MY dear Manning,—Although something of the latest, and after two
months’ waiting, your letter was highly gratifying. Some parts want a
little explication; for example, “the god-like face of the First Consul.” What god does he most resemble? Mars, Bacchus, or Apollo? or the god Serapis who, flying (as Egyptian chronicles deliver) from the
fury of the dog Anubis (the hieroglyph of
an English mastiff), lighted on Monomotapa (or the land of apes), by some
thought to be Old France, and there set up a tyranny, &c. Our London prints
of him represent him gloomy and sulky, like an angry Jupiter. I hear that he is very small, even less than me, who
am “less than the least of the Apostles,” at least than they
are painted in the Vatican. I envy you your access to this great man, much more
than your seances and conversaziones, which I have a shrewd suspicion must be
something dull. What you assert concerning the actors of Paris, that they
exceed our comedians, “bad as ours are,” is impossible. In
one sense it may be true, that their fine gentlemen, in what is called genteel
comedy, may possibly be more brisk and dégagé than Mr.
Caulfield or Mr.
Whitfield; but have any of them the power to move laughter in excess? or can a Frenchman laugh? Can they batter at your judicious ribs till they shake,
nothing loth to be so shaken? This is John
Bull’s criterion, and it shall be mine. You are
Frenchified. Both your tastes and morals are corrupt and perverted. By-and-by
you will come to assert, that Buonaparte is as great a
general as the old Duke of Cumberland,
and deny that one Englishman can beat three Frenchmen. Read “Henry the Fifth” to
restore your orthodoxy. All things continue at a stay-still in London. I cannot
repay your new novelties with my stale reminiscences. Like the prodigal, I have
spent my patrimony, and feed upon the superannuated chaff and dry husks of
repentance; yet sometimes I remember with pleasure the hounds and horses, which
I kept in the days of my prodigality. I find nothing new, nor anything that has
so much of the gloss and dazzle of novelty, as may rebound in narrative, and
cast a reflective glimmer across the channel. Something I will say about people
that you and I know. Fenwick is still in
debt, and the Professor has not done
making love to his new spouse. I think
he never looks into an almanack, or he would have found by the calendar that
the honeymoon was extinct a moon ago. Southey is Secretary to the Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer;
£400 a year.
| 1802 | AN EPITAPH | 241 |
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“Under this cold marble stone
Sleep the sad remains of one
Who, when alive, by few or none
Was loved, as loved she might have been,
If she prosperous days had seen,
Or had thriving been, I ween.
Only this cold funeral stone
Tells she was beloved by one,
Who on the marble graves his moan.”
|
Brief, and pretty, and tender, is it not? I send you this, being the only piece of poetry I have done, since the muses all went with T. M. to Paris. I have neither stuff in my brain, nor paper in my drawer, to write you a longer letter. Liquor and company and wicked tobacco a’nights, have quite dispericraniated me, as one may say; but you who spiritualise upon Champagne may continue to write long letters, and stuff ’em with amusement to the end. Too long they cannot be, any more than a codicil to a will which leaves me sundry parks and manors not specified in the deed. But don’t be two months before you write again. These from merry old England, on the day of her valiant patron St. George.
