No. IV.
“Authors who acquire a reputation by pilfering all their
beauties from others, may be compared to Harlequin and his
snuff, which he collected by borrowing a pinch out of every
man’s box he could meet, and then retailed it under the
pompous title of ‘_tabác de mille fleurs_.’”
_Fitzosborne’s Letters._
“If the work cannot boast of a regular plan, (in
which respect, however, I do not think it altogether
indefensible,) it may yet boast that the reflections are
naturally suggested always by the preceding passage.”
_Cowper’s Letters._
_No est tan bravo il leon, como se pinta_--the lion is not so fierce
as his picture--says the Spanish proverb, and such will doubtless be
your exclamation, fair, gentle, indulgent, or judicious reader, (by
whichever title you may please to be addressed,) when you discover that
the heroes of the Coffee Club, invested by your scrutinizing sagacity
with so many fictitious attributes, whether of honor or of dishonor,
are in truth but cognate atoms with yourself in making up the mass of
our small and secluded community. Nor will your self-satisfaction be at
all enhanced, by the remembrance of the astute conjectures, ‘positive
certainties,’ ‘perfect convictions,’ and ‘confidential informations,’
which have afforded you matter of exultation for a season, but are, by
the revealment of the truth, shown to be unfounded, and if cherished
with vanity, ridiculous. Each, however, may soothe his chagrin, with
the assurance that no one was wiser than himself, and that the secret,
which baffled his endeavors, not even the talismanic power of woman’s
curiosity could elicit.
It is the eve of the farewell exercises of the class, and the last
meeting of the Coffee Club. Tristo had thrown gloom upon our spirits,
by a mournful _epitaph_ upon the pleasures and the duties, now buried
in the past--but Pulito has reversed our feelings by a brilliant
_epithalamium_, for our coming bridal day, on which we are to wed the
_world_. So is it in life--we shed one tear over the past, and hasten
on to catch the future.
“Thrift, thrift, Horatio! the funeral baked meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.”
In such a mood, the thoughts of all naturally reverted to the time when
first we entered upon that stage in the journey of life, which we
have now completed. As we traced our progress onward, and recalled our
errors and our follies, our hopes and disappointments, our attainments
and our short-comings, the desire of sympathy, of consolation, and
encouragement, led to a full and free expression of our thoughts and
feelings. Apple, however, as his cigar wreathed forth its exhalations,
‘Upward and downward, thwarting and convolved,’
and puns and quips unceasing shot through their obscurity, like
lightning through a cloud, seemed at first to be in no mood for the
pathetic, or the serious. Pulito, too, after a brief and apparently
regretful abstraction, broke forth in a strain half querulous, half
laughing.
_Pulito._ “Well, ‘gentlemen commoners,’ however discourteous the remark
may appear to you and your society, I must ne’ertheless regret that I
am not this evening where I might have been, in a certain far-famed
street, and gazing upon a certain lovely face, whose owner’s name
’twould be profanity to mention. I may say with the stricken Cowper,
‘Farewell to the _elm-tree_, farewell to the shade
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade.’”
_Nescio_, (smiling.) “‘Lugete oh! Veneres Cupidinesque!’ As an old
dramatist has it,
‘Your soul, retired within her inmost chamber,
Like a fair mourner, sits in state with all
The silent pomp of sorrow round about her.’”
_Pulito._ “Yes, and to borrow from the same play, The Rival Ladies, I
think,
‘Oh she is gone! methinks she should have left
A track so bright, I might have followed her
Like setting suns that vanish in a glory.’”
_Nescio._ “For the sake of quoting beautifully, you quote without
application.”
_Apple_, (in a voice of thunder.) “Who in the name of heaven is it
about whom you are making all this ‘tempest in a tea-pot?’ Girls,
girls, girls, for ever and eternally! I wonder what you see in them!
weak and shallow! It maddens me, Pulito, to see you, a fellow of some
small sense, ‘bowing the knee in worship to an idol,’ a minion-queen, a
painted doll--
‘A pagod thing of flirting sway,
With front of brass, and feet of clay.’”
_Pulito._ “Why, Apple, from your fierceness, I suspect you have lately
met with a rebuff from some fair damsel.”
_Apple._ “No, indeed I have not; I was afraid I should though, and
did not give her a chance. I was acquainted with some of them once,
and endeavored to patronize, instruct, and even please them. But they
had neither the acuteness to perceive the point of my puns, nor the
complaisance to laugh at them, even when I led the way. In fact--the
fiends scorch their pictures!--I believe they laughed _at_ instead of
_with_ me. ‘Flattery is nectar and ambrosia to them.’ They drink it in
and enjoy it like an old woman sucking metheglin through a quill.”
_Pulito._ “I allow that
----‘if ladies be but young and fair,
They have the gift to know it.’
But this is chargeable upon us, who are accustomed to lie to them about
their charms, as a matter of course.”
_Apple._ “Then, too, if beautiful, they can scarce be good. For,
‘honesty coupled to beauty, is to have honey a sauce to sugar.’”
_Pulito._ “How! Is what is fair at surface necessarily foul at heart?
‘Why what a world is this, where what is comely,
Envenoms him that bears it.’”
_Apple._ “And how wide is their information, scientific, literary,
political, moral! Their wits ‘are dry as a remainder biscuit after a
voyage.’”
_Pulito._ “Well, Apple, I should think you had exhausted Shakspeare and
yourself for terms of reproach: yet it still remains true, that they
are the dearest, sweetest things ‘_in rerum naturâ_,’ and
‘Should fate command me to the farthest verge
Of the green earth,’