Part 14

''Blanchard's Balloon.' An ascension, I suppose.' No; it is a political squib. Mr. Blanchard has given out, that his gas, owing to an unfortunate accident, has _also_ 'given out,' and that on account of the great expense, he is compelled to forego a second ascension. A wag advises him, as a cheap and expeditious method of obtaining an ample supply of gas, to place his balloon over the chimney of a house in which the 'Democratic Society' are to meet, in the evening, the members of which are expected to be highly inflated with a kind of light, combustible air, which will escape into his vessel, and answer his purpose admirably!

In these days of 'wars and rumors of wars' between the whites and Florida Indians, these twin poetical epistles will be apropos. The writer says, under date of Pittsburgh, 10th June,

'Since Friday last the news we've had, Has been, dear Sir, extremely bad: An Indian of the Senecas, A white who swears to all he says, Have brought a most alarming story, The substance I shall set before ye: Six nations of the Indians, set on By Satan and the imps of Britain, Have join'd the Indians to the westward, By which we soon shall be quite prest hard; They now are crossing o'er the lake, Fort Franklin to surprise and take; That Fort will certainly be taken, And scarce a settler save his bacon.'

Two days after, he adds the following, by way of postscript:

'The news I wrote three days ago, This day I learn is all untrue; The British have not gain'd their ends, The Senecas are still our friends: Fort Franklin is in statu quo, Nor dreads a white or yellow foe; For Capt. DENNY finds he can go, And I suppose is at Venango.

'Although t' extract the naked truth, We put these traders on their oath; Yet while they swear to what they say, We find we're humm'd from day to day; Hence, when I write to you again, A second letter shall the first explain.'

In Animal Magnetism parlance, we 'will' the reader from off our shoulder, and close the book. It is matter-full, however, and peradventure we may open it yet again, anon.

MUSIC--MR. RUSSELL.--Our theatrical reporters have left us but brief space wherein to reply to a correspondent of the Philadelphia '_National Gazette_,' who, in a long communication bearing the signature of 'HONESTUS,' censures the tone of our remarks in relation to Mr. HENRY RUSSELL, the popular vocalist, and the peculiar style of his performances. Both the writer alluded to, and the editor who publishes and endorses his strictures, 'trust that the KNICKERBOCKER will not maintain a dignified silence' under their remarks, since, originating in a work supposed to be influential in leading public opinion, the observations complained of 'have inflicted deep injury on the profession of music, taking away incentive to honest professional toil, close study, and real science,' by elevating a false standard of musical excellence. The writer denies, in so many words, that Mr. RUSSELL ever received the honors in Italy, to which he lays claim; doubts his having been 'a pupil for three years under ROSSINI,' or that he studied under GENERALI, MAYERBEER, and other masters; affirms that 'The Brave Old Oak' is transposed, without acknowledgment, from LODER, save a few trifling alterations for the worse; that 'Some Love to Roam' does not bear the real composer's name; and that five-sixths of the 'Treatise on Singing,' recently issued, with Mr. RUSSELL's name as author, are plagiarized from a work on singing by Rodolph, who has been dead these thirty years.

We depart for once from our uniform practice of silence, in relation to newspaper comments upon articles which appear in the KNICKERBOCKER, to correct one or two errors of the correspondent in question. In regard to the honors received, and the studies pursued by Mr. RUSSELL, 'Honestus' will perceive, by reference to the article in our last number, that the entire paragraph touching his personal and musical history, is quoted from an article in the 'New-York Mirror,' far more laudatory and elaborate than the one which embodied it, as an extract. The _onus_, therefore, in so far as these statements and the remarks which they elicited are concerned, rests not with this Magazine. As to the remaining charges of 'Honestus,' _if established_, we shall be found not less ready than himself to counsel one capable of such deception, to lose no time in bringing down his pretensions to the level of his talents; and farther, commend him to a serious reflex upon the folly of a course so unworthy of his reputation. In the mean time, however, let it not be forgotten, that there are _two sides_ to this matter, and that Mr. RUSSELL is extant, to reply for himself to these anonymous accusations.[17]

The opinions we expressed of Mr. RUSSELL's singing, are entertained by the great majority of those who have heard him; and our remarks in regard to the musical _affectations_ of the day were not lightly hazarded, nor did they fail, as we have good reason to know, to strike an answering chord in the hearts of our readers. Italian effeminacy, elaborate ornament, (often known in musical parlance by the term 'difficult execution,') interpolated upon the simplest airs, demanded reprehension. It was ridiculous _imitation_, pressed by Fashion into the service, and was lamentably infectious, from the _prima donna_, down to the tawdry damsels who flirt at the tail of a chorus, and the piano-strumming miss, redolent of bread-and-butter. It would have irked even Aristophanes, the quintessential, to have heard, as we have heard, some such melody as 'John Anderson my Joe' garnished with attenuated and circumfused skeletons or shades of notes, in endless progression and recurrence, by your 'difficult execution'-er, bent on wreaking all the tones of his voice upon a single word. Bells jangled out of tune, and harsh, or 'the spheres touched by a raw angel,' would have the advantage, in comparative execrability, over such refined tinkerings of simple melody. It was this misplaced ornament, (rendered for a period _fashionable_, by the affected ecstasies of 'genteel' young men without brains, and small travelled amateurs, who voted it 'the thing,') that we condemned, and _not_ music, cultivated and improved by the great masters of the art.

LETTERS AND LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB.--There is at the 'Merchants' Exchange' in this city, the model of a machine for re-pressing cotton-bales. Would that some ingenious person would invent a similar process, by which much of the matter of such a work as TALFOURD's 'Letters of CHARLES LAMB, with a Sketch of his Life'--now lying damp before us, in all the luxury of London typography--could be re-pressed into these pages, for the gratification of our readers! In the absence, howbeit, of so desirable a power, we may present such condensed portions as can be subdued 'by hand,' withal. The letters in these volumes are connected by a 'thread of narrative,' which evinces a kindred spirit between Lamb and his biographer. The author of 'Ion' was an old and familiar friend of 'Elia's; hence he every where exhibits a thorough knowledge of his character, not less than a perfect appreciation of his originality of thought, the delicacy and refinement of his taste, and the fascination of his language. These familiar epistles set before us _the man_, as he lived, moved, and acted. We have here, too, the first germs of those delicate children of his brain, which have rarely been equalled, and never surpassed. We see the sources whence sprang the dainty thought, the charming image; and we may mark the daily creation and circumfusion of those felicitous conceits with which the name of 'Elia' is inseparably associated. What a reader was he; and how the ferreted beauties of the old worthies 'slid into his soul!' Upon the fertile suggestions of a creative, observant spirit, were inoculated and grafted the rich treasures of the elder intellects. But as our associate, in 'Brotherly Love,' (in a double sense,) has, since the above was penned, spoken elsewhere in this Magazine of these distinctive endowments and graces, we forbear farther comment. '_Revenons à Mouton._' Return we to LAMB:

As the volumes will hereafter be issued from the press of the Brothers HARPER, we shall postpone a 'prepared report' upon them, until another number; contenting ourselves, in the mean time, with a few selections, in the perusal of which we have had especial delight. The annexed--to plunge at once, _in medias res_, into the work--was addressed to a friend who was about to depart for the East, being haunted with the idea of oriental adventure:

"My dear friend, think what a sad pity it would be to bury such _parts_ in heathen countries, among nasty, unconversable, horse-belching, Tartar people! Some say, they are Cannibals; and then, conceive a Tartar-fellow _eating_ my friend, and adding the _cool malignity_ of mustard and vinegar! * * * The Tartars, really, are a cold, insipid, smouchey set. You'll be sadly moped (if you are not eaten) among them. Pray _try_, and cure yourself. Take hellebore (the counsel is Horace's, 'twas none of my thought _originally_.) Shave yourself oftener. Eat no saffron, for saffron-eaters contract a terrible Tartar-like yellow. Pray, to avoid the fiend. Eat nothing that gives the heart-burn. _Shave the upper lip._ Go about like an European. Read no books of voyages (they are nothing but lies,) only now and then a romance, to keep the fancy under. Above all, don't go to any sights of _wild beasts_. _That has been your ruin._ Accustom yourself to write familiar letters, on common subjects, to your friends in England, such as are of a moderate understanding. And think about common things more. I supped last night with Rickman, and met a merry _natural_ captain, who pleases himself vastly with once having made a pun at Otaheite in the O. language. 'Tis the same man who said Shakspeare he liked, because he was _so much of the gentleman_. Rickman is a man 'absolute in all numbers.' I think I may one day bring you acquainted, if you do not go to Tartary first; for you'll never come back. Have a care, my dear friend, of Anthropophagi! their stomachs are always craving. 'Tis terrible to be weighed out at five-pence a-pound. To sit at table (the reverse of fishes in Holland,) not as a guest, but as a meat."

The attractions which a New-York 'May Day' would have had for one whose horror of 'moving' is thus naturally accounted for, may be readily conceived:

"What a dislocation of comfort is comprised in that word moving! Such a heap of little nasty things, after you think all is got into the cart; old dredging-boxes, worn-out brushes, gallipots, vials, things that it is impossible the most necessitous person can ever want, but which the women, who preside on these occasions, will not leave behind, if it was to save your soul; they'd keep the cart ten minutes to stow in dirty pipes and broken matches, to show their economy. Then you can find nothing you want for many days after you get into your new lodgings. You must comb your hair with your fingers, wash your hands without soap, go about in dirty gaiters. Was I Diogenes, I would not move out of a kilderkin into a hogshead, though the first had nothing but small beer in it, and the second reeked claret. Our place of final destination--I don't mean the grave, but No. 4, Inner Temple-lane--looks out upon a gloomy church yard-like court, called Hare-court, with three trees and a pump in it. Do you know it? I was born near it, and used to drink at that pump when I was a Rechabite of six years old."

A clever artist might readily transfer the following picture to the canvass, though his imagination were naught. It describes the misfortune of a 'cisled' fellow-clerk in the East India House, akin to one whom he elsewhere mentions, as 'pouring down goblet after goblet, the second to see where the first is gone, the third to see no harm happens to the second, a fourth to say there is another coming, and a fifth to say he is not sure he is the last:'

"The E. I. H. has been thrown into a quandary by the strange phenomenon of poor ---- ---- whom I have known man and madman twenty-seven years, he being elder here than myself by nine years and more. He was always a pleasant, gossiping, half-headed, muzzy, dozing, dreaming, walk-about, inoffensive chap; a little too fond of the creature; who isn't at times? but ---- had not brains to work off an over-night's surfeit by ten o'clock next morning, and, unfortunately, in he wandered the other morning, drunk with last night, and with a superfoetation of drink taken in since he set out from bed. He came staggering under his double burthen, like trees in Java, bearing at once blossom, fruit, and falling fruit, as I have heard you or some other traveller tell, with his face literally as blue as the bluest firmament; some wretched calico that he had moped his poor oozy front with had rendered up its native dye, and the devil a bit would he consent to wash it, but swore it was characteristic, for he was going to the sale of indigo, and set up a laugh which I did not think the lungs of mortal man were competent to. It was like a thousand people laughing, or the Goblin Page. He imagined afterward that the whole office had been laughing at him, so strange did his own sounds strike upon his _non_sensorium. But ---- has laugh'd his last laugh, and awoke the next day to find himself reduced from an abused income of £600 per annum to one-sixth of the sum, after thirty-six years' tolerably good service. The quality of mercy was not strained in his behalf; the gentle dews dropped not on him from heaven."

Lamb was a creature of ardent sympathies. His social affections were as fresh and tender as those of childhood; and in the subjoined extract from a letter to Wordsworth, these characteristics are admirably portrayed:

"Deaths overset one, and put one out long after the recent grief. Two or three have died within this last two twelvemonths, and so many parts of me have been numbed. One sees a picture, reads an anecdote, starts a casual fancy, and thinks to tell of it to this person in preference to every other: the person is gone whom it would have peculiarly suited. It won't do for another. Every departure destroys a class of sympathies. There's Capt. Burney gone! What fun has whist now?--what matters it what you lead, if you can not fancy him looking over you? One never hears any thing, but the image of the particular person occurs with whom alone almost you would care to share the intelligence: thus one distributes oneself about--and now for so many parts of me I have lost the market. Common natures do not suffice me. Good people, as they are called, won't serve. I want individuals. I am made up of queer points, and I want so many answering needles. The going away of friend does not make the remainder more precious. It takes so much from them as there was a common link. A. B. and C. make a party. A. dies. B. not only loses A., but all A.'s part in C. C. loses A.'s part in B., and so the alphabet sickens by subtraction of interchangeables."

But gentle-spirited as he was, Lamb knew how to use the polished weapon of satire. Witness his 'Letter to Southey,' and the following keen sonnet upon the editor of the Quarterly Review. It is a revenge for the severely-expressed 'distaste of a small though acute mind, for an original power which it could not appreciate, and which disturbed the conventional associations of which it was master.' GIFFORD was originally a shoe-maker. The sonnet is entitled, 'SAINT CRISPIN to Mr. GIFFORD,' and dated 'Saint Crispin's Eve':

"All unadvised, and in an evil hour, Lured by aspiring thoughts, my son, you daft The lowly labors of the 'Gentle Craft' For learned toils, which blood and spirit sour. All things, dear pledge, are not in all men's power; The wiser sort of shrub affects the ground: And sweet content of mind is oftener found In cobbler's parlor, than in critic's bower. The sorest work is what doth cross the grain; And better to this hour you had been plying Tho obsequious awl, with well-waxed finger flying, Than ceaseless thus to till a thankless vein: Still teasing muses, which are still denying; Making a stretching-leather of your brain."

The annexed ludicrous account of a temporary indisposition, was addressed to Bernard Barton, the well-known Quaker poet. It breathes the very spirit of 'Elia:'

"Do you know what it is to succumb under an insurmountable day-mare--'a whoreson lethargy,' Falstaff call it--an indisposition to do any thing--a total deadness and distaste--a suspension of vitality--an indifference to locality--a numb, soporifical, good-for-nothingness--an ossification all over--an oyster-like insensibility to the passing events--a mind stupor--a brawny defiance to the needles of a thrusting-in conscience? Did you ever have a very bad cold, with a total irresolution to submit to water-gruel processes? This has been for many weeks my lot, and my excuse; my fingers drag heavily over this paper, and to my thinking it's three-and-twenty furlongs from hence to the end of this demi-sheet. I have not a thing to say; nothing is of more importance than another; I am flatter than a denial or a pancake; emptier than Judge ----'s wig when the head is in it; duller than a country stage when the actors are off it; a cipher, an 0! I acknowledge life at all, only by an occasional convulsional cough, and a permanent phlegmatic pain in the chest. I am weary of the world, and the world is weary of me. My day is gone into twilight, and I don't think it worth the expense of candles. My wick hath a thief in it, but I can't muster courage to snuff it. I inhale suffocation; I can't distinguish veal from mutton; nothing interests me. 'Tis twelve o'clock, and Thurtell is just now coming out upon the New Drop, Jack Ketch alertly tucking up his greasy sleeves to do the last office of mortality, yet cannot I elicit a groan or a moral reflection. If you told me the world will be at an end to-morrow, I should just say, 'will it?' I have not volition enough left to dot my i's, much less to comb my eyebrows; my eyes are set in my head; my brains are gone out to see a poor relation in Moorfields, and they did not say when they'd come back again; my skull is a Grub-street attic to let--not so much as a joint-stool left in it; my hand writes, not I; just as chickens run about a little, when their heads are off. O for a vigorous fit of gout, of cholic, tooth-ache--an earwig in my auditory, a fly in my visual organs; pain is life--the sharper, the more evidence of life; but this apathy, this death! Did you ever have an obstinate cold--a six or seven weeks' unintermitting chill, and suspension of hope, fear, conscience, and every thing? Yet do I try all I can to cure it; I try wine, and spirits, and smoking, and snuff in unsparing quantities, but they all only seem to make me worse instead of better. I sleep in a damp room, but it does me no good; I come home late o' nights, but do not find any visible amendment!

"It is just fifteen minutes after twelve; Thurtell is by this time a good way on his journey, baiting at Scorpion perhaps; Ketch is bargaining for his cast coat and waistcoat; the Jew demurs at first at three half-crowns, but, on consideration that he may get somewhat by showing 'em in the town, finally closes."

In the same vein is the following, written under similar circumstances:

"I have had my head and ears stuffed up with the east winds. A continual ringing in my brain of bells jangled, or the spheres touched by some raw angel. Is it not George the Third tuning the Hundredth Psalm? I get my music for nothing. But the weather seems to be softening, and will thaw my stunnings. Coleridge, writing to me a week or two since, began his note: '_Summer has set in with his usual severity._' A cold summer is all I know disagreeable in cold. I do not mind the utmost rigour of real winter, but these smiling hypocritical Mays wither me to death. My head has been ringing chaos, like the day the winds were made, before they submitted to the discipline of a weather-cock, before the quarters were made. In the street, with the blended noises of life about me, I hear, and my head is lightened; but in a room, the hubbub comes back, and I am deaf as a sinner. Did I tell you of a pleasant sketch Hood has done, which he calls, '_Very deaf indeed?_' It is of a good-natured, stupid-looking old gentleman, whom a foot-pad has stopped, but for his extreme deafness cannot make him understand what he wants. The unconscious old gentleman is extending his ear-trumpet very complacently, and the fellow is firing a pistol into it to make him hear, but the ball will pierce his skull sooner than the report reach his sensorium. I choose a very little bit of paper, for my ear hisses when I bend down to write. I can hardly read a book, for _I miss that small soft voice which the idea of articulated words raises_ (almost imperceptibly to you) _in a silent reader_. _I seem too deaf to see what I read._ But with a touch of returning zephyr, my head will melt."

It is in a letter to the same staid correspondent, that we find the following reflections on the fate of Fauntleroy, who was executed many years since in London. It is 'a strange mingling of humor and solemn truth:'