I have a favour to ask of you. My desire is this: I would fain see a
stream from thy Hippocrene flowing through the pages of the _Table
Book_. A short article on the old Turk, who used to vend rhubarb in the
City, I greatly desiderate. Methinks you would handle the subject
delightfully. They tell us he is gone----
We have not seen him for some time past--Is he really dead? Must we
hereafter speak of him only in the past tense? You are said to have
divers strange items in your brain about him--Vent them I beseech you.
Poor Mummy!--How many hours hath he dreamt away on the sunny side of
Cheap, with an opium cud in his cheek, mutely proffering his drug to the
way-farers! That deep-toned bell above him, doubtless, hath often
brought to his recollection the loud Allah-il-Allahs to which he
listened heretofore in his fatherland--the city of minaret and mosque,
old Constantinople. Will he never again be greeted by the nodding
steeple of Bow?--Perhaps that ancient beldame, with her threatening head
and loud tongue, at length effrayed the sallow being out of existence.
Hath his soul, in truth, echapped from that swarthy cutaneous case of
which it was so long a tenant? Hath he glode over that gossamer bridge
which leads to the paradise of the prophet of Mecca? Doth he pursue his
old calling among the faithful? Are the blue-eyed beauties (those living
diamonds) who hang about the neck of Mahomet ever qualmish? Did the
immortal Houris lack rhubarb?
Prithee teach us to know more than we do of this Eastern mystery! Have
some of the ministers of the old Magi eloped with him? Was he in truth a
Turk? We have heard suspicions cast upon the authenticity of his
complexion--was its tawniness a forgery? Oh! for a _quo warranto_ to
show by what authority he wore a turban! Was there any hypocrisy in his
sad brow?--Poor Mummy!
The editor of the _Table Book_ ought to perpetuate his features. He was
part of the living furniture of the city--Have not our grandfathers seen
him?
The tithe of a page from thy pen on this subject, surmounted by “a true
portraicture & effigies,” would be a treat to me and many more. If thou
art stil ELIA--if thou art yet that gentle creature who has
immortalized his predilection for the sow’s baby--roasted without
sage--this boon wilt thou not deny me. Take the matter upon thee
speedily.--Wilt thou not endorse thy Pegasus with this pleasant fardel?
An’ thou wilt not I shall be malicious and wish thee some trifling evil:
to wit--by way of revenge for the appetite which thou hast created among
the reading public for the infant progeny--the rising generation of
swine--I will wish that some of the old demoniac leaven may rise up
against thee in the modern pigs:--that thy sleep may be vexed with
swinish visions; that a hog in armour, or a bashaw of a boar of three
tails, may be thy midnight familiar--thy incubus;--that matronly sows
may howl after thee in thy walks for their immolated offspring;--that
Mab may tickle thee into fits “with a tithe-pig’s tail;”--that
wheresoever thou goest to finger cash for copyright, instead of being
paid in coin current, thou mayst be enforced to receive thy
_per-sheetage_ in guinea-pigs;--that thou mayst frequently dream thou
art sitting on a hedge-hog;--that even as Oberon’s Queen doated on the
translated Bottom, so may thy batchelorly brain doat upon an ideal image
of the swine-faced lady----
Finally, I will wish, that when next G. D. visits thee, he may, by
mistake, take away thy hat, and leave thee his own----
“Think of that Master Brook.”--
Yours ever,