Page:Ainsworth's Magazine - Volume 1.djvu/84

Shake your ears and eyes free from your mass of papers, and recollect your description to me of the two aspirants to fame whom you met at Paris, in Tony Johannot's company. The first, "à la mode de la jeune France, fier, brusque, eveillé, et tant soit peu fanfaron," bearded like the pard, and bitten with Victor Hugo and the romantic school, though holding Madame Dudevant's garbage, thank Heaven! in wholesome abomination. Remember the grave assertion which tickled your muscles, "Un ballet ne sauroit pas paroître ennuyeux, pourvu que la morale soit bonne, le genre heroique, et la metaphysique bien entendue."

"Wele y ma eich Dyn!" "Here, then, behold your man!" as Edward I. said to the Welsh chiefs, on the birth of his son in Caernarvon Castle, and claimed their allegiance to a Taffy born. By-the-bye, my fifteenth cousin, Llwyd Vychan, from whom I have stolen a ghostly legend for you, maintains, I think justly, that Ich Dien (or rather diene) ought to be Eich Dyn, and that our young Prince's motto is falsely worded, through some apocryphal legend of the King of Bohemia.

The Italian was, you said, an artist, poet, and musician, like Lover; and probably, too, a lover beyond his pretensions, as he harped on his asserted descent from Buondelmonti (the noble in whose murder originated the Guelph and Ghibelline feud), and snivelled for ten minutes about Tasso and Leonora d'Este. Query, Is not our good little Queen descended from the Ferrara blood? And why does she not, for the sake of her great-great-aunt, and public morals and observances, issue an order iu council against those eternal themes, Leonora's philandering, and the nasty Rimini story? That civil old person, Sua Santità, would, I have no doubt, confirm the edict by "a moto proprio," as he gets nothing by the exportation of these nuisances. However, if it be judged inexpedient to ruin the trade in Annuals for want of stock, and if in any future edition of your works, your stomach will stand making Poll Maggot Dantesque and Byronian, just give her a touch of Francesca di Rimini's nameless taint, and she will draw tears.

Probably you promised both of Tony's acquaintances copies of No. I. through him, or verbally; hence their hints on the subject. I recognise the identity of young Kerapferhausen's sturdy pot-hooks. He is the sou of an old friend, whom you will find mentioned, as well as Harry Seward, the elder, and myself (then two saucy Oxford boys), in Blackwood's number for September, 1819, describing the grousing symposium on the Braemar moors, where we were guests, cum multis aliis, of old Christopher's. The slang I disclaim; to the authorship of the song, which Harry, excited by mountain air and mountain dew, sung under Dr. Parr's very wig, as Whately's composition, I plead guilty; but not to taking a double first, for I had not then been up, and never even got into conic sections. And as to the rest of the hocus-que, pocus-que, jocus-que,

seasoned by Tickler's caustic quirks, Dr. Parr's unusual urbanity, and the poor dear Ettrick Shepherd's pungent naivete—is it not written in the annals of Christopher? the only man who laveth himself in the fountain of perpetual youth, while we, far his juniors, coax up our thin side-locks, and patronize large print.

The next year, while I was writing political squibs as "Old Tom of Oxford," Hal ran away from Christ Church to Gretna, and the Illustrissimus took a frau to comfort his mature period of life, as he wrote me word. The result, in the one case, is a clever young varlet, who tops me, his godfather, by an inch, and has given me leave to send you his letters from the Archipelago; in the other, a parvus lulus, of six feet five, the cock of Jena, whom I expect in my lion's den by about February. Not content with a promised introduction to you, he insisted on my sanction in addressing you as "lieber Wilhelm," by letter, and it seems "have been and done't nolus bolus," as our constable says in assault cases. As Hal, the younger, chooses to send him an English journal now and then, he must aid me to clap the giants' "zerschmeissende Faust" into a strait waistcoat on his arrival. I mark him in my list, as Claverhouse did Morton, "double dangerous," and just the lad, without due coercion, to do summary vengeance on the well-meaning critics, whose motives you respect too much to point out to them that they have laid the saddle on the wrong horse. They do not perceive that there was not a word in poor Jack to excite a single bad passion in the minds of those who could afford to read him, but rather to suggest, in the words of honest Baxter, the Puritan, when he saw a culprit in the condemned cart, "But for the grace of God, there goes Richard Baxter." We ought, in fact, never to say grace over a good dinner, sweetened by a good character among one's guests, without recollecting what want and evil education might have brought us to. The story might have rested quietly with Paul Clifford and fifty such things; but the cads of the penny press thought it worth pirating to your detriment, and Yates would lug it on the stage in the most attractive fashion; and let them bear the blame.

But what saith the deep-mouthed Theban, who knew the world better than most poets, save Shakspeare?