ページの画像
PDF
ePub

"And who are to exhibit ?"

"Yourself," answered Mrs. Vincings, in a sprightly manner. "Yourself, to be sure. Then there is old Mr. Potts, and Mrs. Potts, and old Mrs. Potts' sister's uncle, and aunt Martha; in short, the whole school can be brought into play."

"But my leg," said Mr. Vincings pathetically, looking down to a wooden stick which supplied the place of a defunct member. "But my leg."

"Pho, pho," said a lady in a calico gown, with a high tortoise shell comb, and very remarkable leather leggins, who had been sitting as yet in the chimney corner, apparently silent and unnoticed; "Pho, pho, what of that! I had a friend who had just lost both his legs. He had a contrivance constructed, consisting of springs and clock work, and just wind it up, and it went like any pair of human legs, only much more reg'lar."

"Dear me," exclaimed the interested Mr. Vincings, "could he walk?"

"Walk," answered the lady in leggins, "walk indeed! It wasn't walking exactly to be sure, it was a kind of trotting he indulged in. One leg or two, it was square with him, as the duck remarked when she went to sleep. One day there was a great racing match. Mr. Hogg, the celebrated Irish fancy, laid a wager he could walk five hundred miles in three hours, if any other gentleman would walk one hundred in the same time. My friend was no chicken, and he immediately pounced at the offer, much to the horror of the great Irish game, who hardly knew what wasn't coming. He had the choice of his grounds, and took a rail road. The day came, and my poor friend was the first on the spot. His pants looked unusually swelled out, and those as didn't know him thought he was uncommon fat. The truth was, from wery perwersity, he had the little engine what commonly moved him taken out, an' a bigger one put in.' "Didn't he find the heat of the boilers very unpleasant?" interrogated Mr. Vincings.

[ocr errors]

"La, no," answered the lady in leggins; "the heat was applied low down. Every body wondered why he carried a coal scuttle and Dutch furnace in his hand, especially since he was about to exercise. Off he started, however, and went at a rate that was quite embarrassing, as the man who fell from the balloon was overheard to remark. What was the worst on it, was that after he had gone a while, the legs took a notion to go on by themselves."

"Why, could they stand up?" asked Mr. Vincings.

"Stand up!" said the lady in leggins, "yes, indeed they did, and all the better without a body to them. The principal misfortune was, that when the Irish fancy heard how fast the legs had gone, he rashly harnessed himself to a locomotive, and was never heard of since."

"An awful death-bed scene there must have been," ejaculated the Reverend Mr. Higgs.

"It wasn't a death bed exactly," cursorily remarked the lady in leggins.

"I never did," said Mr. Vincings, recovering at length from his surprise; "if the poor gentleman could bear such exertions as that; I'm sure I shouldn't mind a little acting."

"There's nothin like decision of character," was the brief reply of the lady in question.

He

Mr. Vincings was ambitious, especially in the line of manual exercise. In his youth he had figured prominently at all the wakes and riots in the country. After the narrated feat of the friend of the lady in leggins, his legs seemed to lose much of the morbid sensibility with which they had before been invested. But it was on Mr. Higgs that the chief responsibility of the Exhibition was placed. Mr. Higgs was no ordinary man. had seen little of society, it is true, but from the little he had seen he worked wonders. Indeed, it is at all times questionable whether an extensive acquaintance with the world is improving to the manners, or beneficial to the mind. A too vast collection of sweets is apt to confuse the bee, and spoil the honey. Mr. Higgs had reaped much from the little corn-field that was apportioned to him. He had organized a school of veteran scholars. He superintended their education with patience, which indeed was no easy matter. Considering the great personal obligations they were under to Mr. Higgs, and the deference due to each other's age and experience; considering the knowledge and gravity they were supposed to have acquired in traveling over so great a portion of the road of life, and the decorum of mind which is so suitable to antiquity in years, the old gentlemen might certainly have been consistently persuaded to throw aside childish things, and behave with decency to themselves and their master. After the manner of courageous roosters, which, after having each individually stood the glory of his own hen-roost and gravelpatch, till he has fallen into habits of solitary grandeur, are suddenly transported from the seat of their ancient dominion, and are cast promiscuously into the Botany Bay of a narrow coop; did the "oldest inhabitants of the respectable town of New Beersheeba" cackle and foam in an insufferably sublime manner when placed together on the same form. One aged grandfather pertinaciously insisted in hissing at another still more venerable, whenever he successfully had passed the Scylla and Charybdis of the alphabet. Another unaccountably amused himself with setting what are vulgarly called man-traps for his neighbors. Of course, such a proceeding as that last mentioned was utterly destructive of order, to say nothing of decency; for when the infirm victim would squat down on his seat with a hasty plump, similar to which corpulent persons indulge in, a sharp ejaculation, ex

pressive of a darting pain, was the usual result. Old Mr. Huggins, the green grocer, resolutely determined never to extend his knowledge of the first primer any farther than allowed by those hieroglyphical characters which render more simple the words of one and two syllables. As a man who has always been accustomed to swim with bladders, rather dislikes in case of an emergency to trust to his own strength, so did Mr. Huggins make up his mind, in defiance of all reason, to resist any attempts that might be made to induce him to "spell without picturs."

But the scholars of the New Beersheeba Select School were not all of this stamp. Some had progressed much farther on the track of literature, and were engaged in the dry, but not the less scientific studies of geography and arithmetic. A happy few, having by much trial leaped over the chasm which separates ignorance from learning, were already holding sweet intercourse with the sisters three, and moistening their pinions in the cloud which is said to overhang Parnassus. It was for such as these that the Exhibition was intended. The Sappho-like genius of Mrs. Vincings, for instance, trellised as it was by the light and fanciful wicker-work of English rhythm, and entwining its delicate tendrils, like the ivy, around the support thus given to it, was well qualified to shine in such an arena.

The night came,—the night of the exhibition: after such exertions much was expected, as must be confessed, but even those expectations were surpassed. To use the language of the New Beersheba Universal Trumpeter, "astonishment crowned success with rapture. Never was such a crowd collected in this flourishing town, as that which filled the hall which had been appropriated to the use of the Antique Infant School, on the night of the performance." We hesitate much to describe, inasmuch as we fear we can never do justice to the scene that followed. Precisely at six o'clock, the Rev. Mr. Higgs gave orders for the opening of the doors. And what a rush was there! We regret to say, that an infatuated person, the elder Mr. Potts, who notwithstanding his age and inexperience had pertinaciously refused to become a member of the class, persisted in carrying his opposition to this benevolent design so far, as to remark that the exhibition of the school savored too much of the theater. What if a dramatic hue was cast over the performances in order to add to their interest? Did it add a criminality to the offices of the evening? Certainly not; because sentiments which are holy in the mouth of one man, are holy in the mouth of another, and the mere fact of a change of character does not naturally merit the accusation of guilt.

But the exercises soon commenced, and there was an end to all farther observations on their propriety. A green baize curtain was drawn aside, behind which the debutants were marshalled. With great judgment and taste, Mr. Higgs by means of the valu

able assistance of Mrs. Vincings had so arranged matters that the whole corps dramatique were presented at first sight to the eye of the spectator. The scene was supposed to be a savage island d; Mr. Higgs was Juan Fernandez, whilst Mrs. Vincings, her spouse, together with several others personated those uneducated individuals, generally called savages. On the withdrawal of the curtain, Mr. Higgs was seen gazing upon some blue curtains which represented either the ocean or the sky, we regret we have not been able to discover which; while around were crowded quite a variety of domestic goats; a large cat, of that sex which Espriella in his letters so much wonders at the English for nick-naming "Thomas," acted to admiration the part of a hyena, while to complete the efficacy of the scene, Deacon Wilson's old grey mare, whose back was so much streaked by service, did the Zebra.

We would that we had time to enter in full into the plot of the play. Juan Fernandez, (Mr. Higgs,) who, by the way, it seems is something of a pious Don Juan, is anxious to marry one of the aboriginal belles named Timbuctoo. Timbuctoo (Mrs. Vincings) does not assent to what she thinks an unnatural union, she being supposed to be only a few years old, and he obviously in the decline of life. She therefore refuses to enter into the proposed union, determining if possible to espouse a young warrior whom the poet geographically calls Lake Huron. The plot has the advantages of great brevity and simplicity, and well conduces to the purpose for which it was intended.

One great beauty which it possesses above similar productions is, that in it each individual was allowed to devise and portray his own character. Hence it was that the speeches of the different dramatis personæ were strikingly consistent with the peculiar turn of mind of the persons who represented them.

The first scene opens, as we have said before, with a soliloquy of Juan Fernandez. What a pity it is that Cowper should have pre-occupied so much ground on the same theme. Great poets are apt to think alike, especially when the same subjects are presented to their attention; but Mr. Higgs can no more justly be said to have borrowed from Cowper, than Cowper from Mr. Higgs. It was no more than natural, that attracted by the scenery around him, he should exclaim

[blocks in formation]

Then in his desire to impart knowledge to the mind of the hitherto uneducated savage, with a spirit of intellectual benevolence, which by the way runs through the whole drama, he exclaims, apostrophizing the person of his lady love—

Oh chariot of the daring thought,

Oh casket of the brilliant mind,

Are all thy powers thine own for nought?

Should none of them be left behind?

The bird who soars upon the sky,

The beast who roams amid the field,
There is in these anxiety,

A mutual benefit to yield,―

Breath of the long aspiring soul,

Teachers of thought! to you I bend,
'Tis mine in stormy waves to roll,
To cultivate each lovely friend.

We are sorry to observe that many of those jealous critics, with which the world and especially the suburbs of New Beersheba are crowded, have amused themselves and deceived the public by leveling at this part of the drama, and indeed at all the passages which emanated from the pen of Mr. Higgs, the accusation of obscurity. Who is such a tyro in the rules of rhetoric as not to know that obscurity is a principal source of the sublime, (Jam. Rhet. Chap. IV. sec. 394;) that grandeur and incomprehensibility are inseparably linked together: and that people are much the more awe-stricken by that which their intellects cannot embrace, in the same manner as we admire the grandeur of a mountain the more when its top is surrounded with clouds. To be sure it is to be guarded lest we invest a little subject with too much magnificence and obscurity of diction, so that it may appear greater than it really is; for if the cheat is discovered the opinion entertained of our sagacity and acquirements will be lowered.

But with Mr. Higgs such was not the case. Men of true and universally acknowledged genius scorn to make use of such claptraps. We need not quote much more of this remarkable poem to prove to the reader that something more than ordinary ability lurked in the breast of the distinguished man in question. Benevolence was also one of his principal characteristics. The pathetic exclamation of Timbuctoo to him when he offers his heart and worldly goods to her, and the deep regret she appears to feel in declining his polite offer, shows in what estimation Juan Fernandez, or Mr. Higgs, was held by those who knew him. Following the severe simplicity of the nursery ballad, what is lost in the originality of this touching ode is gained in pathos: [Enter Timbuctoo singing mournfully.]

Who taught me first to read and write,

Who told me that it showed much spite,
With other savages to fight?

My grandfather.

« 前へ次へ »