The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 17, No. 486, April 23, 1831

Being essential uniform in all
Not to be severed or dividual;
But in her function holdeth her estate
By powers divine in her ingenerate;
And so by inspiration conceiveth,
What heaven to her by divination breatheth.

    DRAYTON.

UNDERSTANDING

Most miserable creature under sky
Man without understanding doth appear,
For all this world’s affliction he thereby,
And Fortune’s freaks is wisely taught to bear;
Of wretched life the only joy is she,
And the only comfort in calamity;
She arms the breast with constant patience,
Against the bitter throes of Dolour’s darts,
She solaceth with rules of sapience,
The gentle winds in midst of worldly smarts:
When he is sad, she seeks to make him merry,
And doth refresh his spirits when they be weary.

    SPENSER.

CARE

Care, the consuming canker of the mind,
The discord that disorders sweet heart’s tune,
The abortive bastard of a coward mind,
The lightfoot lackey that runs post by death,
Bearing the letters which contain our end;
The busy advocate that sells his breath
Denouncing worst to him who’s most his friend.

    CONSTABLE.

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS

OLD PARR AND OLD PEOPLE

(From “After Dinner Chat,” in the New Monthly Magazine.)

N.—Parr was a mischievous old fellow: he has left a pernicious example of longevity behind him. At sixty-nine a man will look with complacency to the approaching termination of his career, as an event to be expected in the ordinary course of Nature. Once allow him to turn seventy, he has then escaped the fatal three-score-and-ten, and would consider himself an ill-used person should he receive notice of ejectment a day short of ninety. Ninety comes, and he grows insolent. Death, he thinks, has passed on and overlooked him. He asks why Nature so long has delayed to claim her debt. She has suffered thrice seven years to elapse beyond the period usually assigned for payment, and he indulges in wild fancies of a Statute of Limitations. In his most rational moments he talks of nothing but Old Parr. He burns his will, marries his housemaid, hectors his son-and-heir, who is seventy, and canes his grand-child (a lad of fifty) for keeping late hours. I called on old S—g a morning or two ago: he is ninety-three. I found him reading his newspaper, and inveighing against the outcry for Reform and short Parliaments—declaring that, rather than be forced down into Cheshire to vote oftener than once in every six or seven years, he, for his part, would sell his franchise for a straw. ‘Twas clear he had outlived the recollection of the probability of a visit from one who might deprive him of his franchise upon terms even less advantageous. I took occasion to compliment him upon his fine old age. His reply was an angry growl.—“Ugh! do you want me gone? I’m only ninety-three Ugh! Mr. Parr wouldn’t die till he was one hundred and sixty!”

R.—Paying a visit to old P—ke, I found him walking up and down the drawing-room, stamping and raving, and holding a handkerchief to his mouth. I inquired what ailed him. To my astonishment, he complained of tooth-ache!—a strange complaint, thought I, for a man of seventy-eight, whom one would hardly expect to find with a single implement of that kind in his head; but, in fact, he was in possession of the whole set, except two! His lamentation, which he continued at intervals, ran in this strain—“Seventy-eight!—only seventy-eight, and two teeth gone already!—lost one of them sixty years ago, and, as if that were not enough, four years ago I must lose a second;—and now—ah! I suppose I must part with another. And then my eyes! one of my eyes is beginning to fail. Lord help me! for, should it go on at this rate, I shall be in a sad condition before many more years are over my head!”

S.—The unconscionable old rogue! at seventy-eight how many more could he expect?

N.—Rely on it I am right, and that Parr was to blame for this. At seventy, P—ke would have died with grateful thanksgivings on his lips for the blessings of his past life. As it was, had he been allowed to live on till he should have parted with the remainder of his teeth, at the rate of one a year, he would have attempted, when it came to the last, to smuggle a false tooth or two into his jaws.

R.—I think I understand the gist of your complaint: the longer you allow folks to live, the more they won’t die. Fie upon them!

S.—I shudder at the contemplation of the consequences of Parr’s abominable example. Well had it been for posterity if some one had killed the cent-sexagenarian at the outset of his wicked career.

K.—Horrible! that would have been Parr-icide!

DUELLING.

N.—Apropos of duelling. I hear that General F—rn—r is dead. He was the most celebrated, or, I ought to say, the most notorious duellist in France—at a time, too, when duelling was most the rage. He had been a great favourite of Napoleon’s. Having the command of a regiment, upon—I forget what occasion—he led it with such extraordinary bravery to the attack, yet, at the same time, conducted its movements with so total a want of skill and discretion, that, without attaining any good result, his men were nearly all cut to pieces, and he himself narrowly escaped with his life. As a reward for his gallantry, his Imperial master promoted him to the rank of general; but, to mark his sense of F—rn—r’s total want of “the better part of valour,” he never after entrusted him with a command. So fatal was his skill in duelling, that, when I knew him in Paris, he was under an interdiction of the police ever to fight again. The terms of one of the duels in which he had been engaged were, that the parties should fire at eight paces, and that they should alternately advance two paces till the fire of one or both of them should take deadly effect. According to this arrangement, the last advance brought the muzzle of his pistol close to his adversary’s breast—he had twice already wounded him slightly, and received one shot himself—he fired, and his adversary fell dead at his feet! This piece of butchery—for as such it must be stigmatized—having been perpetrated under sanction of the articles of the meeting, passed over without receiving any severe notice. No wonder he was an unhappy man. I met him one day at dinner. On that occasion he was boisterous in his mirth, without appearing to be gay.—Suddenly he rose and left the room. Half an hour afterwards we found him in a small boudoir at the farther end of the apartment, stretched on a sofa—writhing, groaning, and gnashing his teeth: I thought of Richard in the tent scene. I once heard him say—(I must give part of his expression in his own words, for terrible as they are, they are, at the same time, so simple, that they would lose their force in translation)—”J’ai la bras fatal! if I fire at a mark ten to one I miss it: I never miss a man.” His look and tone, as he uttered this, were as of one who should speak of an attendant demon, from whose dominion he had no power of escape.

R.—I once was witness to an instance of apathy on the part of a father—your talking of duelling reminds me of it—which is perhaps without a parallel. Walking one day beyond the Barrière de Clichy, I saw several persons assembled at a little distance from the roadside. Two gentlemen had just taken their ground—you know that these affairs are not always conducted with the same privacy on the Continent as in England—and received their pistols from the hands of their seconds. They fired at the same instant. One of the combatants, a line young man of about five-and-twenty, received his adversary’s shot in his forehead: it pierced his brain. He sprang nearly his own height from the ground, and fell dead. He was immediately carried home to his father’s house, which was at no great distance from the spot, and I went along with the crowd. He was an only son, mind you, but (so it was said) a mauvais sujet of the last degree—indeed the very quarrel which led to the duel had occurred in a gaming-house of which he was a regular frequenter. The body, which I followed into the courtyard of his father’s house, was placed on the stones. The father was sent for;—a scene was naturally to be expected;—and a scene to be remembered there was. The old gentleman came out, looked calmly upon the dead body of his son, deliberately took a pinch of snuff, tapped down the lid of the box, and, saying nothing in the world more than—Enfin!—walked in again.

S.—Père Sensible!

Ibid.

POLITICAL CHANGES

Presumptuous was the wish so patriotically conceived, and so repeatedly extolled, of that pious churchman, who exclaimed, with reference to the constitution of his native country, now no more existing as an independent state, “Esto perpetua!” The ancients, indeed, to secure what might be humanely termed a perpetuity to their laws and edicts, had them graven on brass. But what is the perpetuity even of brass itself, when opposed to the irresistible advance of Time? Even in the very infancy of the world, this question might have been answered, as it was, some few thousand years after its creation, by Old Simonides:

“Who so bold
To uphold
What the Lindian sage[16 - Cleobulus.] has told?
Who will dare
To compare
Works of man, that fleeting are,
With the smooth perennial flow
Of swift rivers, or the glow
Of the eternal sun, or light
Of the golden orb of night?

Spring renews
The floweret’s hues
With his sweet refreshing dews;
Ocean wide
Bids his tide
With returning current glide;
The sculptured tomb is but a toy
Man may fashion, man destroy—
Eternity in stone or brass?
Go, go! who said it was an ass.”

    Fragm. 10. BRUNCK, _ Analect_, tom. i. p. 122.
(From a striking paper entitled “Correction, Melioration, Reformation, Revolution,” in Blackwood’s Magazine.)

OLD PARLIAMENTS

There is nothing in our history more uncertain than their nature and the extent of their power. Blackstone says, that “the original or first institution of parliaments is one of those matters which lie so far hidden in the dark ages of antiquity, that the tracing of it out is a thing equally difficult and uncertain; and how members were returned to the Michel-Synoth, or Michel-Gemote, or Wittena-Gemote, of our Saxon ancestors, it would doubtless puzzle the learning even of Lord John Russell to ascertain.” In the simple days of good King Alfred, parliaments were not summoned for “the dispatch of business”—that is, to discuss regulations touching the taxes and the public debt—the Bank affairs—the East India affairs—the West India affairs, and a thousand other concerns of national moment, then lying unborn in the womb of time. In those days, the great council was ordained to “meet twice in the year, or oftener, if need be, to treat of the government of God’s people, how they should keep themselves from, sin, should live in quiet, and should receive right.”—Blackwood’s Mag.