"Will she thy linen wash and hosen darn?"
GAY.
I'm utterly sick of this hateful alliance
Which the ladies have form'd with impractical Science!
They put out their washing to learn hydrostatics,
And give themselves airs for the sake of pneumatics.
They are knowing in muriate, and nitrate, and chlorine,
While the stains gather fast on the walls and the flooring—
And the jellies and pickles fall wofully short,
With their chemical use of the still and retort.
Our expenses increase, (without drinking French wines.)
For they keep no accounts, with their tangents and sines-.
And to make both ends meet they give little assistance,
With their accurate sense of the squares of the distance.
They can name every spot from Peru to El Arish,
Except just the bounds of their own native parish;
And they study the orbits of Venus and Saturn,
While their home is resign'd to the thief and the slattern.
Chronology keeps back the dinner two hours,
The smoke-jack stands still while they learn motive powers;
Flies and shells swallow up all our every-day gains,
And our acres are mortgaged for fossil-remains.
They cease to reflect with their talk of refraction—
They drive us from home by electric attraction—
And I'm sure, since they've bother'd their heads with affinity,
I'm repuls'd every hour from my learned divinity.
When the poor, stupid husband is weary and starving,
Anatomy leads them to give up the carving;
And we drudges the shoulder of mutton must buy,
While they study the line of the os humeri.
If we 'scape from our troubles to take a short nap,
We awake with a din about limestone and trap;
And the fire is extinguished past regeneration,
For the women were wrapt in the deep-coal formation.
'Tis an impious thing that the wives of the laymen,
Should use Pagan words 'bout a pistil and stamen,
Let the heir break his head while they fester a Dahlia,
And the babe die of pap as they talk of mammalia.
The first son becomes half a fool in reality,
While the mother is watching his large ideality;
And the girl roars uncheck'd, quite a moral abortion,
For we trust her benevolence, order, and caution.
I sigh for the good times of sewing and spinning,
Ere this new tree of knowledge had set them a sinning;
The women are mad, and they'll build female colleges,—
So here's to plain English!—a plague on their ologies!
London Mag.
July 28, 1828.
And so, most tasteful and provident public, you are going out of town on
Saturday next?—We envy you. Mars is gone, and Sontag is gone, and
Pasta is going—and Velluti is out of voice—and they are
playing tragedies at the Haymarket—and Vauxhall will never be dry
again—and the Funny Club are drenched to their skins every day—and
"the sweet shady side of Pall Mall" is a forgotten blessing. You will be
dull in the country if this weather continue—but not so dirty as
upon the Macadam. So go.
We shall stay behind, with the Duke of Wellington, to look after business.
It would not do for either of us to be gadding, while Ireland, and Turkey,
and Portugal want watching. The times are getting ticklish. The stocks are
rising most dreadfully, as the barometer falls; and the Squirearchy are
beginning to dread that the patridges will be drowned. That will be a sad
drawback from the delights of a two-shilling quartern-loaf. For ourselves,
we have plenty of work cut out for us, in this our abiding place. The
fewer the books which are published, the more we shall have to draw upon
our own genius; and the duller the season, the more vivacious must we be
to put our readers in spirits. But we have consolation approaching in the
shape of amusing work. Immediately that parliament is up, the newspapers
will begin to lie, "like thunder," Tom Pipes would say. What mysterious
murders, what heart-rending accidents, what showers of bonnets in the
Paddington Canal, what legions of unhappy children dropped at honest men's
doors! We have got a file of the "Morning Herald" for the last ten years;—and
we give the worthy labourers in the accident line, fair notice, that if
they hash up the old stories with the self-same sauce, as they are wont to
do, without substituting the pistol for the razor, and not even changing
the Christian name of the young ladies who always drown themselves when
parliament is up, we shall take the matter into our own hands, and write a
"Chapter of Accidents" that will drive these poor pretenders to the
secrets of hemp and rats-bane fairly out of the field.—Ibid.
Man is naturally the most awkward animal that inhales the breath of life.
There is nothing, however simple, which he can perform with the smallest
approach to gracefulness or ease. If he walks,—he hobbles, or jumps,
or limps, or trots, or sidles, or creeps—but creeping, sidling,
limping, hobbling, and jumping, are by no means walking. If he sits,—he
fidgets, twists his legs under his chair, throws his arm over the back of
it, and puts himself into a perspiration, by trying to be at ease. It is
the same in the more complicated operations of life. Behold that
individual on a horse! See with what persevering alacrity he hobbles up
and down from the croupe to the pommel, while his horse goes quietly at an
amble of from four to five miles in the hour. See how his knees, flying
like a weaver's shuttle, from one extremity of the saddle to another,
destroy, in a pleasure-ride from Edinburgh to Roslin, the good, gray
kerseymeres, which were glittering a day or two ago in Scaife and Willis's
shop. The horse begins to gallop—Bless our soul! the gentleman will
decidedly roll off. The reins were never intended to be pulled like a peal
of Bob Majors; your head, my friend ought to be on your own shoulders, and
not poking out between your charger's ears; and your horse ought to use its
exertions to move on, and not you. It is a very cold day, you have
cantered your two miles, and now you are wiping your brows, as if you had
run the distance in half the time on foot.
People think it a mighty easy thing to roll along in a carriage. Step into
this noddy. That creature in the corner is evidently in a state of such
nervous excitement that his body is as immovable as if he had breakfasted
on the kitchen poker; every jolt of the vehicle must give him a shake like
a battering-ram; do you call this coming in to give yourself a rest? Poor
man, your ribs will ache for this for a month to come! But the other
gentleman opposite: see how flexible he has rendered his body. Every time
my venerable friend on the coach-box extends his twig with a few yards of
twine at the end of it, which he denominates "a whupp," the suddenness of
the accelerated motion makes his great, round head flop from the centre of
his short, thick neck, and come with such violence on the unstuffed back,
that his hat is sent down upon the bridge of his nose with a vehemence
which might well nigh carry it away. Do you say that man is capable of
taking a pleasure ride? Before he has been bumped three miles,
every pull of wind will be jerked out of his body, and by the time he has
arrived at Roslin, he will be a dead man. If that man prospers in the
world, he commits suicide the moment he sets up his carriage.
We go to a ball. Mercy upon us! is this what you call dancing? A man of
thirty years of age, and with legs as thick as a gate-post, stands up in
the middle of the room, and gapes, and fumbles with his gloves, looking
all the time as if he were burying his grandmother. At a given signal, the
unwieldy animal puts himself in motion; he throws out his arms, crouches
up his shoulders, and, without moving a muscle of his face, kicks out his
legs, to the manifest risk of the bystanders, and goes back to the place
puffing and blowing like an otter, after a half-hour's burst. Is this
dancing? Shades of the filial and paternal Vestris! can this be a specimen
of the art which gives elasticity to the most inert confirmation, which
sets the blood glowing with a warm and genial flow, and makes beauty float
before our ravished senses, stealing our admiration by the gracefulness of
each new motion, till at last our souls thrill to each warning movement,
and dissolve into ecstasy and love?
People seem even to labour to be awkward. One would think a gentleman
might shake hands with a familiar friend without any symptoms of
cubbishness. Not at all. The hand is jerked out by the one with the
velocity of a rocket, and comes so unexpectedly to the length of its
tether, that it nearly dislocates the shoulder bone. There it stands
swaying and clutching at the wind, at the full extent of the arm, while
the other is half poked out, and half drawn in, as if rheumatism detained
the upper moiety and only below the elbow were at liberty to move. After
you have shaken the hand, (but for what reason you squeeze it, as if it
were a sponge, I can by no means imagine,) can you not withdraw it to your
side, and keep it in the station where nature and comfort alike tell you
it ought to be? Do you think your breeches' pocket the most proper place
to push your daddle into? Do you put it there to guard the solitary
half-crown from the rapacity of your friend; or do you put it across your
breast in case of an unexpected winder from your apparently peaceable
acquaintance on the opposite side?
Is it not quite absurd that a man can't even take a glass of wine
without an appearance of infinite difficulty and pain? Eating an egg at
breakfast, we allow, is a difficult operation, but surely a glass of wine
after dinner should be as easy as it is undoubtedly agreeable. The egg
lies under many disadvantages. If you leave the egg-cup on the table, you
have to steady it with the one hand, and carry the floating nutriment a
distance of about two feet with the other, and always in a confoundedly
small spoon, and sometimes with rather unsteady fingers. To avoid this,
you take the egg-cup in your hand, and every spoonful have to lay it down
again, in order to help yourself to bread; so, upon the whole, we
disapprove of eggs, unless, indeed, you take them in our old mode at
Oxford; that is two eggs mashed up with every cup of tea, and purified
with a glass of hot rum.
But the glass of wine—can anything be more easy? One would think not—but
if you take notice next time you empty a gallon with a friend, you will
see that, sixteen to one, he makes the most convulsive efforts to do with
ease what a person would naturally suppose was the easiest thing in the
world. Do you see, in the first place, how hard he grasps the decanter,
leaving the misty marks of five hot fingers on the glittering crystal,
which ought to be pure as Cornelia's fame? Then remark at what an acute
angle he holds his right elbow as if he were meditating an assault on his
neighbour's ribs; then see how he claps the bottle down again as if his
object were to shake the pure ichor, and make it muddy as his own brains.
Mark how the animal seizes his glass,—by heavens he will break it
into a thousand fragments! See how he bows his lubberly head to meet half
way the glorious cargo; how he slobbers the beverage over his unmeaning
gullet, and chucks down the glass so as almost to break its stem after he
has emptied it of its contents as if they had been jalap or castor-oil!
Call you that taking a glass of wine? Sir, it is putting wine into your
gullet as you would put small beer into a barrel,—but it is not—oh,
no! it is not taking, so as to enjoy, a glass of red, rich port, or
glowing, warm, tinted, beautiful caveza!
A newly married couple are invited to a wedding dinner. Though the lady,
perhaps, has run off with a person below her in rank and station, see when
they enter the room, how differently they behave.—How gracefully she
waves her head in the fine recover from the withdrawing curtsy, and
beautifully extends her hand to the bald-pated individual grinning to her
on the rug! While the poor spoon, her husband, looks on, with the white of
his eyes turned up as if he were sea-sick, and his hands dangle dangle on
his thighs as if he were trying to lift his own legs. See how he ducks to
the lady of the house, and simpers across the fire-place to his wife, who,
by this time is giving a most spirited account of the state of the roads,
and the civility of the postilions near the Borders.
Is a man little? Let him always, if possible, stoop. We are sometimes
tempted to lay sprawling in the mud fellows of from five feet to five feet
eight, who carry the back of their heads on the extreme summit of their
back-bone, and gape up to heaven as if they scorned the very ground. Let
no little man wear iron heels. When we visit a friend of ours in
Queen-street we are disturbed from our labours or conversation by a sound
which resembles the well-timed marching of a file of infantry or a troop
of dismounted dragoons. We hobble as fast as possible to the window, and
are sure to see some chappie of about five feet high stumping on the
pavement with his most properly named cuddy-heels; and we stake our
credit, we never yet heard a similar clatter from any of his majesty's
subjects of a rational and gentlemanly height—We mean from five feet
eleven (our own height) up to six feet three.
Is a man tall? Let him never wear a surtout. It is the most unnatural, and
therefore the most awkward dress that ever was invented. On a tall man, if
he be thin, it appears like a cossack-trouser on a stick leg; if it be
buttoned, it makes his leanness and lankness still more appalling and
absurd; if it be open, it appears to be no part of his costume, and leads
us to suppose that some elongated habit-maker is giving us a specimen of
that rare bird, the flying tailor.
We go on a visit to the country for a few days, and the neighbourhood is
famous for its beautiful prospects. Though, for our own individual share,
we would rather go to the catacombs alone, than to a splendid view in a
troop, we hate to balk young people! and as even now a walking-stick chair
is generally carried along for our behoof, we seldom or ever remain at
home when all the rest of the party trudge off to some "bushy bourne or
mossy dell." On these occasions how infinitely superior the female is to
the male part of the species! The ladies, in a quarter of an hour after
the proposal of the ploy, appear all in readiness to start, each with her
walking-shoes and parasol, with a smart reticule dangling from her wrist.
The gentlemen, on the other hand, get off with their great, heavy
Wellingtons,
which, after walking half a mile, pinch them at the toe, and make the
pleasure excursion confine them to the house for weeks. Then some fool,
the first gate or stile we come to, is sure to show off his vaulting, and
upsets himself in the ditch on the opposite side, instead of going quietly
over and helping the damosels across. And then, if he does attempt the
polite, how awkwardly the monster makes the attempt! We come to a narrow
ditch with a plank across it—He goes only half way, and standing in
the middle of the plank, stretches out his hand and pulls the unsuspecting
maiden so forcibly, that before he has time to get out of the way, the
impetus his own tug has produced, precipitates them both among the hemlock
and nettles, which, you may lay it down as a general rule, are to be found
at the thoroughfares in every field.
We hold that every man behaves with awkwardness when he is in love, and
the want of the one is a presumption of the absence of the other. When
people are fairly engaged, there is perhaps less of this directly to
the object, but there is still as much of it in her presence; but it
is wonderful how soon the most nervous become easy when marriage has
concluded all their hopes. Delicate girl! just budding into womanly
loveliness, whose heart, for the last ten minutes, has been trembling
behind the snowy wall of thy fair and beautiful bosom, hast thou never
remarked and laughed at a tall and much-be-whiskered young man for the mauvaise
honte with which he hands to thee thy cup of half-watered souchong?
Laugh not at him again, for he will assuredly be thy husband.
Love, when successful is well enough, and perhaps it has treasures of its
own to compensate for its inconveniences; but a more miserable situation
than that of an unhappy individual before the altar, it is not in the
heart of man to conceive. First of all, you are marched with a solitary
male companion up the long aisle, which on this occasion appears
absolutely interminable; then you meet your future partner dressed out in
satin and white ribbons, whom you are sure to meet in gingham gowns or
calico prints, every morning of your life ever after. There she is,
supported by her old father, decked out in his old-fashioned brown coat,
with a wig of the same colour, beautifully relieving the burning redness
of his huge projecting ears; and the mother, puffed up like an overgrown
bolster, encouraging the trembling girl, and joining her maiden aunts of
full fifty years, in telling her to take courage, for it is what they must
all come to. Bride's-maids and mutual friends make up the company; and
there, standing out before this assemblage, you assent to everything the
curate, or, if you are rich enough, the rector, or even the dean, may say,
shewing your knock-knees in the naked deformity of white kerseymeres, to
an admiring bevy of the servants of both families, laughing and tittering
from the squire's pew in the gallery. Then the parting!—The mother's
injunctions to the juvenile bride to guard herself from the cold, and to
write within the week. The maiden aunts' inquiries, of, "My dear, have you
forgot nothing?"—the shaking of hands, the wiping and winking of
eyes! By Hercules!—there is but one situation more unpleasant in
this world, and that is, bidding adieu to your friends, the ordinary and
jailor, preparatory to swinging from the end of a halter out of it.
The lady all this time seems not half so awkward. She has her gown to keep
from creasing, her vinaigrette to play with; besides, that all her
nervousness is interesting and feminine, and is laid to the score of
delicacy and reserve.
Blackwood's Magazine.