Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

ing, still so fresh, so erect on its stalk, at mid-day hung its heavy head, discoloured, wan, and fading; but so frequently had the billows, during the fury of the storm, drenched my boy's little crib, that I could not wonder he should have felt their effects in a severe cold. I put him to bed, and tried to hush him to sleep. Soon, however, his face grew flushed, and his pulse became feverish. I failed alike in my endeavours to procure him repose and to afford him amusement: but, though playthings were repulsed, and tales no longer attended to, still he could not bear me an instant out of his sight; nor would he take anything except at my hands. Even when-as too soon it did his reason began to wander, his filial affection retained its pristine hold of his heart. It had grown into an adoration of his equally doting father; and the mere consciousness of my presence seemed to relieve his uneasiness.

Had not my feelings, a few moments only before, been those of such exceeding happiness, I should not so soon perhaps have conceived great alarm; but I had throughout life found every extraordinary burst of joy followed by some unforeseen calamity; and my exultation had just risen to so unusual a pitch, that a deep dismay now at once struck me to the heart. I felt convinced that I had only been carried to so high a pinnacle of joy, in order to be hurled with greater ruin into an abyss of wo. Such became my anxiety to reach Trieste, and to obtain the best medical assist

a villain spoiled by early indulgence; he becomes a renegade to his faith, a mercenary, a robber, and an assassin; but the elements of a better nature are sown in his composition, and break forth at times. He is a native of Chios, the son of Greek parents. To avoid the consequences of an amour with Helena, the consul's daughter, he runs off to sea in a Venetian vessel, which is boarded by pirates and captured. The pirates are in turn taken by a Turkish frigate, and carried before Hassan Pasha. Anastasius is released, fights with the Turks in the war against the Araonoots, and accompanies the Greek drogueman to Constantinople. Disgrace and beggary reduce him to various shifts and adventures. He follows a Jew quack doctor selling nostrums-is thrown into the Bagnio, or state prison-afterwards embraces the Turkish faith-revisits Greece-proceeds to Egypt-and subsequently ranges over Arabia, and visits Malta, Sicily, and Italy. His intrigues, adventures, sufferings, &c. are innumerable. Every aspect of Greek and Turkish society is depicted-sarcasm, piquant allusion, pathos and passion, and descriptions of scenery, are strangely intermingled in the narrative. Wit, epigram, and the glitter of rhetorical amplification, occupy too much space; but the scene is constantly shifting, and the work possesses the truth and accuracy of a book of travels joined to those of a romance. The traveller, too, is a thorough man of the world, has a keen insight into human weaknesses and foibles, and de-ance, that even while the ship continued to cleave scribes his adventures and impressions without hypocrisy or reserve. The most powerful passages are those in which pathos is predominant-such as the scenes with Euphrosyne, whom Anastasius has basely violated-his sensations on revisiting Greece and the tomb of Helena-his reflections on witnessing the dead Araonoot soldier whom he had slain the horrors of the plague and famine-and, above all, the account of the death of Alexis, the child of Anastasius, and in whom were centred the only remains of his human affection, his love and hope. The gradual decay of this youth, and the intense anxiety and watchfulness of his father, constitute a scene of genuine grief and tenderness. We forget the craft and villany of Anastasius, thus humbled and prostrate. His wild gaiety and heartless jests, his degeneracy and sensualism, have passed away. They had palled upon himself, but one spring of pure affection remained to redeem his nature; and it is not without the strongest pity and kindred commiseration that we see the desperate adventurer reduced to loneliness and heartbroken despair. The scene is introduced by an account of his recovering his lost son in Egypt, and carrying him off to Eu

rope :

My cousin's letter had promised me a brilliant lot, and-what was better-my own pockets insured me a decent competence. The refinements of a European education should add every external elegance to my boy's innate excellence, and, having myself moderately enjoyed the good things of this world, while striving to deserve the better promised in the next, I should, ere my friends became tired of my dotage, resign my last breath in the arms of my child.

The blue sky seemed to smile upon my cheerful thoughts, and the green wave to murmur approbation of my plan. Almighty God! what was there in it so heinous to deserve that an inexorable fate should cast it to the winds?

In the midst of my dream of happiness, my eye fell upon the darling object in which centred all its sweets. Insensibly my child's prattle had diminished, and had at last subsided in an unusual silence. I thought he looked pale; his eyes seemed heavy, and his lips felt parched. The rose, that every morn

the waves like an arrow, I fancied it lay like a log when, as if in resentment of my unjust complaints, upon the main. How, then, did my pangs increase the breeze, dying away, really left our keel motionless on the waters! My anguish baffled all expression.

In truth I do not know how I preserved my senses, except from the need I stood in of their aid: for, while we lay cursed with absolute immobility, and the sun ever found us, on rising, in the same place where it had left us on setting, my child--my darling child-was every instant growing worse, and sinking apace under the pressure of illness. To the deep and flushing glow of a complexion far exceeding in its transient brilliancy even the brightest hues of health, had succeeded a settled, unchanging, deadly paleness. His eye, whose round full orb was wont to beam upon me with mild but fervent radiance, now dim and wandering, for the most part remained half closed; and when, roused by my address, the idol of my heart strove to raise his languid look, and to meet the fearful inquiries of mine, he only showed all the former fire of his countenance extinct. In the more violent bursts, indeed, of his unceasing delirium, his wasting features sometimes acquired a fresh but sad expression. He would then start up, and with his feeble hands clasped together, and big tears rolling down his faded cheeks, beg in the most moving terms to be restored to his home: but mostly he seemed absorbed in inward musings, and, no longer taking note of the passing hour, he frequently during the course of the day moved his pallid lips, as if repeating to himself the little prayer which he had been wont to say at bed-time and at rising, and the blessings I had taught him to add, addressed to his mother on behalf of his father. If-wretched to see him thus, and doubly agonized to think that I alone had been the cause I burst out into tears which I strove to hide, his perception of outward objects seemed all at once for a moment to return. He asked me whether I was hurt, and would lament that, young and feeble as he was, he could not yet nurse me as he wished; but promised me better care when he should grow stronger.

In this way hour after hour and day after day rolled on, without any progress in our voyage, while all I had left to do was to sit doubled over my child's

80

[graphic]
[merged small][merged small][graphic]

A.

Washington Irving's Cottage.

issued from his fertile pen-Astoria, a narrative of passion for cleanliness was the leading principle in American adventure; A Tour in the Prairies; Abbots- domestic economy, and the universal test of an able ford and Newstead, &c. The principal works of Mr housewife; a character which formed the utmost amIrving are his 'Sketch-Book' and Bracebridge bition of our unenlightened grandmothers. The front Hall; these are the corner-stones of his fame, and door was never opened except on marriages, funerals, likely to be durable. In all his writings, however, New-Year's days, the festival of St Nicholas, or some there are passages evincing fine taste, gentle affec- such great occasion. It was ornamented with a gortions, and graceful description. His sentiments are geous brass knocker curiously wrought, sometimes manly and generous, and his pathetic and humorous into the device of a dog, and sometimes of a lion's sketches are in general prevented from degenerating head; and was daily burnished with such religious into extravagance by practical good sense and a cor- zeal, that it was ofttimes worn out by the very prerect judgment. Modern authors have too much cautions taken for its preservation. The whole house neglected the mere matter of style; but the success was constantly in a state of inundation, under the disof Mr Irving should convince the careless that the cipline of mops, and brooms, and scrubbing-brushes; graces of composition, when employed even on paint- and the good housewives of those days were a kind of ings of domestic life and the quiet scenes of nature, amphibious animal, delighting exceedingly to be dabcan still charm as in the days of Addison, Gold-bling in water, insomuch that a historian of the day

smith, and Mackenzie.

[Manners in New York in the Dutch Times.] The houses of the higher class were generally constructed of wood, excepting the gable end, which was of small black and yellow Dutch bricks, and always faced on the street; as our ancestors, like their descendants, were very much given to outward show, and were noted for putting the best leg foremost. The house was always furnished with abundance of large doors and small windows on every floor; the date of its erection was curiously designated by iron figures on the front; and on the top of the roof was perched a fierce little weathercock, to let the family into the important secret which way the wind blew. These, like the weathercocks on the tops of our steeples, pointed so many different ways, that every man could have a wind to his mind; and you would have thought old olus had set all his bags of wind adrift, pellmell, to gambol about this windy metropolis; the most stanch and loyal citizens, however, always went according to the weathercock on the top of the governor's house, which was certainly the most correct, as he had a trusty servant employed every morning to climb up and point it whichever way the wind blew.

In those good days of simplicity and sunshine, a

gravely tells us, that many of his townswomen grew to have webbed fingers like unto a duck; and some of them, he had little doubt, could the matter be examined into, would be found to have the tails of mermaids; but this I look upon to be a mere sport of fancy, or, what is worse, a wilful misrepresentation.

The grand parlour was the sanctum sanctorum, where the passion for cleaning was indulged without control. In this sacred apartment no one was permitted to enter excepting the mistress and her confidential maid, who visited it once a-week for the purpose of giving it a thorough cleaning, and putting things to rights, always taking the precaution of leaving their shoes at the door, and entering devoutly on their stocking feet. After scrubbing the floor, sprinkling it with fine white sand, which was curiously stroked into angles, and curves, and rhomboids, with a broom, after washing the windows, rubbing and polishing the furniture, and putting a new bunch of evergreens in the fireplace, the window-shutters were again closed to keep out the flies, and the room carefully locked up until the revolution of time brought round the weekly cleaning day.

As to the family, they always entered in at the gate, and most generally lived in the kitchen. To have seen a numerous household assembled around the fire, one would have imagined that he was tran

sported back to those happy days of primeval simplicity which float before our imaginations like golden visions. The fireplaces were of a truly patriarchal magnitude, where the whole family, old and young, master and servant, black and white, nay, even the very cat and dog, enjoyed a community of privilege, and had each a prescriptive right to a corner. Here the old burgher would sit in perfect silence, puffing his pipe, looking in the fire with half-shut eyes, and thinking of nothing for hours together; the goede vrouw on the opposite side would employ herself diligently in spinning her yarn or knitting stockings. The young folks would crowd around the hearth, listening with breathless attention to some old crone of a negro who was the oracle of the family, and who, perched like a raven in a corner of the chimney, would croak forth for a long winter afternoon a string of incredible stories about New England witches, grisly ghosts, horses without heads, and hairbreadth escapes, and bloody encounters among the Indians.

In those happy days a well-regulated family always rose with the dawn, dined at eleven, and went to bed at sundown. Dinner was invariably a private meal, and the fat old burghers showed incontestable symptoms of disapprobation and uneasiness at being surprised by a visit from a neighbour on such occasions. But though our worthy ancestors were thus singularly averse to giving dinners, yet they kept up the social bonds of intimacy by occasional banquetings, called tea-parties.

As this is the first introduction of those delectable orgies, which have since become so fashionable in this city, I am conscious my fair readers will be very curious to receive information on the subject. Sorry am I that there will be but little in my description calculated to excite their admiration. I can neither delight them with accounts of suffocating crowds, nor brilliant drawing-rooms, nor towering feathers, nor sparkling diamonds, nor immeasurable trains. I can detail no choice anecdotes of scandal, for in those primitive times the simple folk were either too stupid or too good-natured to pull each other's characters to pieces; nor can I furnish any whimsical anecdotes of brag; how one lady cheated, or another bounced into a passion; for as yet there was no junto of dulcet old dowagers who met to win each other's money and lose their own tempers at a card-table.

These fashionable parties were generally confined to the higher classes, or noblesse-that is to say, such as kept their own cows and drove their own wagons. The company commonly assembled at three o'clock, and went away about six, unless it was in winter time, when the fashionable hours were a little earlier, that the ladies might get home before dark. I do not find that they ever treated their company to iced creams, jellies, or syllabubs, or regaled them with musty almonds, mouldy raisins, or sour oranges, as is often done in the present age of refinement. Our ancestors were fond of more sturdy substantial fare. The tea-table was crowned with a huge earthen dish well stored with slices of fat pork, fried brown, cut up into morsels, and swimming in gravy. The company being seated around the genial board, and each furnished with a fork, evinced their dexterity in launching at the fattest pieces of this mighty dish, in much the same manner as sailors harpoon porpoises at sea, or our Indians spear salmon in the lakes. Sometimes the table was graced with immense apple-pies, or saucers full of preserved peaches and pears; but it was always sure to boast of an enormous dish of balls of sweetened dough fried in hog's fat, and called dough-nuts, or oly koeks; a delicious kind of cake, at present scarce known in this city, excepting in genuine Dutch families.

herds and shepherdesses, tending pigs with boats sailing in the air, and houses built in the clouds, and sundry other ingenious Dutch fantasies. The beaux distinguished themselves by their adroitness in replenishing this pot from a huge copper tea-kettle, which would have made the pigmy macaronies of these degenerate days sweat merely to look at it. To sweeten the beverage, a lump of sugar was laid beside each cup, and the company alternately nibbled and sipped with great decorum, until an improvement was introduced by a shrewd and economic old lady, which was, to suspend a large lump directly over the tea-table by a string from the ceiling, so that it could be swung from mouth to mouth-an ingenious expedient, which is still kept up by some families in Albany, but which prevails, without exception, in Communipaw, Bergen, Flat-Bush, and all our uncontaminated Dutch villages.

At these primitive tea-parties the utmost propriety and dignity of deportment prevailed. No flirting nor coquetting-no gambling of old ladies, nor hoyden chattering and romping of young ones-no self-satisfied struttings of wealthy gentlemen with their brains in their pockets; nor amusing conceits and monkey divertisements of smart young gentlemen with no brains at all. On the contrary, the young ladies seated themselves demurely in their rush-bottomed chairs, and knit their own woollen stockings; nor ever opened their lips, excepting to say yah Mynheer or yah ya Vrouw to any question that was asked them; behaving in all things like decent well-educated damsels. As to the gentlemen, each of them tranquilly smoked his pipe, and seemed lost in contemplation of the blue and white tiles with which the fireplaces were decorated; wherein sundry passages of Scripture were piously portrayed: Tobit and his dog figured to great advantage; Haman swung conspicuously on his gibbet; and Jonah appeared most manfully bouncing out of the whale, like Harlequin through a barrel of fire.

The parties broke up without noise and without confusion. They were carried home by their own carriages-that is to say, by the vehicles nature had provided them, excepting such of the wealthy as could afford to keep a wagon. The gentlemen gallantly attended their fair ones to their respective abodes, and took leave of them with a hearty smack at the door; which, as it was an established piece of etiquette, done in perfect simplicity and honesty of heart, occasioned no scandal at that time, nor should it at the present-if our great-grandfathers approved of the custom, it would argue a great want of reverence in their descendants to say a word against it.

[A Rainy Sunday in an Inn.]

[From 'Bracebridge Hall."]

It was a rainy Sunday in the gloomy month of November. I had been detained in the course of a journey by a slight indisposition, from which I was recovering; but I was still feverish, and was obliged to keep within doors all day, in an inn of the small town of Derby. A wet Sunday in a country inn! whoever has had the luck to experience one, can alone judge of my situation. The rain pattered against the casements, the bells tolled for church with a melancholy sound. I went to the windows in quest of something to amuse the eye, but it seemed as if I had been placed completely out of the reach of all amusement. The windows of my bed-room looked out among tiled roofs and stacks of chimneys, while those of my sitting-room commanded a full view of the stable-yard. I know of nothing more calculated to make a man sick of this world than a stable-yard on a rainy day. The tea was served out of a majestic delft tea-pot The place was littered with wet straw that had been ornamented with paintings of fat little Dutch shep-kicked about by travellers and stable-boys. In one

corner was a stagnant pool of water surrounding an island of muck; there were several half-drowned fowls crowded together under a cart, among which was a miserable crest-fallen cock, drenched out of all life and spirit, his drooping tail matted, as it were, into a single feather, along which the water trickled from his back; near the cart was a half-dozing cow chewing the cud, and standing patiently to be rained on, with wreaths of vapour rising from her reeking hide; a wall-eyed horse, tired of the loneliness of the stable, was poking his spectral head out of a window, with the rain dripping on it from the eaves; an unhappy cur, chained to a dog-house hard by, uttered something every now and then between a bark and a yelp; a drab of a kitchen wench tramped backwards and forwards through the yard in pattens, looking as sulky as the weather itself; everything, in short, was comfortless and forlorn, excepting a crew of hard-drinking ducks, assembled like boon companions round a puddle, and making a riotous noise over their liquor. I sauntered to the window, and stood gazing at the people picking their way to church, with petticoats hoisted mid-leg high, and dripping umbrellas. The bells ceased to toll, and the streets became silent. I then amused myself with watching the daughters of a tradesman opposite, who, being confined to the house for fear of wetting their Sunday finery, played off their charms at the front windows, to fascinate the chance tenants of the inn. They at length were summoned away by a vigilant vinegar-faced mother, and I had nothing further from without to amuse me. The day continued lowering and gloomy; the slovenly, ragged, spongy clouds drifted heavily along; there was no variety even in the rain; it was one dull, continued, monotonous patter, patter, patter, excepting that now and then I was enlivened by the idea of a brisk shower, from the rattling of the drops upon a passing umbrella. It was quite refreshing (if I may be allowed a hackneyed phrase of the day) when in the course of the morning a horn blew, and a stage-coach whirled through the street, with outside passengers stuck all over it, cowering under cotton umbrellas, and seethed together, and reeking with the steams of wet box-coats and upper Benjamins. The sound brought out from their lurking-places a crew of vagabond boys and vagabond dogs, and the carroty-headed hostler, and that nondescript animal yclept Boots, and all the other vagabond race that infest the purlieus of an inn; but the bustle was transient; the coach again whirled on its way; and boy and dog, and hostler and Boots, all slunk back again to their holes; the street again became silent, and the rain continued

JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART.

black, and cabbaged at the end, and dimmed the
little light that remained in the chamber. The gloom
shapeless and almost spectral box-coats of departed
that now prevailed was contagious. Around hung the
travellers, long since buried in deep sleep. I only
heard the ticking of the clock, with the deep-drawn
breathings of the sleeping toper, and the drippings of
the rain-drop, drop, drop-from the eaves
of the
house.

JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART.

illustrious father-in-law, Sir Walter Scott, and editor JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART, the biographer of his of the Quarterly Review, is author of four novelsValerius, a Roman Story, three volumes, 1821; Adam Blair, one volume, 1822; Reginald Dalton, three volumes, 1823; and Matthew Wald, one volume,

1824.

best. It is a tale of the times of Trajan, when that The first of Mr Lockhart's productions is the emperor, disregarding the example of his predecessor Nerva, persecuted the small Christian community which had found shelter in the bosom of the Eternal City, and were calmly pursuing their pure worship and peaceful lives. As the blood of the martyr is the seed of the church, the Christians were extending their numbers, though condemned to meet in honours and ambition of the world. The hero of the caves and sepulchres, and forced to renounce the period. He is the son of a Roman commander, who tale visits Rome for the first time at this interesting had settled in Britain, and is summoned to Rome after the death of his parents to take possession of an estate to which, as the heir of the Valerii, he had become entitled. His kinsman Licinius, an eminent lawyer, receives him with affection, and introduces presented with sketches of the domestic society of him to his friends and acquaintances. We are thus the Romans, with pictures of the Forum, the baths, temples, and other marvels of Rome, which are At the villa of Capito, an Epicurean philosopher, briefly, but distinctly and picturesquely delineated. Valerius meets with the two fair nieces of his host, Sempronia and Athanasia. The latter is the heroine of the tale-a pure intellectual creation, in which we see united the Roman grace and feminine sweetness of the patrician lady, with the high-souled fortitude and elevation of the Christian. Athanasia has embraced the new faith, and is in close communion with its professors. Her charms overcome Valerius, who soon obtains possession of her secret; and after various adventures, in which he succours the perseThe evening gradually wore away. The travellers cuted maiden, and aids in her wonderful escape, he read the papers two or three times over. Some drew is at length admitted by baptism into the fellowship round the fire, and told long stories about their of the Christians, and embarks with Athanasia for horses, about their adventures, their overturns, and Britain. The materials of such a story are necesbreakings-down. They discussed the credits of diffe- sarily romantic and impressive. The taste and rent merchants and different inns, and the two wags splendour of ancient Rome present a fertile field for told several choice anecdotes of pretty chambermaids the imagination, and the transition from these to and kind landladies. All this passed as they were the sufferings, the devotion, and dangers of the quietly taking what they called their nightcaps; that early Christians, calls up a different and not less is to say, strong glasses of brandy and water or striking train of feelings and associations. In his sugar, or some other mixture of the kind; after which serious and pathetic scenes the author is most sucthey one after another rang for Boots and the cham-cessful. In the low humour of his attendants, the bermaid, and walked off to bed in old shoes cut down into marvellously uncomfortable slippers. There was only one man left-a short-legged, long-bodied, plethoric fellow, with a very large, sandy head. He sat by himself with a glass of port wine negus and a spoon, sipping and stirring, and meditating and sipping, until nothing was left but the spoon. He gradually fell asleep bolt upright in his chair, with the empty glass standing before him; and the candle seemed to fall asleep too, for the wick grew long and

to rain on.

[ocr errors]

vulgar display of the rich widow, and the servile pedantry of the stoic tutor, there appear to us many sins against good taste. Some of the satirical touches and phrases are also at variance with the purity and elegance of the general strain of the story, and with the consummate art with which the author has wrought up his situations of a tragic and lofty nature, where we are borne along by a deep and steady feeling of refined pleasure, interest, and admiration. One of the most striking scenes in the novel is a

« ZurückWeiter »