“Here am I, scrambling about the stubble of literature, springing game for you, who, caring not half a straw about your faithful pointer, sally out afield after dinner, charged with everything but straight shot, and loading your piece with crooked powder. My nose—‘my jolly red nose,’ acknowledged to be one of the best of noses—true to the scent, nosed a covey—up it sprang. ‘Bang!’ says his Honour. Then his Honour boasts, ‘Look! Oh, what a shot am I!’
“If I did not point as plain as a pike-staff to the American game, giving you full scope to mark each bird, then am I a ‘shotten herring.’
“Henceforth ‘read, mark, learn, and inwardly
digest.’ The ‘Sketch
Book’ was purchased at New York, wet
from the press, by a gentleman coming to England, for the purpose of beguiling
a vacant hour on the voyage, and thou hast made
| WASHINGTON IRVING. | 289 |
“This is very afflicting. What company—I ask it with sorrow—what company hast thou picked up in the South, O worthy man of the North? The Sussex coast, a smuggling coast, right and left—has it not Hastings for its headquarters? Beware of its ‘moonshine,’ and drink Farintosh (if that be the word). Farintosh sweepeth clean the threshing-floor of a reviewer’s brain, and places a lamp in the corner of his midnight understanding, so that a scribbler scribbles his lucubrations† with true spirit, when he scribbleth Farintosh-like.
|
“Gin, you cry up Gin,
Gin you cry for ever;
Boderation! Gin
Has burnt poor Paddy’s liver.”
Vide Elegant Stanzas on Gin, by J. Hoppner,
R.A.
|
“So the mermaids are gone a hair-combing at our Northcountrymen. Cannot you fidget up some excuse, to lead you a little further coast-ways?
“Come hame, mon—come hame. After all, they are but odd fish, and I wud na gie a bawbee to gang alang wi’ the ‘fanciest she’ an ’em that ever waltzed on the top o’ the giddy sea. But then, lad—what then? I want not the cooling of a hot frenzied poet. How romantic! How poetic! To be awakened from amorous dreams by a swingeing slap of her saucy tail, and refreshed by a showerbath of salt-water, sand, and perriwinkle from her trundling
* “I need not inform a reviewer that moonshine is smuggled gin—‘Strip me naked.’” † “Query. The ‘Literary Gazette’ and the ‘Morning Chronicle’ use the word lucubration, methinks, not always in its true artificial light. Do these literary earth-stoppers always work (like the glow-worm) with a lantern at their back?” |
| 290 | AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. |
