respectable means; but, following wise pursuits foolishly, live in a
sort of intellectual limbo between the worlds of Wisdom and Folly. The
fashionable agriculturists are of this class: men who assume, as the
creed of their philosophical belief, a foolish saying of some not very
wise author, "That he who makes two blades of grass grow where only one
grew before, is the greatest benefactor to his species." With these
persons, the noblest employment of human intellect is to improve the
size of turnips and cabbages, and for this they lay aside all other
studies. "When my friends come to see me in the summer," said one of
these gentlemen, "I like to hear them complain that they have not been
able to sleep in their beds for heat, because then I know things are
growing out of doors." _Quicquid amat valde amat_, may truly be said of
the Englishman; his pursuit always becomes his passion; and, if great
follies are oftentimes committed in consequence of this ardour, it must
not be forgotten that it leads also to great actions, and to important
public benefits.
Of this class the breeders are the most remarkable, and least useful.
Their object is to improve the cattle of the country, for which purpose
they negotiate with the utmost anxiety the amours of their cows and
sheep. Such objects, exclusively pursued, tend little to improve either
the intellect or the manners:—these people will apply to a favourite
pig, or a Herefordshire bull, the same epithets of praise and
exclamations of delight, which a sculptor would bestow upon the Venus de
Medici, or the Apollo Belvidere. This passion is carried to an
incredible degree of folly: the great object of ambition is to make the
animal as fat as possible, by which means it is diseased and miserable
while it lives, and of no use to any but the tallow-chandler when dead.
At this very time there is a man in London belonging to a fat ox, who
has received more money for having fattened this ox than Newton obtained
for all his discoveries, or Shakspeare for all his works. Crowds go to
see the monster, which is a shapeless mass of living fat. A picture has
been painted both of man and beast, a print engraved from it in order
that the one may be immortalized as the fattest ox that ever was seen,
and the other, as the man that fed him to that size; and two thousand
persons have subscribed for this at a guinea each. A fat pig has been
set up against him, which, I know not why, does not seem to take. The
pig is acknowledged to be a pig of great merit, but he is in a manner
neglected, and his man complains of the want of taste in the public.
To end the list of fashions, what think you of philosophy in fashion?
You must know that though the wise men of old could find out no royal
road to the mathematics, in England they have been more ingenious, and
have made many short cuts to philosophy for the accommodation of ladies
and gentlemen. The arts and sciences are now taught in lectures to
fashionable audiences of both sexes; and there is a Royal Institution
for this purpose, where some of the most scientific men in the kingdom
are thus unworthily employed. I went there one morning with J. and his
wife,—whom you are not to suspect of going for any other purpose than to
see the place. Part of the men were taking snuff to keep their eyes
open, others more honestly asleep, while the ladies were all upon the
watch, and some score of them had their tablet and pencils, busily
noting down what they heard, as topics for the next conversation party.
"Oh!" said J. when he came out, in a tone which made it half groan half
interjection, "the days of tapestry hangings and worked chair-bottoms
were better days than these!—I will go and buy for Harriet the Whole
Duty of Woman, containing the complete Art of Cookery."
But even oxygen and hydrogen are not subjects sufficiently elevated for
all. Mind and matter, free will and necessity, are also fashionable
topics of conversation; and you shall hear the origin of ideas
explained, the nature of volition elucidated, and the extent of space
and the duration of time discussed over a tea-table with admirable
volubility. Nay, it is well if one of these orators does not
triumphantly show you that there is nothing but misery in the world,
prove that you must either limit the power of God or the goodness, and
then modestly leave you to determine which. Another effect this of the
general passion for distinction: the easiest way of obtaining access
into literary society, and getting that kind of notoriety, is by
professing to be a metaphysician, because of such metaphysics a man may
get as much in half an hour as in his whole life.
At present the English philosophers and politicians, both male and
female, are in a state of great alarm. It has been discovered that the
world is over-peopled, and that it always must be so, from an error in
the constitution of nature; that the law which says "Increase and
multiply," was given without sufficient consideration; in short, that He
who made the world does not know how to manage it properly, and
therefore there are serious thoughts of requesting the English
Parliament to take the business out of his hands.
[26] Full of affected graces, and a master sufficiently profound of the
important inanities, the nothings of the fine world; and of that
sweetest art so eloquent, which can talk so long and say nothing; with
traits of malice, mirthful at another's expense: always in his mouth
that decisive tone, that amiable insolence, which, with equal freedom at
a glance, praises or condemns by wholesale.—TR.
[27] It is that which most approaches to virtue, which neither
stupifies, nor degrades the understanding, but, on the contrary,
exercises it and gives agility, and few who play at it have the gout.—TR.
LETTER LXXII.
_Westminster Abbey on Fire.—Frequency of Fires in England.—Means
devised for preventing and for extinguishing them; but not in Use._
I was fortunate enough this morning to witness a very grand and
extraordinary sight. As D. and I were walking towards the west end of
the town, we met an acquaintance who told us that Westminster Abbey was
on fire. We lost no time in going to the spot; the roof was just smoking
sufficiently to show us that the intelligence was true, but that the
building was no longer in danger.
The crowd which had collected was by no means so great as we had
expected.—Soldiers were placed at the doors to keep out idle intruders,
and admit such only as might properly be admitted. The sight when we
entered was truly striking. Engines were playing in the church, and the
long leathern pipes which conveyed the water stretched along the
pavement. The roof at the joint of the cross, immediately over the
choir, had fallen in, and the huge timbers lay black and smoking, in
heaps, upon the pews which they had crushed. A pulpit, of fine
workmanship, stood close by unhurt. Smaller fragments, and sparks of
fire, were from time to time falling down; and the water which was still
spouted up in streams, fell in showers, and hissed upon the hot ruins
below. We soon perceived that no real injury was done to the church,
though considerable damage was inflicted upon the funds of the
chapter.—The part which was thus consumed had not been finished like the
rest of the building; instead of masonry, it had been from some paltry
motives of parsimony made of wood, and lined on the inside with painted
canvas, in a miserable style. All this patchwork was now destroyed, as
it deserved to be; and the light coming in from above, slanted on the
fretted roof, the arches and pillars, which stood unhurt and perfectly
secure.
The Westminster boys were working an engine in the cloisters with hearty
goodwill. D., who had been educated at Westminster himself, said they
were glad at the fire; indeed, he confessed that he did not himself look
without satisfaction upon the ruins of the pew, where he had formerly
been compelled to sit so many hours in the cold.
The pavement in that part of the abbey which is called Poet's Corner
sunk considerably in consequence of the water, the earth in the graves
probably sinking when wet: so much so that the stones must be taken up
and laid anew. What an opportunity of examining the skulls of so many
celebrated men! If professor Blumenbach were but an Englishman, or if
the dean and chapter were physiologists, these relics would now be
collected and preserved.
One of the graves would exhibit curious contents, if any such curiosity
should be indulged. An old countess, who died not long since after a
very singular life, gave orders in her will that she should be buried in
Poets' Corner, as near as possible to Shakspeare's monument, dressed in
her wedding suit, and with a speaking trumpet in her coffin. These
orders her executors were obliged to perform to the letter. Accordingly,
a grave was solicited and granted for a due consideration in this holy
ground; the old lady was equipped in her bridal array, packed up for the
journey, and ready to set off, when it was discovered that the
speaking-trumpet had been forgotten. What was to be done? This was in a
remote part of the country; there was not such a thing to be purchased
within a dozen leagues, and the will was not to be trifled with. Luckily
some person there present recollected that a gentleman in the
neighbourhood had a speaking-trumpet, which had been left him by a
sea-captain as a memorial of an old friend, and which for that reason he
particularly valued. A messenger was immediately dispatched to borrow
this; of course he was careful not to say for what it was wanted: as
soon as it was brought, it was put by her side in the coffin, the coffin
was soldered down, off posted the funeral for London, and if the
rightful owner does not look after his trumpet now, he will have no
other opportunity till he hears the old lady flourish upon it at the
resurrection, for which purpose it is to be presumed, she chose to have
it at hand.
This mischief, which might have been in its consequences so deplorable,
was occasioned by the carelessness of some plumbers, who were at work
upon the roof. Old St Paul's was destroyed just in this way: it is
surprising how many accidents of this kind have happened from the same
cause, and provoking to think, that so great and venerable a work of
piety and human genius, and human power, should have been so near
destruction by the stupid negligence of a common labourer! They burn in
the hand for accidental homicide in this country;[28] a little
application of hot iron for accidental church-burning would be a
punishment in kind for a neglect of duty, so dangerous, that it ought
not to be unpunished. When carelessness endangers the life or welfare of
another, it ought to be regarded as a crime.
A fire is the only ordinary spectacle in this great metropolis which I
have not seen; for this cannot be called such, though in its effect
finer than any conflagration.—Fires are so frequently happening, that I
may consider myself as unfortunate. The traveller who is at London
without seeing a fire, and at Naples without witnessing an eruption of
Vesuvius, is out of luck.
The danger of fire is one to which the Londoners are more exposed than
any people in the world, except, perhaps, the inhabitants of
Constantinople. Their earth-coal must be considered as one main
cause—pieces of this are frequently exploded into the room. The
carelessness of servants is another; for nothing but candles are used to
give light for domestic purposes, and accidents happen from a candle
which could not from a lamp. The accumulation of furniture in an English
house is so much fuel in readiness; all the floors are boarded, all the
bedsteads are of wood, all the beds have curtains. I have heard of a
gentleman who set the tail of his shirt on fire as he was stepping into
bed, the flames caught the curtains, and the house was consumed. You may
easily suppose this adventure obtained for him the name of The Comet.
Means have been devised for preventing fires, for extinguishing them,
and for escaping from them. David Hartley, son to a great English
philosopher of the same name, proposed to line every room with plates of
metal, and Lord Stanhope invented a kind of mortar for the same purpose.
Both methods have been tried with complete success; but they will never
be adopted unless a law be passed to compel the adoption. For houses in
London, and indeed in all large towns, are built for sale, and the
builder will not incur the expense of making them fire-proof, because,
if they are burnt, he is not the person who is to be burnt in them. And
if he who builds for himself in the country, were disposed to avail
himself of these inventions, should he have heard of them, the
difficulty of instructing labourers in the use of any thing which they
have not been used to, is such, that rather than attempt it, he submits
to the same hazard as his neighbours.
You would suppose, however, that there could be no objection to the use
of any means for extinguishing fires. Balls for this purpose were
invented by Mr Godfrey, son to the inventor of a famous quack-medicine;
but the son's fire-balls did not succeed so well as the father's
cordial.—Succeed, indeed, they did, in effecting what was intended; for,
when one of them was thrown into a room which had been filled with
combustibles and set on fire for the purpose of experiment, it exploded,
and instantly quenched it. But there was an objection to the use of
these balls which Mr Godfrey had not foreseen. It is a trade in England
to put out fires, and the English have a proverb that "All trades must
live;" which is so thoroughly admitted by all ranks and degrees, that if
the elixir of life were actually to be discovered, the furnishers of
funerals would present a petition to parliament, praying that it might
be prohibited, in consideration of the injury they must otherwise
sustain; and in all probability, parliament would permit their plea. The
continuance of the slave trade, in consideration of the injury which the
dealers in human flesh would sustain by its abolishment, would be a
precedent. The firemen made a conspiracy against Godfrey; and when he or
any of his friends attended at a fire, and mounted a ladder to throw the
balls in, the ladder was always thrown down; so that, as the life of
every person who attempted to use them was thus endangered, the thing
was given up.
The machine for escaping is a sort of iron basket, or chair, fixed in a
groove on the outside of the house. I have never seen one at any other
place than at the inventor's warehouse. The poet, Gray, was notoriously
fearful of fire, and kept a ladder of ropes in his bed-room. Some
mischievous young men at Cambridge knew this, and roused him from below,
in the middle of a dark night, with the cry of Fire! The staircase, they
said, was in flames. Up went his window, and down he came by his
rope-ladder, as fast as he could go, into a tub of water which they had
placed to receive him.
[28] Don Manuel confounds homicide and manslaughter.—TR.
LETTER LXXIII.
_Remarks on the English Language._
He who ventures to criticise a foreign language should bear in mind that
he is in danger of exposing his own ignorance. "What a vile language is
yours!" said a Frenchman to an Englishman;—"you have the same word for
three different things! There is ship, _un vaisseau_; ship (sheep)
_mouton_; and ship (cheap) _bon marché_."—Now these three words, so
happily instanced by Monsieur, are pronounced as differently as they are
spelt. As I see his folly, it will be less excusable should I commit the
same myself.
The English is rather a hissing than a harsh language, and perhaps this
was the characteristic to which Charles V. alluded, when he said it was
fit to speak to birds in. It has no gutturals like ours, no nasal twang
like the Portugueze and French; but the perpetual sibilance is very
grating. If the Rabbis have not discovered in what language the Serpent
tempted Eve, they need not look beyond the English; it has the true mark
of his enunciation. I think this characteristic of the language may be
accounted for by the character of the nation. They are an active busy
people, who like to get through what they are about with the least
possible delay, and if two syllables can be shortened into one it is so
much time saved. What we do with _Vmd._ they have done with half the
words in their language. They have squeezed the vowel out of their
genitives and plurals, and compressed dissyllables into monosyllables.
The French do the same kind of thing in a worse way; they in speaking
leave half of every word behind them in a hurry; the English pack up
theirs close, and hasten on with the whole.
It is a concise language, though the grievous want of inflections
necessitates a perpetual use of auxiliaries. It would be difficult to
fill eight lines of English, adhering closely to the sense, with the
translation of an octave stanza. Their words are shorter; and though in
many cases they must use two and sometimes three, where we need but one,
still if the same meaning requires more words, it is contained in fewer
syllables, and costs less breath. Weight for weight, a pound of
_garvanzos_[29] will lie in half the compass of a pound of chesnuts.
Frenchmen always pronounce English ill; Germans, better; it is easier
for a Spaniard than for either. The _th_, or theta, is their shibboleth;
our _z_ has so nearly the same sound that we find little or no
difficulty in acquiring it. In fact, the pronunciation would not be
difficult if it were not capricious; but the exceptions to any general
rule are so numerous, that years and years of practice are hardly
sufficient to acquire them. Neither is the pronunciation of the same
word alike at all times, for it sometimes becomes the fashion to change
the accent. The theatre gives the law in these cases. What can have been
the cause of this preposterous and troublesome irregularity is beyond my
knowledge. They acknowledge the defect, and many schemes have been
devised by speculative writers for improving the orthography, and
assimilating it to the oral tongue: but they have all so disfigured the
appearance of the language, and so destroyed all visible traces of
etymology, that they have only excited ridicule, and have deserved
nothing better.
It is difficult to acquire, yet far less so than the German and its
nearer dialects; the syntax is less involved, and the proportion of
Latin words far greater. Dr Johnson, their lexicographer, and the most
famous of all their late writers, introduced a great number of
sesquipedalian Latinisms, like our Latinists of the seventeenth century.
The ladies complain of this, and certainly it was done in a false
taste,—but it facilitates a foreigner's progress. I find Johnson for
this very reason the easiest English author; his long words are always
good stepping-stones, on which I get sure footing.
If the size of his dictionary, which is the best and largest, may be
regarded as a criterion, the language is not copious. We must not
however forget that dictionaries profess to give only the written
language, and that hundreds and thousands of words, either preserved by
the peasantry in remote districts, or created by the daily wants and
improvements of society, by ignorance or ingenuity, by whim or by wit,
never find their way into books, though they become sterling currency.
But that it is not copious may be proved by a few general remarks. The
verb and substantive are often the same; they have few diminutives and
no augmentatives; and their derivatives are few. You know how many we
have from _agua_; the English have only one from _water_, which is the
adjective _watery_; and to express the meaning of ours, they either use
the simple verb in different senses, or form some composite in the
clumsy Dutch way of sticking two words together; _agua_, water;
_aguaza_, water; _aguar_, to water; _hazer aguada_, to water;
_aguadero_, a water-man; _aguaducho_, a water-pipe; _aguado_, a
water-drinker, &c. &c. And yet, notwithstanding these deficiencies, they
tell me it is truly a rich language. Corinthian brass would not be an
unapt emblem for it,—materials base and precious melted down into a
compound still precious, though debased.
They have one name for an animal in English, and another for its
flesh;—for instance, cow-flesh is called beef; that of the sheep,
mutton; that of the pig, pork. The first is of Saxon, the latter of
French origin; and this seems to prove that meat cannot have been the
food of the poor in former times. The cookery books retain a technical
language from the days when carving was a science, and instruct the
reader to _cut up_ a turkey, to _rear_ a goose, to _wing_ a partridge,
to _thigh_ a woodcock, to _unbrace_ a duck, to _unlace_ a rabbit, to
_allay_ a pheasant, to _display_ a crane, to _dismember_ a hern, and to
_lift_ a swan.
Their early writers are intelligible to none but the learned, whereas a
child can understand the language of the Partidas, though a century
anterior to the oldest English work. This late improvement is easily
explained by their history: they were a conquered people: the languages
of the lord and the subject were different; and it was some ages before
that of the people was introduced at court, and into the law
proceedings, and that not till it had become so amalgamated with the
Norman French, as in fact to be no longer Saxon. We, on the contrary,
though we lost the greater part of our country, never lost our
liberty—nor our mother tongue. What Arabic we have we took from our
slaves, not our masters.
I can discover, but not discriminate, provincial intonations, and
sometimes provincial accentuation; but the peculiar words, or phrases,
or modes of speech which characterize the different parts of the
country, a foreigner cannot perceive. The only written dialect is the
Scotch. It differs far more from English than Portugueze from Castilian,
nearly as much as the Catalan, though the articles and auxiliars are the
same. Very many words are radically different, still more so differently
pronounced as to retain no distinguishable similarity; and as this
difference is not systematic, it is the more difficult to acquire. No
Englishman reads Scotch with fluency, unless he has long resided in the
country—I have looked into the poems of Burns, which are very famous,
and found them almost wholly unintelligible; a new dictionary and new
grammar were wanted, and on enquiring for such I found that none were in
existence.
The English had no good prose writers till the commencement of the last
century, indeed with a very few exceptions till the present reign; but
no book now can meet with any success unless it be written in a good
style. Their rhymed poetry is less sonorous, less euphonous, less
varied, than ours; their blank verse, on the other hand, infinitely more
rhythmical than the _verso suelto_. But their language is incapable of
any thing between the two; they have no _asonantes_, nor would the
English ear be delicate enough to feel them. In printing poetry they
always begin the line with a capital letter, whether the sentence
requires it or not: this, which is the custom with all nations except
our own, though at the expense of all propriety, certainly gives a sort
of architectural uniformity to the page. No mark of interrogation or
admiration is ever prefixed; this they might advantageously borrow from
us. A remarkable peculiarity is, that they always write the personal
pronoun I with a capital letter. May we not consider this great I as an
unintended proof how much an Englishman thinks of his own consequence?
[29] A species of lupin used as food.—TR.
LETTER LXXIV.
_Departure from London.—West Kennet.—Use of the Words Horse and
Dog.—Bath.—Ralph Allen.—The Parades.—Beau Nash.—Turnspits._
Sept. 16.
The last day of my abode in London was the most painful of my life. To
part from dear friends, even for a transitory absence, is among the
evils of life; but to leave them with a certainty of never meeting
again, was a grief which I had never till now endured. Sixteen months
had I been domesticated with J., as if I had been a brother of the
family. When the children, as they went to bed last night, came to kiss
me for the last time, I wished I had never seen them, and all night I
remained wakeful—not in that state of feverish startlishness which the
expectation of an early call occasions, but in melancholy thoughts and
unavailing regret, which all the recollections of my own country, and my
father's house, could not dissipate. Never shall I remember my friends
in England without gratitude and love.