No Chesterfield patronages, tailor-made insolences, and contradictions of sinners; which may be called his revolutionary movements, hard and peremptory by the law of them; these could not be soft like his constitutional ones, when men and kings took him for somewhat like the thing he was. Given a noble man, I think your Lordship may expect by and by a polite man. 'politer' man was to be found in Britain than the rustic Robert Burns: high duchesses were captivated with the chivalrous ways of the man; recognized that here was the true chivalry, and divine nobleness of bearing, -as indeed they well might, now when the Peasant God and Norse Thor had come down among them again! Chivalry this, if not as they do chivalry in Drury Lane or West-End drawing-rooms, yet as they do it in Valhalla and the General Assembly of the Gods. For indeed, who invented chivalry, politeness or anything that is noble and melodious and beautiful among us, except precisely the like of Johnson and of Burns? The select few who in the generations of this world were wise and valiant, they, in spite of all the tremendous majority of blockheads and slothful belly-worshippers, and noisy ugly persons, have devised whatsoever is noble in the manners of man to man. THE VULGAR. - L. D. P. V. 1 ALAS, the vulgarest vulgar, I often find, are not those in ragged coats at this day; but those in and superfinest ;-the more is the pity! RICHES AND GIGMEN.* fine, superfine, L. D. P. V. RICHES in a cultured community are the strangest of things; a power all-moving, yet which any the most powerless and skilless can put in motion; they are the readiest of possibilities; the readiest to become a great blessing or a great curse. 'Beneath gold thrones and "In Thurtell's trial (says the Quarterly Review) occurred the following colloquy: 'Q. What sort of a person was Mr. Weare? A. He was always a respectable person. Q. What do you mean by respectable? A. He kept a gig. who knows how many The first fruit of riches, es mountains,' says Jean Paul, giant spirits lie entombed!' pecially for the man born rich, is to teach him faith in them, and all but hide from him that there is any other faith: thus is he trained up in the miserable eye-service of what is called Honour, Respectability; instead of a man we have but a gigman,-one who always kept a gig,' two-wheeled or four-wheeled. Consider too what this same gigmanhood issues in; consider that first and most stupendous of gigmen, Phaeton, the son of Sol, who drove the brightest of all conceivable gigs, yet with the sorrow fullest result. Alas, Phaeton was his father's heir; born to attain the highest fortune without earning it: he had built no sun-chariot (could not build the simplest wheelbarrow), but could and would insist on driving one; and so broke his own stiff neck, sent gig and horses spinning through infinite space, and set the universe on fire!—Or, to speak in more modest figures, Poverty, as we may say, surrounds a man with ready-made barriers, which, if they mournfully gall and hamper, do at least prescribe for him and force on him a sort of course and goal; a safe and beaten though a circuitous course; great part of his guidance is secure against fatal error, is withdrawn from his control. The rich, again, has his whole life to guide, without goal or barrier, save of his own choosing; and, tempted as we have seen, is too likely to guide it ill; often, instead of walking straight forward, as he might, does but, like Jeshurun, wax fat and kick; in which process, it is clear, not the adamantine circle of Necessity whereon the World is built, but only his own limb-bones must go to pieces! -Goethe's Works. ENNUI. SURELY, surely this ignoble sluggishness, sceptical torpor, indifference to all that does not bear on Mammon and his interests, is not the natural state of human creat Other ures; and is not doomed to be their final one! states once were, or there had never been a Society, or any noble thing, among us at all. Under this brutal stagnancy, there lies painfully imprisoned some tendency which could become heroic. The restless gnawing ennui which, like a dark dim ocean-flood, communicating with the Phlegethons and Stygian deeps, begirdles every human life so guided,is it not the painful cry even of that imprisoned heroism? Imprisoned it will never rest; set forth at present, on these sad terms, it cannot be. You unfortunates, what is the use of your moneybags, of your territories, funded properties, your mountains of possessions, equipments and mechanic inventions, which the flunkey pauses over, awestruck, and almost rises into epos and prophecy at sight of? No use, or less than none. Your skin is covered, and your digestive and other bodily apparatus is supplied; and you have but to wish in these respects, and more is ready; and-the Devils, I think, are quizzing you. You ask for happiness,' "O give me happiness!"-and they hand you ever new varieties of covering for the skin, ever new kinds of supply for the digestive apparatus, new and ever new, worse or not a whit better than the old; and-and-this is your 'happiness?' As if you were sick children; as if you were not men, but a kind of apes! I rather say, be thankful for your ennui; it is your last mark of manhood; this at least is a perpetual admonition, and true sermon preached to you. From the the chair of verity this, whatever chairs be chairs of cantity. Happiness is not come, nor like to come; ennui, with its great waste ocean-voice, moans answer, Never, never. That ocean-voice, I tell you, is a great fact, it comes from Phlegethon and the gates of the Abyss; its bodeful never-resting inexorable moan is the voice of primeval Fate, and of the eternal necessity of things. Will you shake away your nightmare and arise; or must you lie writhing under it, till death relieve you? Unfortunate creatures! You are fed, clothed, lodged as men never were before; every day in a new variety of magnificence are you equipped and attended to; such wealth of material means as is now yours was never dreamed of by man before :—and to do any noble thing, with all this mountain of implements, is forever denied you. Only ignoble, expensive and unfruitful things can you now do; nobleness has vanished from the sphere where you live. The way of it is lost, lost; the possibility of it has become incredible. We must try to do without it, I am told.Well; rejoice in your upholsteries and cookeries, then, if so be they will make you happy.' Let the varieties of them be continual and innumerable. In all things let perpetual change, if that is a perpetual blessing to you, be your portion instead of mine; incur that Prophet's curse, and in all things in this sublunary world 'make yourselves like unto a wheel.' Mount into your railways; whirl from place to place, at the rate of fifty, or if you like of five hundred miles an hour: you cannot escape from that inexorable all-encircling oceanmoan of ennui. No: if you would mount to the stars, and do yacht-voyages under the belts of Jupiter, or stalk deer on the ring of Saturn, it would still begirdle you. You cannot escape from it, you can but change your place in it, without solacement except one moment's. That prophetic Sermon from the Deeps will continue with you, till you wisely interpret it and do it, or else till the Crack of Doom swallow it and you. -L. D. P. VIII. HALF AND HALFNESS. NOTHING properly is wholly despicable, at once detestable and forgetable, but your half-knave, he who is neither true nor false; who never in his existence once spoke or did any true thing (for indeed his mind lives in twilight, with cat-vision, incapable of discerning truth); and yet had not the manfulness to speak or act any decided lie; but spent his whole life in plastering together the True and the False, and therefrom manufacturing the Plausible. Such a one our Transcendentals have defined as a moral Hybrid and chimera; therefore, under the moral point of view, as an Impossibility, and mere deceptive Nonenity,-put together for commercial purposes. Of which sort, nevertheless, how many millions, through all manner of gradations, from the wielder of kings' sceptres to the vender of brimstone matches, at tea-tables, council-tables, behind shop-counters, in priests'-pulpits, incessantly and everywhere, do now, in this world of ours, in this Isle of ours, offer themselves to view! From such, at least from this intolerable over-proportion of such, might the merciful. Heavens one day deliver us. -M. Cagliostro. HERR TEUFELSDRÖCKIP'S REJECTED EPITAPH. HIS grand principle is, that lapidary inscriptions, of what sort soever, should be Historical rather than Lyrical. By request of that worthy Nobleman's survivors', says he, 'I undertook to compose his Epitaph; and not unmindful of my own rules, produced the following; which, however, for an alleged defect of Latinity, a defect never yet fully visible to myself, still remains unengraven; '-wherein, we may predict, there is more than the Latinity that will surprise an English reader: HIC JACET PHILIPPUS ZAEHDARM, COGNOMINE MAGNUS, ZAEHDARMI COMES, EX IMPERII CONCILIO, VELLERIS AUREI, PERISCELIDIS, NECNON VULTURIS NIGRI EQUES. QUI DUM SUB LUNA AGEBAT, QUINQUIES MILLE PERDRICES PLUMBO CONFECIT: |