The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844

One of my friends has become infatuated with a taste which is much less common; one that he brought back with him from his travels, together with albums, mnemonics, and Kant’s Philosophy. It is a taste for autograph letters. It is well known that the English, who are always ready to confound what is rare with what is really admirable, are very successful in their curiosities of this kind. They collect them at a great expense, and employ skilful engravers to reproduce fac-similes for second-rate amateurs, whose whole fortune would not suffice for the acquisition of the originals.

Last week I came upon my friend the autographist, just as he was receiving a note of Boileau, of only four lines, in which he regrets that he cannot dine the next day with a Mr. Le Vasseur. This note, written in the most simple style, contained no anecdote, nor curious fact, and was only remarkable for a fault in its orthography. So that all the respect I have for our great critic did not prevent me from testifying some surprise, when I saw my friend pay ten Louis for a paper rag of no value at all.

‘I understand your astonishment,’ he said; ‘but to complete a collection, no matter of what kind, one must make sacrifices;’ and at the same time he placed his precious paper in a carton, labelled ‘Age of Louis XIV.’ ‘You see,’ he continued, pointing to a part of his library where several similar cartons were arranged, ‘you see the result of my collections for some years. I have sixty thousand francs’ worth of autographs in that corner.’

‘For which you cannot get ten from the grocer at the next corner, who is probably the only person to whom the rubbish would be of any use.’

‘Vandal!’ he exclaimed, with a mixture of indignation and contempt; ‘you talk like a man whom posterity will never mention. Look at the names you have insulted! Look at this letter from Montaigne to Boëtius, so illegible that it has never been printed; look at that billet of Henry IV. to the Duchesse de Verneuil; and that Sonnet of Malherbe, written entirely by Bacon’s own hand; that letter from Madame de Maintenon to Father Le Tellier; that order from the Prince the night before the battle of Senef—’

‘Even if I were wishing,’ I answered, ‘to share your veneration for some of these relics which excite so many historical recollections, I should not laugh the less at the zeal with which you preserve all that waste paper, which has nothing to recommend it. For instance, what is this letter worth which I have just taken up? It is signed by a Marquis d’Hernouville, whom no one ever heard of, and directed to a Comte de Monchevreuil, who is remembered only for one or two instances of gallantry in the field, and for having been, if I am not mistaken, the governor of the Duc de Maine.’

‘You could not have furnished me with a better opportunity of proving to you that we always run some risk in assertions upon subjects of which we know nothing. Oblige me by reading that letter, and then laugh, if you can, at the importance which I attach to similar papers.’

Never, I must own, was triumph more complete. Not only did I confess, after having perused it, that it was well worthy of the honor of the port-folio, but I begged him to let me copy it for publication. I had some difficulty in obtaining this favor, which was only granted me in exchange of a letter of Hyder Ali Khan to Suffren, which I promised to send him.

This is the letter of the Marquis, which I certify to be in every respect a true copy of the original:

    ‘Paris, the 30 December, 1669.

‘I seize the occasion, my dear Comte, afforded me by a cold which has kept me some days by the fire-side, to send you news from this part of the country. The most important, and what will give you the most pleasure is, that M. de Guise has obtained the favor of a cushion at the King’s mass; he did not fail to make use of it on Sunday, and between ourselves, with rather too much ostentation. Every one expects wonders from the Marquis de Chastet, who has boasted that he will soon bring the Algerians to terms, but I have no faith in his predictions. The Duc de Vermandois has been raised to the dignity of Admiral. Madame de la Valliere received this mark of the royal favor with the most perfect indifference. I am quite of your opinion: that woman is not in her proper place.

‘Did your brother write you that we went together to the first representation of Britannicus? Some admirers of Racine had praised the piece so much to me, that not being able to get a box, I sent my valet at ten o’clock to keep a place for me. I thought that I should never reach the Hôtel de Bourgogne, although I left my carriage at the corner of the Rue Mauconseil: without Chapelle and Mauvillain, who know all the actors in Paris, I should never have succeeded in getting a place. Do not mistake this eagerness of the public; there was much more malevolence than curiosity in it. I paid my respects to Madame de Sévigné in her box, where I found Mesdames de Villars, de Coulanges and de La Fayette, escorted by the little Abbé de Villars and de Grignau the Frondeur. You may imagine what treatment Britannicus received in that box. Madame de Sévigné said the other day at Madame de Villarceau’s that ‘Le Racine passerait comme le café.’ This speech made every one laugh; all agreed that it was as just as it was good. What I most like is the presumption of this tragedy student, who undertakes to make Romans talk for us after our great, our sublime Corneille; but some people think that they can do any thing. I never saw the Hôtel de Bourgogne so brilliant. Such a fashionable audience deserved a better piece. The people in the pit yawned, and those in the boxes went to sleep. Vilandry was snoring away in the box of the Commandeur de Louvré. Since he dines at that table, the best kept in Paris, he goes to the theatre to digest haciendo la siesta, wakes up when all is over, and pronounces the play detestable. I cannot understand what pleasure the brave and witty Commandeur can take in the society of a man who never opens his mouth but to eat. Despréaux, (Boileau,) beside whom I was sitting, was furious at the coldness of the pit. He protested that it was Racine’s chef d’œuvre; that the ancients had never written any thing finer; that neither Tacitus nor Corneille had ever produced any thing more forcible. He had like to have quarrelled with Subligny, because in the scene where Nero hides behind a curtain to listen to Junia, he could not restrain a burst of laughter, which was echoed all over the house. Perhaps this bad play will furnish him with the materials for another ‘Folle Querelle,’[3 - Parody of ‘Andromache:’ Racine’s first tragedy of any note.] which will make us laugh as much as the first. Ninon and the Prince sided with Despréaux. They defended the ground inch by inch, but without being able to cover the retreat of Britannicus. I am curious to know how the little rival of the great Corneille will take this failure, for it certainly is one. The worst of the business for him is, that every one remarked some very clear and very audacious allusions. The King said nothing about them; but yesterday at his levee, he countermanded a ballet in which he was to have danced at St. Germain. This may put our poet somewhat out of favor at court; but what the devil have poets to do there?

‘Floridor was sublime. You would have sworn that he had wagered to make one of the worst parts he overplayed successful. I cannot tell you much of the plot of this tragedy. How could I hear it? I sat between your brother and the fat Vicomte. Nevertheless you may rely on me that it is bad, decidedly bad, whatever the satirist may say about it. I am quite of his opinion when he says, ‘That a work of that importance must be listened to with attention, and that it is unjust to pronounce upon a play in the midst of the clamors of theatre-factions, and the chattering of that crowd of women who are always eager to display themselves at a first representation.’ All this is very true, but not at all applicable in this instance. This time Racine is well judged. The dénouement is the most ridiculous I ever heard. Imagine that silly, conceited Junia turning vestal, as if Madame de Sennès were to enter the Ursuline Convent. Heaven forbid that I should play the scholar; but I have read in Ménage that it required other formalities to take the veil in the convent of ladies of the society of Vesta. I forgot the most essential. Your little Desœuillet played like an angel. I spoke to her about you in her box. I think that you had better come and speak about it yourself. She is a girl for whom constancy is only the interval that separates two fancies.

‘If you ever get the Nouvelles à la Main where you are, you will see Racine handled without gloves. The number which treats of his play has not yet appeared; but if Le Clerc does things as he should, and remembers the just resentment of d’Olonne and de Créqui,[4 - Alluding to an epigram of Racine on d’Olonne and de Crequi, written to revenge himself for their attacks on ‘Andromache.’] from whom he received two hundred pistoles, poor Britannicus will pay for Andromache.

‘Gourrilu has probably given you the perfumes you ordered for your pretty cousin; Martial would not receive the money. He said that he was in your debt. Dubroussin sends his love. We had such a charming supper at his house! You were the only one wanting. I was obliged to bring Chapelle home in my carriage, dead drunk: to pay for it, I left him the next day under the table at La Pomme de Pin, where he has passed more than one night.

‘I shall try to get to the levée next Sunday. My uncle is doing his best to make me rejoin my regiment. If he should succeed, I shall see you on my way. I should much prefer to have the meeting take place here; but whatever happens, believe me, etc.,

    ‘Hernouville.’

STANZAS TO MARY

Thine eye is like the violet,
Thou hast the lily’s grace;
And the pure thoughts of a maiden’s heart
Are writ upon thy face.
And like a pleasant melody
To which memory hath clung,
Falls thy voice in the loved accent
Of mine own New-England tongue.

New-England—dear New-England!
All numberless they lie,
The green graves of my people,
Beneath her far blue sky;
And the same bright sun that shineth
On thy home at early morn,
Lights the dwellings of my kindred,
And the house where I was born.

Oh, fairest of her daughters!
That bid’st me so rejoice
’Neath the starlight of thy beauty
And the music of thy voice,
While Memory hath power
In my breast her joys to wake,
I will love thee, Mary, for thine own
And for New-England’s sake.

    M. E. Hewitt.

ON RIVERS AND OTHER THINGS

If I were as tedious as a King, I could find in my heart to bestow it all on your worship.

    Shaks.

It is a comfort still remaining to me, to reflect, that after all the evil that the Tourists, the Reviewers and the Satirists of England together have said and done and imagined of America, they have never yet annihilated our Lakes; dispossessed us of our Rivers; disproved our Waterfalls; nor made bitter to us, our fountains and streams and brooks and water-courses. I thank God with a full heart that from whatever cause these still abide unchanged among us; still flow, still control the ear with the majesty of sound, and make glad the solitary places of the heart.

It is not often indeed that they admit the existence of these objects in set terms; nor introduce into their works a paragraph upon the subject: nor would any one who had never visited America be expressly informed perhaps by them, that our part of the world contained within its compass any thing at all comparable in the way of Rivers to the Thames or the Tweed; or to the ponds of Cumberland in the way of Lakes; or to the Pisse Vache in Switzerland in the way of a fall of water: but yet they have not deprived us of them; and, incidentally, when they sometimes mention their having been shockingly annoyed and incommoded by a scrub, who spat several times upon the floor of the steamer in their presence, during a trip of three hundred, five hundred or a thousand miles that they have had the mishap to make with him, (instead of using his stomach like a true born Englishman, or his parti-coloured flag of abomination like a continental personage,) they give the reader some idea of the scope of a River or of a Lake in America. Or, when they note down that a parcel of knaves, with sterling money of the realm of Great Britain, borrowed doubtless for the purpose and, as they verily believe, never repaid to this hour, bought a merchant ship; loaded her with every variety of live animals like an ark, and then cruelly and nefariously precipitated her over the Falls of Niagara, in order to gratify that national tendency for a great Splash, which exists universally in every form throughout the whole of that wretched experiment at self-government called the United States—they then give the untravelled reader some conception of an American Fall of Water. One may therefore with confidence write down in a grave Essay like this, and expect it to be believed even by those who have not Morse’s Geography before their eyes, that there still is, and long has been, a fall of Water by common courtesy distinguished as The Cataract of Niagara; and a river in the State of Connecticut, called, without any of our ‘usual’ cisatlantic inflation, Connecticut River.

I pass over all further preliminary matter, and proceed at once to state, that the steamer which leaves New-York in the course of the afternoon, enters, during the night, the long and tranquil expanse of water known by the name of the Connecticut; and that when the passengers, after a quiet night’s rest, assemble upon decks that are moist with dew in the bright, still, cheery morning of the early summer, they are gliding onward far up that river, cutting its glassy bosom in the direction of the rays of the rising Sun; the overpowering lustre of which is diminished by a soft and precious Claude-like haze that hangs like a gauze of gossamer on the borders of their way, a bridal veil just being lifted by the Sun; tempering while it enriches the gilding of the shores, the waters, the far-off spire, the contented farmer’s house and barns, the unfrequent trees, the cattle gazing at the approaching object, the sail you are overtaking or meeting, and often, the fisherman, seen in the distance, standing in his boat on the margin of the river, in his white shirt-sleeves, waiting the passage of the steamer.

For these shores very rarely form themselves into any picturesque acclivity. Hardly is there on the whole course of the river one bold bluff or headland to obstruct the sight; and the scenery might even be thought tame and uninteresting, but for a home-born feeling that comes over the kind heart as it approaches so close to the mowers on the meadow-field as to scent the fragrance of the hay; to hear the song of the Boblink, or the rhythmic whetting of the scythe; or passes the ends of those primitive, those pilgrim-fences of post and rail, that enter the brink of the river to mark the boundaries of the small, paternal, and though frequently sterile, the much loved fields into which this home of industry is divided.

The moment you have passed the fisherman, and the noise and movement of the steamer have frightened the fish toward the shore, he darts out in his boat with one end of a net of many roods in extent, takes a semi-circular sweep and frequently draws in again with very little delay fraught with a school of most luxurious Shad. It is of this fish that Basil Hall I think says it is worth crossing the Atlantic to taste them; and although I fear I may shock the prejudices of some of my friends who highly favour those of the Delaware when caught above Bordentown, I cannot but opine that the shad of the Connecticut is the best shad in the Union.

The opinion if incorrect may have arisen from the freshness with which I have beheld them taken and have partaken of them from these nets, brought without the least bruise or violence on board the steamer which lies ‘blowing off’ for a moment or two while it receives on the forward deck a rich supply for breakfast of these broad thick-backed fellows, all wet and spangling from the River, as stout at the dorsal fin as at the shoulder, leaping hither and thither astonished at the suddenness of the change, pausing at each instant to expand the deep pomegranate-coloured gills that decorate their small and beautiful heads, and puffing on the deck as if the air they inhaled could be nothing else but water; or else imagining and planning an escape into their proper element; and at each exhalation after a desperate leap, vying almost with the dolphin in the richness of the hues of purple green and gold upon the laughing scales!

Now, one fine fish lies extended at its length, wondering and appalled and tremulous with fear, as the cook’s assistant, for the first time that any human being has touched it, lays his hand upon the fullness of that line of beauty, the curved and satisfying swell that extends from the head to the graceful little swallow tail that flutters and pleads so eloquently for its wonted employment. ‘Heavens! is it possible,’ it says to itself—I mean that beautiful female shad on which the hand is just laid—‘can it be that this warm hand is that of man; that the tradition of our forefathers is indeed true; and that this fish-devouring monster is going to destroy me after a mystick fashion of his own, so different from that of the porpoise and the sturgeon, whom I have escaped so well! Is it for a fate like this, that, avoiding the Delaware river and the profound Hudson, I have returned to these scenes of my nativity and earliest youth! Is it for an end so cruel as this, that I have taken such care of myself upon the southern shores of this unworthy continent, feeding with a tasteful choice and epicurean delicacy amid the marine vegetation that adorns its milder latitudes, and plumping and beautifying myself into this admired shape, and all to gratify at last the cormorant appetite of this unfishlike animal, and decorate, with my remains and memory, a mere steam-boat breakfast! O Dickens! the Dickens! sworn enemy of the enemies of my race! thou Hannibal of my expiring hopes—’ Alas! her apostrophe is cut short at the moment by the ruthless knife that strips her of her coat of many colours, and in one fell stroke prepares her delicious belle-ship for the broil!

It forms no part within the scope of our intention in the present Essay, to dwell upon the various modes of cookery of this annual and precious accession to the riches of our waters; but it is not to be supposed that the arrival of the Shad in this beautiful river of Connecticut can be a slight advent to the inhabitants upon its borders, particularly in villages and towns too densely populated to admit the idea, that their occupants derive a livelihood, either from agriculture, fishing, or the commerce that can be maintained by the yearly launch of a square-rigged vessel or two, depending mainly on the profits of a freighting voyage: now that the trade with the West-Indies, (formerly a rich source of the wealth of this state,) has dwindled into insignificance and loss. On the contrary, the first appearance of the shad imparts an hilarious sensation of abundance all along the shores. The retired sea-captain, the small annuitant, the broken-down family, and the capitalist, are all alike interested in the welcome. The price falls immediately within the compass of the very poorest inhabitant, while the luxury of the regale it furnishes is one that the richest epicure might covet. The green lanes that lead toward the shore, and that at other seasons are hardly visited except by lovers on a moonlit evening, now grow lively with the morning movement of the householder and his flock of little ones.

The poor man’s cow now no longer browses there in a neglected and undisturbed possession; now no longer does the stiff and shackled plough-horse graze leisurely along the path, but is startled by some youthful shout into an attempt at what was once a leap; now half-ripe berries are furtively gathered in spite of all advice as to unwholesomeness; dogs move round as if upon a hunt and on the scent for game; the yoked goose, after more than one expression of its sense of dignity, retires a little out of the way; and now the ground sparrow, deeming his thistle or over-hanging Barberry-bush insecure against the incursions of all these comers and goers, regrets at a short and watchful distance, and with all the anxiety of a politician, that he had not built more wisely under covert of the other side of the hedge.

Boys and girls, young men and maidens, old men and widows, meet each other on the path of the green lane, like angels on the steps of Jacob’s Ladder in a Flemish picture that I have, where the ladder is represented by a broad stone stair-case; except that blessings are here all brought up instead of down, for a brace of Shad is in the hand of every family-man returning from the shore.

Cordial greetings are every where interchanged, and every where the question rises or is answered that determines the market value of the morning; that makes known the signal success of the great haul of Enoch Smith; the further fall of prices in the perspective; and the general promise of the season in the way of shad; and all agree that however large or small may be the supply, never, since the memory of man, have the shad been quite so good as they are this season; and that Connecticut River Shad are decidedly the best imaginable of all possible shad.

Having in my purse the ring of Gyges, which is too ponderous for ordinary wear, I placed it on my finger and accompanied home unseen a hale bandy-legged old gentleman with a florid complexion, a benevolent wart upon his nose, an alert step, drab-breeches with thin worsted stockings of pepper and salt, plated buckles worn to the brass in his shoes, and silver ones at the knees, and the heaviest pair of shad that had appeared in the lane during the morning. I saw him deposit the Fish safely in his kitchen which he entered through a side gate, giving some strict injunctions to the cook with the air of a person who had certainly made a good bargain and was speaking to one who best knew how to appreciate it.

We then wended our way together to a neighboring house where we were immediately admitted. A person older than the visitor, quite deaf, pale and suffering but without complaint, lay extended upon a couch in a soft chintz dressing-gown, afflicted with that sort of Will-o’-the-wisp gout, that takes the toe, the heel, the knee, the hip, the heart, the neck, the head, and hands, in turn: not in any graceful rotation, not in any quiet or systematic order; but that gratifies itself by darting with the quickness of the electrick fire to which it is allied, to the part least expecting or prepared to sustain the pang. Not an honest gentlemanly gout that will exhibit itself and meet one fairly toe to toe with the inflammation of undisguised passion; but an adder, a viper of the nerves that stings and flies; and darts and disappears before the flesh has even time to blush for its existence; so subtle yet so tormenting, so deep yet so evanescent, that the patient in his agony half wonders whether it be a malady of the body or of the soul; and only knows that it is a pain, aye marry ‘past all surgery!’

Our invalid was now enjoying a momentary interval of ease, and welcomed his guest very cheerfully, although without attempting to do more than extend his hand to him and beg him to sit near. Notwithstanding all deafness the compliments of the morning, the enquiries after different members of each other’s family, and the comments on the weather, were made and understood and interchanged with great facility, and the visit went off swimmingly; until the stout gentleman, probably actuated by his desire to speak of his successful purchase of the morning, ventured, at the first pause, to ask his acquaintance if he were fond of fish?