ill-fated offspring of a foolish father; miscellaneous collection of
occasionals and fugitives, longer or shorter, as the army of Bombastes.
Poetical as in verity I must confess to have been, (using the word
"poetical" as most men use it, and the words "have been" in the sense of
Troy's existence,) there must have lingered in me, even at that
hallucinating period, some little remnant of prosaic wisdom; for it is
now long since that I consigned to the most voracious of elements all
the more love-sick rhythmicals, and all the more hateful satiricals.
Now, I will maintain that act of incremation to be one of true heroism,
nearly equal to the judgment of Brutus; nor less is it matter of
righteous boasting to have immolated (warned by Charles Lamb's ghost)
divers albuminous preparations, which to have to do, were, Clio knows,
little pleasure, and to have done, we all know, as little praise. Such
light follies are like skeins of cotton, or adjectives, or babies, unfit
to stand alone; haply, well enough, times and things considered, but
totally unworthy to be dragged out of their contexts into the
imperishability of print; it is to take flies out of treacle, and embalm
them in clear amber. As to sonnets, what real author's mind will not,
if honest, confess to the almost daily recurrence of that symptom of his
disease? With mine, at least, they have increased, and are increasing;
yea, more--as a certain statesman suggested of Ireland's multitudinous
_pisantry_, or as tavern patriots declare of the power of the
crown--they ought to be diminished. Nevertheless, resolutely do I hope
that some of these at least are little worthy of the days of good Queen
Anne.
In matters of the sacred muse, lengthily as others have I trespassed
heretofore; the most protracted _fytte_, however, made a respectable
inroad on a new metrical version of the '_Psalms_,' attempting at any
rate closer accuracy from the Hebrew than Brady's, and juster rhymes
than Sternhold's: but this has since been better done by another bard.
On the whole budget of exploded poeticals is now legibly inscribed "to
be kept till called for," a period rather more indefinite than the
promise of a spendthrift's payment. Let them rest in peace, those
unfortunate poetics!
There are also in the bundle, if I rightly do remember me, sundry
metricals of the humorous sort, which may be considered as really
_waste-failures_ as any tainted hams that ever were yclept Westphalias.
For of all dreary and lugubrious perpetrations in print, nothing can be
more desolate than laboured witticism. A pun is a momentary spark dropt
upon the tinder-box of social intercourse; and to detach such a sentence
from its producing circumstances, is about as efficacious a method of
producing laughter, as the scintillatory flint and steel struck upon wet
grass would be of generating light. Few things are less digestible than
abortive efforts at the humorous; the stream of conversation instantly
freezes up; the disconcerted punster wears the look of his well-known
kinsman, the detected pickpocket; and a scribe, so mercilessly suicidal
as regards his better fame, deserves, when a plain blunt jury comes to
sit upon the body, to be found in mystical Latin, _felo de se_, or in
plain English "a fellow deceased."
"There shall come in the last days, scoffers;" those same last days in
which "many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased." It
is true that these phrases (quoted with the deepest reverence, though
found in lighter company) are forcibly taken from their context; but
still, the judgment of many wise among us will agree that they present a
remarkable coincidence: in this view of the case, and it is a most
serious one, the concurrent notoriety of humour having just arisen like
a phoenix from its ashes, of railroads and steamboats having partially
annihilated space, and of the strides which education, if not intellect,
has made upon the highroad of human improvement, assumes an importance
greater than the things themselves deserve. To a truly philosophic ken,
there is no such thing as a trifle; the ridiculous is but skin-deep,
papillae on the surface of society; cut a little deeper, you will find
the veins and arteries of wisdom. Therefore will a sober man not deride
the notion that comic almanacs, comic Latin grammars, comic hand-books
of sciences and arts, and the great prevalence of comicality in popular
views taken of life and of death, of incident and of character, of evil
and of good, are, in reality, signs of the times. These straws, so thick
upon the wind, and so injuriously mote-like to the visual organs, are
flying forward before a storm. As symptoms of changing nationality, and
of a disposition to make fun of all things ancient and honourable, and
wise, and mighty, and religious, they serve to evidence a state of the
universal mind degenerated and diseased. Still, let us not be too
severe; and, as to individual confessions, let not me play the
hypocrite. Like every thing else, good in its good use, and evil only in
abuse of its excesses, humour is capable of filling, and has filled, no
lightly-estimable part in the comedy of temporal happiness. What a good
thing it is to raise an innocent and cheerful laugh; to inoculate
moroseness with hearty merriment; to hunt away misbelieving care, if not
with better prayers, at the lowest with a pack of yelping cachinations;
to make pain forget his head-ache by the anodyne of mirth! Truly, humour
has its laudable and kindly uses: it is the mind's play-time after
office-drudgery--an easy recreation from thought, anxiety, or study.
Only when it usurps, or foolishly attempts to usurp, the office of more
than a temporary alleviation; when it affects to set up as an atheistic
panacea; when it professes to walk as an abiding companion, lighting you
on your way with injurious gleams (as that dreadful figure in Dante, who
lanterns his path by the glaring eyes of his own truncated head); and
when it ceases to become merely the casual scintillation, the flitting
_ignus fatuus_ of a summer evening--then only is wit to be condemned.
Often, for mine own poor part in this most mirthful age, have I had