Besides, the man's poor, his orchard's his bread: If you will go with us you shall have a share,* "If the matter depended alone upon me, His scruples thus silenced, Tom felt more at ease, A new and seasonable reading of the old but never obsolete saw, Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor. One example more this time a classical one-from the bard of Olney: When Mrs. Throckmorton's bullfinch was done to death by a rat, which gnawed through the wooden cage, and made a meal of poor Bully in toto, beak alone excepted, an appropriate threnody was composed by the lady's rhyming friend. ("Did ever fair lady," he asks Mr. Rose, per epistolam, "from the Lesbia of Catullus to the present day, lose her bird, and find no poet to commemorate the loss?" A question put à propos of this piece of news: "Weston has not been without its tragedies since you left us. Mrs. Throckmorton's piping bullfinch has been eaten by a rat, and the villain left nothing but poor Bully's beak behind him.") The pat allusion is to Orpheus in the closing stanza-the penultimate one containing an honest wish that the rat had half swallowed the beak too, and that it had stuck fast and disagreed with him: O, had he made that too his prey! Maria weeps-the Muses mourn- But we shall forfeit all claim to the first three syllables of our title of omniumgatherum, if so long a stay with any one Eutrapelus become the rule, not the exception. Looking out, therefore, in other and diverse * The will and shall in this line are (as regards accent) almost as awkwardly managed, metricè, as Hibernian or Scot would mismanage them, grammaticè. Cowper could have done better an he liked, with next to no pains at all at all. "Pity for Poor Africans." Mrs. Throckmorton. "On the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton's Bullfinch." (1788.) directions, for individual instances of the pat allusion, we find one in Swift's description of a rainy day in town, where the beau in his sedanchair is mock-heroically compared to the Greeks inside the wooden horse. Vide the tale of Troy divine: Boxed in a chair, the beau impatient sits, While spouts run clattering o'er the roof by fits, The leather sounds; he trembles from within. The following (also a classical) pat allusion occurs in Lord Hervey's celebrated squib on the retirement of Walpole and the accession of the Pulteney party to place, in 1742: And as popular Clodius, the Pulteney of Rome, To get reins in his hand, though 'tis plain he can't drive.† The far-famed barber of Seville is always saying or doing something pat-'tis his vocation. As a pat allusion on his part, take the Rabelaisian reference to Panurge's flock of sheep, in the scene where Figaro pretends to have been the man who was seen jumping out of the boudoir window, and is suddenly confronted with the actual jumper, the little page. Cherubino allows that he it was who came tumbling on the gardener's beds: what has Figaro to say to that, asks the jealous count his master: Figaro (révant). Ah! s'il le dit.... cela se peut. Je ne dispute pas de ce que j'ignore. Le Comte. Ainsi vous et lui...? Figaro. Pourquoi non ? la rage de sauter peut gagner: voyez les moutons de Panurge; et quand vous êtes en colère, il n'y a personne qui n'aime mieux risquer. Le Comte. Comment, deux à la fois! . . . Figaro. On aurait sauté deux douzaines, &c.‡ Advising Bubb Dodington, by letter, how the parliamentary opposition should act, in the organised struggle which ended in Walpole's resignation, Lord Chesterfield insists that the decisive battle must be in *Swift contributed these lines-racy part of a graphic whole-to the "Tatler," where Steele welcomed them "for self and readers," as written by "one who treats of every subject after a manner that no other author has done, and better than any other can do." † Horace Walpole to Sir H. Mann, Oct. 16, 1742. And his "Reminiscences," ch. viii. Beaumarchais: "Le Mariage de Figaro," IV. 7. the House of Commons, since among the peers the ministers are too strong to be shaken, and “for such a minority," his lordship adds, "to struggle with such a majority, would be much like the late King of Sweden's attacking the Ottoman army at Bender, at the head of his cook and his butler."* Here again is a characteristic example from Horace Walpole's letters, where the writer, then on his travels, has been concentrating a deal of gossip into scanty space, and is proud of the result: "You see how I distil all my speculations and improvements, that they may lie in a small compass. Do you remember the story of the prince, that, after travelling three years, brought home nothing but a nut? They cracked it: in it was wrapped up a piece of silk, painted with all the kings, queens, kingdoms, and everything in the world: after many unfoldings, out stepped a little dog, shook his ears, and fell to dancing a saraband. There is a fairy tale for you."+ Mr. Macaulay is pleasantly addicted to pat allusions of this fairy-tale kind. Canning, in early life, wrote an essay on the exceeding curiosity men have to know what the world may think of them. There is no craving, he alleged, the gratification of which is so eagerly desired, or, in general, so heartily repented of;-and his apposite illustration is the story of Mercury going into the statuary's shop, a mere mortal in form, and, after purchasing at a considerable price a Jupiter, a Juno, a Fury or two, and some other knick-knacks of the same kind,-pointing to a statue of himself, which stood on graceful tiptoe in the window, and asking what might be the price of that elegant image? "Sir," replied the artist, "you have proved so good a customer to me, for some of my best pieces, that I shall but do you justice if I throw you that paltry figure into the bargain."+ If there is neither Wit nor Humour, properly speaking, in the writings of Rousseau, there is frequently an indulgence in that pat allusion which belongs to Eutrapelia, and is our present theme of illustration. As where, in the very act of disclaiming (from his prevalent lack of selfpossession) all ability to say what is pat to the purpose, until too late, he asserts his ability to make an excellent impromptu à loisir (only give him loisir enough), but owns his incapacity for producing a good thing payable on demand, or at sight. He says he should succeed well in a smart conversation carried on through post-office agency, as the Spaniards play at chess; and then alluding to that duke of Savoy who turned back, while on a journey, to cry out, "A votre gorge, marchand de Paris!" he applies the known story by frankly affirming Me voilà !§ Thus, too, describing the noblesse of Savoy, and their then exclusion from means of aggrandisement and paths of ambition, he says, that they follow, of necessity, the counsel of Cineas-alluding to Pyrrhus and his remonstrant privy councillor. Elsewhere he pictures himself as going to Grimm, like another Georges Dandin, to beg his (Grimm's) pardon for * Lord Chesterfield to Dodington, Sept. 8, 1741. the offences he, the said Grimm, had committed.* Again, narrating his literary intercourse with Madame de Boufflers, and how she received his assurance that her tragedy in prose, called L'Esclave généreux, closely resembled "an English piece, very little known, but of which a translation [into French] existed, and entitled 'Oroonoko,'"+—an assurance which madame repaid (with thanks) by a counter-assurance that no such resemblance whatever was traceable between the two, the snubbed philosopher proceeds to say: "I have never mentioned this plagiarism to any one in the whole world except herself, and to her only because she had imposed the doing so upon me as a duty; none the less, however, have I often been reminded, since then, of the fate Gil Blas incurred in the case of his patron the Archbishop." Perhaps of all "well-known stories" to which facete allusions have, first and last, been made, this is the best known. Insomuch, that, not being (like Cleopatra) gifted with infinite variety, custom has now considerably staled, and time withered it. But the story must have had a capital constitution to have gone through so much, and served so many uses. Joseph de Maistre shall supply the next illustration-a man who in creed, character, and general characteristics, both intellectual and moral, political and religious, was born and bred, so to speak, at antipodes to Rousseau, though born and bred very near him, geographically-and not a little distinguished at that Turin where Jean Jacques may be said to have begun his public career-a bad beginning too, significant of what was worse to come. De Maistre thus rates the philosophes of the French Revolution: "When one sees these pretended legislators take up English institutions from their native soil and transport them brusquement to that of France, one is necessarily reminded of that Roman general who caused a sun-dial to be removed from Syracuse to Rome, without troubling himself the least bit in the world as to the question of latitude. One thing, however, renders the comparison after all inexact; and that is, that the worthy general was ignorant of astronomy."§ The pat allusion is common enough in writers to whom both Wit and Humour are, by the general voice of critics (right or wrong), denied. Such a one is Schiller. And here, accordingly, is a "sample" from his miscellaneous stores. Writing to Goethe about the visit of Madame de Staël to Weimar, in 1803, he says: "De Staël I saw yesterday, and shall see her again to-day with the duchess's mother. It is the old story with her: one would think of the Danaides' sieve, if Oknos with his ass did not rather occur to one." Schiller was, in plain English, sick of the brilliant Frenchwoman, and rather dejected than enlivened by her vivacious parts of speech. On the Oknos allusion, Mr. Carlyle has the following note: "J'allai chez Grimm, comme un autre Georges Dandin, lui faire des excuses des offenses qu'il m'avait faites."-(Rousseau: "Les Confessions." Livre IX.) In a letter to Madame d'Epinay, previously transcribed, this heauton-timoroumenos Jean Jacques had said: "L'Evangile ordonne bien à celui qui reçoit un soufflet d'offrir l'autre joue, mais non pas de demander pardon. Vous souvenezvous de cet homme de la comédie, qui crie en donnant des coups de bâton? Voilà le rôle du philosophe.”—(Ibid.) † Southern's well-known tragedy-well acted too, once upon a time. Rousseau : "Les Confessions." Livre XI. § Joseph de Maistre: Lettres d'un Royaliste Savoisien à ses Compatriotes. 3.) Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, b. vi. "Oknos, a Greek gentleman, of date unknown, diligently plaits a reed rope, which his ass as diligently eats. This Oknos is supposed to have had an unthrifty wife. Hence Schiller's allusion."* Goethe probably appreciated the patness of the allusion better than we impartial English; à fortiori much better than madame's countrymen, and above all countrywomen, could, would, or should do. Jean Paul, on the other hand, though a German of the Germans, possessed both Wit and Humour in as remarkable a degree as they were of a remarkable kind. The kind was both individual and national; being conditioned and coloured by the whimsical nature of the man, and the peculiar genius of his fatherland. As an instance of his use of the pat allusion, take his description of French poetry-where he explains his metaphor of "poet-peacock, with glittering tail-mirrors and tail-eyes," by saying-quoad the queer term "tail-mirrors"-that in French poetry, you must always, like the Christian, consider the latter end, or the last verse; "and there, as in life, according to the maxim of the Greek sage, you cannot before the end be called happy."+ Strange uses the maxim of a Greek sage, Solon to Croesus, may be turned to, with the roll of centuries, and the revolution of languages, and the whim-whams of a humorist, addicted to what seems far-fetched and wide-of-the-mark to less discursive spirits. Sir Walter Scott would give us work enough, were a collection to be made of all his achievements in this species of Eutrapelia. Some of them we cannot forbear from noticing. As where he says of Ellangowan, who suddenly commenced a ruthless system of magisterial reform, at the expense of all gipsies, rogues, impostors, superannuated pickers and stealers, &c., in his neighbourhood-that "he wrought his miracles like a second Duke Humphrey; and by the influence of the beadle's rod, caused the lame to walk, the blind to see, and the palsied to labour." In the same fascinating romance occurs the following pat allusion, à propos of the earthly-minded eagerness of a throng of greedy relations, who have just returned from burying the old lady from whom they have "expectations," and who exchange their pious put-on funeral demeanour for the gross solicitude of legatees in posse, impatient to find the will, and hear it read, and profit by it of course. "There is a fable told by Lucian, that while a troop of monkeys, well drilled by an intelligent manager, were performing a tragedy with great applause, the decorum of the whole scene was at once destroyed, and the natural passions of the actors called forth into Carlyle's Miscellanies, vol. iv. † Here is another "pat allusion," of Jean Paul Jean Paulish, very. The Sphinx story of ancient Greece is thus referred to in his satire on Bonaparte's prosecution, or persecution (c'est égal), by press-censorship, of Madame de Staël's book on Germany. "The whole printed edition was laid hold of, and, as it were, under a second papermill devil, hacked anew into beautiful pulp. Nor is that delicate feeling of the whilom censors and clippers to be contemned, whereby these men, by the faintest allusion, smell out the crown debts of their crown-robber (usurper), and thereby proclaim them. The Sphinx in Elba, who, unlike the ancient one, spared only him that could not read his riddle (a riddle consisting in this, to make Europe like the Turkish grammar, wherein there is but one conjugation, one declension, no gender, and no exception), could not but reckon a description of the Germans, making themselves a power within a power, to be ticklish matter." "Guy Mannering," vol. i. ch. vi. |