourtesies of a type too common in the annals of literature—these quarrels of authors—should be remembered for what they were, the passing nonsense of the hour. Thomas Green Fessenden, notwithstanding this nonsensical raving, was a man of mark and merit—not only of humor and spirit in the comic verses with which he enlivened the newspaper discussions of his day, but to be held in memory for his more sober labors in the cause of agriculture. There is a very pleasing reminiscence of his later years—he died at the age of sixty-six in 1837—by Nathaniel Hawthorne, in which he celebrates “the amiable temper and abstracted habits” of his old friend.

Footnote 17:

It is not a little singular, that this mode of ridiculing the gossiping productions of Sir John Carr, and other tourists of the day, should have been successfully adopted almost at the same moment by two writers placed in different and distant quarters of the globe. _My Pocket-Book_ appeared in London only two or three weeks after the publication of these “Memorandums” in New York—so that neither writer could possibly have borrowed from the other—and by its ingenious pleasantry and poignant satire, crushed a whole host of book-making tourists, with the luckless knight at their head.—_Paris Ed._ This matter is again referred to at the close of No. XIII.

Footnote 18:

_Vide_ Carr’s _Stranger in Ireland_. John Carr, Esq., of the Honorable Society of the Middle Temple, wrote several slip-slop entertaining books of travel, _A Northern Summer_, _The Stranger in France_, and _The Stranger in Ireland, a Tour in 1805_. The last appears to have been popular in America. It reached its third edition from the New York press of Riley, this very year, 1807.

Footnote 19:

_Vide_ Weld. Isaac Weld travelled through the United States in 1795–7.

Footnote 20:

_Vide_ Carr.

Footnote 21:

_Vide_ Weld. “General Washington,” says Weld, “told me that he never was so much annoyed by mosquitoes in any part of America, as in Skenesborough, for that they used to bite through the thickest boot.”

Footnote 22:

_Vide_ Carr; _vide_ Moore; _vide_ Weld; _vide_ Parkinson; _vide_ Priest. Richard Parkinson, late of Orange Hill, near Baltimore, published in London, 1805, his tour in America, in 1798–1800, exhibiting sketches of Society and Manners, and a particular account of the American system of agriculture, etc. William Priest, who signs himself on the title-page of his book, “Musician, late of the theatres Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston,” travelled in the United States between the years 1793 and 1797, and published his journals in London, in a thin octavo in 1802. _Vide_ Linkum Fidelius, and _vide_ Messrs. Tag, Rag, and Bobtail.

Footnote 23:

_Vide_ the Sentimental Kotzebue.

Footnote 24:

_Vide_ Carr and Blind _Bet_. Carr, in his travels, meets on the roadside in Wales a stone-blind woman, supporting herself and infirm mother by the sale of gloves and stockings. The traveller perpetrates some verses on the occasion, which he introduces in this ludicrous fashion: “Upon her quitting us, the following lines found their way into my pocket-book!”

Footnote 25:

_Vide_ Carr.

Footnote 26:

_Vide_ Priest. “At two,” says Priest, “the Philadelphians dine on what is usual in England, both a variety of American dishes, such as bear, opossum, raccoon, etc.!”

Footnote 27:

Gulliver is announced by the town crier in Brobdignag as “a strange creature to be seen at the sign of the Green Eagle, not so big as a _splacnuck_, an animal in that country very finely shaped, about six feet long.”

Footnote 28:

Jeremy Cockloft appears, in this enumeration, to have come from a recent perusal of Voltaire’s _Candide_.

Footnote 29:

_Vide_ Carr.

Footnote 30:

_Vide_ Carr’s learned derivation of _gee_ and _whoa_.

Footnote 31:

Moore:—

“Is this the region then, is this the clime For soaring fancies? for those dreams sublime, Which all their miracles of light reveal To heads that meditate and hearts that feel? Alas! not so—the Muse of nature lights Her glories round; she scales the mountain heights, And roams the forests; every wondrous spot Burns with her step, yet man regards it not. She whispers round, her words are in the air, But lost, unheard, they linger freezing there, Without one breath of soul, divinely strong, One ray of mind, to thaw them into song.”

—_Epistle to the Hon. W. R. Spencer, from Buffalo, upon Lake Erie._

Footnote 32:

Carr.

Footnote 33:

Rabelais’ Judge Bridlegoose and famous Oracle. There was a slight difficulty in the Judge’s method of decision, “he was become old, and his sight of late was very much failed, and become dimmer than it was wont to be; by reason of which infirmity he was not able so distinctly and clearly to discern the points of the dice, as formerly he had been accustomed to do.”

Footnote 34:

Moore.

Footnote 35:

Carr.

Footnote 54:

The famous production of the Hartford wits, Alsop, Dwight, Hopkins, & Co.

Footnote 59:

General Eaton’s famous adventure on the land expedition from Egypt to rescue Bainbridge and the prisoners at Tripoli.

Footnote 60:

_Vide_ Solomon Lang.

Footnote 61:

An amusing verification of the fidelity of the character of Tom Straddle, to the type of the Brummagem tourist, is afforded in an anecdote related in a Memoir of Irving, prefixed to the Paris edition of his works. “Some years ago,” it reads, “a man who was prosecuted in Jamaica, for a libelous publication, produced a volume of _Salmagundi_ on his trial. This publication, it appeared, had been copied literally, word for word, from the character of Tom Straddle, printed, sold, sent abroad, mischievously enough, to be sure, while one of those English travellers, whom Irving had so delightfully hit off, was in Jamaica, exploring and astonishing the natives.”

Footnote 62:

The old Government house facing Bowling Green, built for the President of the United States, afterwards the residence of George Clinton and John Jay.

Footnote 63:

The allusion is here evidently to the experiment made by Fulton in New York Harbor, on the 20th of July, 1807, shortly after his return from Europe, bringing with him the favorite plans of “torpedo warfare,” as he called it, which he had laid before the governments of France and England. An old brig was, after some delay, blown up in the bay by one of Fulton’s charged canisters. The affair, with Fulton’s appeal to the Government, his previous lecture on Governor’s Island to the magistracy of the city, when the audience was somewhat diminished on the production of one of the loaded torpedoes, with his declaration that it contained a hundred and seventy pounds of powder, and that, if he were to suffer the clock-work to run fifteen minutes, he had no doubt it would blow the fortification to atoms—all this, with his letter to the Corporation the day after his successful experiment, was well calculated to produce the stir in the city so pleasantly set forth in this paper of SALMAGUNDI.

Footnote 64:

Dr. Francis, in his remarks on the life and character of Washington Irving, before the Historical Society, alludes to this conflict of spelling-books at the school in which they were both instructed. “There was a curious conflict existing in the school between the principal and his assistant instructor; the former a legitimate burgher of the city, the latter a New England pedagogue. So far as I can remember, something depended on the choice of the boy’s parents in the selection of his studies; but if not expressed otherwise, the principal stuck earnestly to Dilworth, while the assistant, for his section of instruction, held to Noah Webster.”

Footnote 65:

Jefferson in his _Notes on Virginia_, says, “The legislative powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

Footnote 66:

The writer of the reminiscence, whom we have already cited in the previous mention of Cockloft Hall, Mr. W. A. Whitehead of Newark, describes the recent condition of the summer-house. “The old man,” who serves the purpose of the narrator, “sighed and turned away his head, while he led the way to a small building standing not far from the river’s brink, and near an artificial basin or pond, into which, as the tide was full, the Passaic was pouring some of its surplus waters through a narrow sluice. It was octagonal in shape, about eighteen feet in diameter, containing only one apartment, with a door facing the river on the east, and having windows opening toward each of the other three cardinal points. It was built of stone, and had been originally weather-boarded, although most of the boards had fallen off. It had evidently been constructed with great care, being fully plastered within and papered, having an ornamental cornice and chair-board, an arched doorway, and cut stone steps: all indicating a fastidiousness of finish not ordinarily found elsewhere than in dwellings; but it was far gone toward utter ruin, the window sashes being all out, the door gone, and the mutilated wood-work showing it to be the resort only of the idle and the vicious. On looking to my companion for an explanation, he said:—

“‘This, sir, was the Cockloft summer-house, and this the fish-pond which Irving mentions when giving the portrait of the old proprietor. You may remember the passage, “an odd notion of the old gentleman was to blow up a large bed of rocks for the purpose of having a fish-pond, although the river ran at about one hundred yards’ distance from the house, and was well stored with fish, but there was nothing, he said, like having things to one’s self. And he would have a summer-house built on the margin of the fish-pond; he would have it surrounded with elms and willows; and he would have a cellar dug under it, for some incomprehensible purpose, which remains a secret to this day.’ ‘As I remember it, in the days of youth,’ continued my aged friend, ‘with its window-seats and lockers, I think it requires no “Will Wizard” to solve the mystery of the cellar, but that _there_ the bottles were kept that were wont to surrender their exhilarating contents at the summons of the occupants of the comfortable apartment above.’

“As I commented on the peculiar position of the building, my companion remarked:—

“‘Here, too, you see an illustration of a peculiarity of the elder “Cockloft.” “He was determined,” says Irving, “to have all his views on his own land, and be beholden to no man for a prospect.” So he placed, you see, the door of his summer-house on the side toward the water, while the windows all look inland.’”

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Page Changed from Changed to

31 Taking of concerts reminds me of Talking of concerts reminds me that given of that given

● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained. ● Renumbered footnotes and, except for those labeled as William Wizard’s notes, placed them all at the end of the final chapter. ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.