Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 66, No. 407, September, 1849

BULLER

Then, if you please, my Lord, to-morrow.

NORTH

You must all three be somewhat fatigued by the exercise of so much critical acumen. So do you, Talboys and Seward, unbend the bow at another game of Chess; and you, Buller, reanimate the jaded Moral Sentiments by a sharp letter to Marmaduke, insinuating that if he don't return to the Tents within a week, or at least write to say that he and Hal, Volusene and Woodburn, are not going to return at all, but to join the Rajah of Sarawak, the Grand Lama, or Prester John – which I fear is but too probable from the general tone and tenor of their life and conversation for some days before their Secession from the Established Camp – there will be a general breaking of Mothers' hearts, and in his own particular case, a cutting off with a shilling, or disinheriting of the heir apparent of one of the finest Estates in Cornwall. But I forget – these Entails will be the ruin of England. What! Billy, is that you?

BILLY

Measter, here's a Fish and a Ferocious.

TALBOYS

Ha! what Whappers!

BULLER

More like Fish before the Flood than after it.

SEWARD

After it indeed! During it. What is Billy saying, Mr North? That Coomerlan' dialect's Hottentot to my Devonshire ears.

NORTH

They have been spoiled by the Doric delicacies of the "Exmoor Courtship." He tells me that Archy M'Callum, the Cornwall Clipper, and himself, each in a cow-hide, having ventured down to the River Mouth to look after and bale Gutta Percha, foregathered with an involuntary invasion of divers gigantic Fishes, who had made bad their landing on our shores, and that after a desperate resistance they succeeded in securing the Two Leaders – a Salmo Salar and a Salmo Ferox – see on snout and shoulder tokens of the Oar. Thirty – and Twenty Pounders – Billy says; I should have thought they were respectively a third more. No mean Windfall. They will tell on the Spread. I retire to my Sanctum for my Siesta.

TALBOYS

Let me invest you, my dear sir, with my Feathers.

BULLER

Do – do take my Tarpaulin.

SEWARD

Billy, your Cow-hide.

NORTH

I need none of your gimcracks – for I seek the Sanctum by a subterranean – beg your pardon – a Subter-Awning Passage.

Scene II

Scene —Deeside

Time-Seven P.C

North – Buller – Seward – Talboys

NORTH

How little time or disposition for anything like serious Thinking, or Reading, out of people's own profession or trade, in this Railway World! The busy-bodies of these rattling times, even in their leisure hours, do not affect an interest in studies their fathers and their grandfathers, in the same rank of life, pursued, even systematically, on many an Evening sacred from the distraction that ceased with the day.

TALBOYS

Not all busy-bodies, my good Sir – think of —

NORTH

I have thought of them – and I know their worth – their liberality and their enlightenment. In all our cities and towns – and villages – and in all orders of the people – there is Mind – Intelligence, and Knowledge; and the more's the shame in that too general appetence for mere amusement in literature, perpetually craving for a change of diet – for something new in the light way – while anything of any substance, is, "with sputtering noise rejected" as tough to the teeth, and hard of digestion – however sweet and nutritious; would they but taste and try.

SEWARD

I hope you don't mean to allude to Charles Dickens?

NORTH

Assuredly not. Charles Dickens is a man of original and genial genius – his popularity is a proof of the goodness of the heart of the people; – and the love of him and his writings – though not so thoughtful as it might be – does honour to that strength in the English character which is indestructible by any influences, and survives in the midst of frivolity, and folly, and of mental depravations, worse than both.

SEWARD

Don't look so savage, sir.

NORTH

I am not savage – I am serene. Set the Literature of the day aside altogether – and tell me if you think our conversation since dinner would not have been thought dull by many not altogether uneducated persons, who pride themselves not a little on their intellectuality and on their full participation in the Spirit of the Age?

TALBOYS

Our conversation since dinner DULL!! No – no – no. Many poor creatures, indeed, there are among them – even among those of them who work the Press – pigmies with pap feeding a Giant who sneezes them away when sick of them into small offices in the Customs or Excise; – but not one of our privileged brethren of the Guild – with a true ticket to show – but would have been delighted with such dialogue – but would be delighted with its continuation – and thankful to know that he, "a wiser and a better man, will rise to-morrow morn."

SEWARD

Do, my dear sir – resume your discoursing about those Greeks.

NORTH

I was about to say, Seward, that those shrewd and just observers, and at the same time delicate thinkers, the ancient Greeks, did, as you well know, snatch from amongst the ordinary processes which Nature pursues, in respect of inferior animal life, a singularly beautiful Type or Emblem, expressively imaging to Fancy that bursting disclosure of Life from the bosom of Death, which is implied in the extrication of the soul from its corporeal prison, when this astonishing change is highly, ardently, and joyfully contemplated. Those old festal religionists – who carried into the solemnities of their worship the buoyant gladsomeness of their own sprightly and fervid secular life, and contrived to invest even the artful splendour and passionate human interest of their dramatic representations with the name and character of a sacred ceremony – found for that soaring and refulgent escape of a spirit from the dungeon and chains of the flesh, into its native celestial day, a fine and touching similitude in the liberation of a beautiful Insect, the gorgeously-winged, aérial Butterfly, from the living tomb in which Nature has, during a season, eased and urned its torpid and death-like repose.

SEWARD

Nor, my dear sir, was this life-conscious penetration or intuition of a keen and kindling intelligence into the dreadful, the desolate, the cloud-covered Future, the casual thought of adventuring Genius, transmitted in some happier verse only, or in some gracious and visible poesy of a fine chisel; but the Symbol and the Thing symbolised were so bound together in the understanding of the nation, that in the Greek language the name borne by the Insect and the name designating the Soul is one and the same – ΨΥΧΗ.

NORTH

Insects! They have come out, by their original egg-birth, into an active life. They have crept and eaten – and slept and eaten – creeping, and sleeping, and eating – still waxing in size, and travelling on from fitted pasture to pasture, they have in not many suns reached the utmost of the minute dimensions allotted them – the goal of their slow-footed wanderings, and the term, shall we say —of their life.