of these great (I mean these nonsensical) characters, I should not attach much weight to them, but only ascribe them to the perverse propensity of great men affectedly to under-rate the qualities and characteristics by which they are alone distinguished; but when we remember that the said first-mentioned contemner of wisdom illustrated his own aphorisms by keeping three-score times as many wives and concubines as any the most nonsensical man could possibly know what to do with, without the assistance of his friends, and that Socrates suffered himself to be henpecked by a jade, in a way that none but men of learning and genius ever do, one must readily admit with them that wis dom is the weakest, and sense and learning are the most nonsensical things imaginable. Aristotle, Cicero, Bacon, Pope, Johnson, have all come to the same conclusion of the utter nothingness of sense and knowledge. Now, Sir, if nothing and nonsense are what we are to arrive at in the end, I confess I prefer the shortest cut. I would go tout droit au but. If nonsense is the ultimate goal, straight to the mark, say I. I like to travel as the crow flies; no toiling for me up mountains of science, amongst crags of philosophy, and sloughs of learning, and fogs of controversy. Why trudge over Highgate-hill when one can canter through the archway; why imitate these men of profound vanity and erudite folly, and philosophical nonsense-the Platos and Lockes, and Humes, and Wartons. Surely it is much easier and more satisfactory, and more rational, and certainly more popular, to be plain downright jackasses and noodles at once, like our friends A. and B. and C. and D. and E. If, then, nonsense is a happy, popular, and fashionable companion, cherished by the great-admitted to a seat in the cabinet-returned with triumphant majorities to the house-a staple commodity at Murray's a favourite contributor to Magazines-a pious, loyal, and churchgoing subject-moral and domestic in habits-a good believer, and the quintesscence and result of all knowledge and all philosophy, I do maintain that nonsense attains and fulfils in a very easy and delightful and toilless manner, almost, if not quite, all the good ends and purposes of life, and that it is one of the most absurd and hypocritical cants, of these canting days, to affect to quiz and ridicule and despise so main an engine in the affairs of life, and so considerable a contributor to the fame, and fortune, and pleasures of individuals. Now, Sir, let me ask, what is the most delightful of all passions? Is it not that which is the nearest allied to nonsense?—which laughs at philosophy, makes fools of philosophers, baffles wisdom, turns the heads of all the world, from the palace to the cottage, and makes all men, from the gravest statesman to the silliest miss, write, and talk, and wish, and hope, and think, and do the most preposterous nonsense that ever entered into the brain of nonsensical man? And think of the importance, and results, and influence of all this very nonsense and twaddling; think of the Relations dear and all the charities Of father, son, and brother, which grow and luxuriate from this fruitful stem; think of the volumes written on it; think of the blood shed for it Nam fuit ante Helenam mulier teterrima belli of the intellect, the time, the energies, devoted to it; the dynasties overthrown, the crimes committed, the laws enacted, and acknowledge with me that nonsense has some slight influence in the economy of the world. Strephon, in the Tatler, was one of the few men who, from a bold reliance on nonsense, was a master of the art of wooing: "Taking the fair nymph's hand and kissing it, he exclaimed, Witness to my happiness, ye groves! be still, ye rivulets! Oh, woods, caves, fountains, trees, dales, mountains, hills, and streams! Oh, fairest! could you love me? To which I heard her answer, with a pretty lisp, Oh, Strephon, you are a dangerous creature!"-to be sure he was, because he used the right weapons. Now-a-days declarations of love must be a little more Germanized and metaphysical; Tom Moore has enlarged and polished the lover's vocabulary-but the sum and substance and foundation is the same, and ever has been, from Leander down to Little. But, Sir, the real extent and full value of the merits of nonsense can, I maintain, only be truly appreciated by that class of persons who, with the most unpardonable forgetfulness of obligations, are those who raise the loudest outcries against it-I mean authors. This is, indeed, quarrelling with their fame and their bread; and it is observable, that those among them are the most intolerant and vindictive against this quality, to whose writings it has been the most bountiful benefactor; they, with the most barbarous ingratitude, take every occasion of reproaching and vituperating, in the works of others, that which is the only substratum and characteristic of their own; as if, truly, they were jealous of all rivals in the enjoyment of this valuable article, and desired to possess a strict and exclusive monopoly of so popular and lucrative commodity. Take away this admirable prop and fulcrum, and you will see, Sir, that the majority of authors have only one leg, or half a one, left to stand upon. The stilts of nonsense enable hundreds to cut a dashing and dignified figure, which they could never effect on their own poor, spavined, and tottering marrowbones. In this late and exhausted stage of the world, indeed, I hold that literature must come to an absolute and downright stand-still without the aid of nonsense. Why, Sir, all the sensible things upon all possible subjects have been long ago said and re-said, written and re-written, to satiety. Only a certain number of changes are to be rung upon the limited range of human ideas, as upon a peal of bells or the notes of a piano-forte: these, in all their varieties and semitones, have been long ago jingled and rattled into the public ear. It is not on the cards to produce above a certain number of combinations. The legislature ought to offer a reward for the discovery of a new idea, as well as a northwest passage. 6 A great bookseller told me the other day he was under contract with the renowned Mr. Lane, of Minerva celebrity, to take a certain number of copies of every thing he published: "For," added he, "without the Minerva novels and romances, it would be absolutely impossible to supply the incessant demand for something new' among our customers." Authors and readers are thus, you see, Sir, fairly driven, ex necessitate rei, and to avoid starvation, to emigrate from the old overstocked domains of sense, and to colonize the green, luxuriant, and teeming plains of the vast continent of nonsense. Too happy and too grateful ought we to confess ourselves for that inexhaustible fecundity which promises a harvest of ever-fresh fertility in these vast and verdant glades. The Germans, who, you know, are great settlers every where, except in Germany, have large plantations in these new VOL. IV. No. 24.-1822. Z3 continents-headed by a variety of Professors and Barons, and Herra and Frauen Von. Our own possessions there are, happily, by no means inconsiderable, and are daily increasing. In addition to Darwin Bay, and Chambers Island, and Della Crusca Farm, which we acquired there some years ago, and which that inveterate friend of the old regime of sense, William Gifford, cruelly did his best to sink in the ocean, we have now to congratulate ourselves on the far more fruitful and extensive acquisitions of Cockney Plantation, Keat's Prairie, Cape H-, &c. &c. These thriving settlements now give us, I apprehend, a firm footing and commanding sway in the regions of nonsense unknown to our forefathers, at least, since the days of Blackmore's Epics, Dennis's Criticisms, and Cibber's Birthday Odes; and as long as the above-named enterprising chieftains, or any of their posterity or votaries, exist, we have no fear of being ejected by the natives, or of ceasing to enrich our old and effete world of sense with the exotic productions, the rich monstrosities, and multiform varieties of that genial soil and clime, assisted by the skill of such unrivalled cultivators. But, Sir, it is in poetry, of all species of composition, that nonsense shines with the most resplendent lustre. There this benign power delights to shed its rosiest influence, there showers her choicest sweets, and lavishes all the luxuriance of her inexhaustible stores. Nonsense is, in poetry, what a new power is in mechanics-adding twenty-fold scope, and energy, and capability to all the poet's efforts-absolving him from the paltry laws and teasing restraints imposed by senseextricating him from the narrow bounds of the probable, and opening the halcyon isles of the improbable and the sublime shores of the impossible to his ravished sight and emancipated pen. The poet who neglects these advantages is the dullest of drivellers, and deserves never to be lauded by the Quarterly or the Edinburgh as long as he lives. He is like a child who prefers a go-cart after he can run alone-like governments who ridiculously pay their debts in gold when print and paper do so much better-like an individual who pays ready money when he can have unbounded credit-like an idiot who lives on his own possessions when his neighbours are so much larger and more convenient. What a dull dolt was poor Boileau who racked his brain and consumed his finger-nails in an absurd attempt to reconcile reason with rhyme; and all this to be voted at last a rhymer and a pedant by the lakists and cockneys of the nineteenth century! Had he possessed a spark of the true vis poetica, he would have found, that instead of forcing rhyme and reason into an unnatural conjunction, the only business of the true poet is to discard both, to luxuriate in verse, blank of meaning as of rhyme-revel in dactylics, alcaics, and dithyrambics without rhymesoar in blank odes-caper in English hexameters and swagger in prose cut into lines of ten syllables. Ces écrits, il est vrai, sans art et languissants Mais ils trouvent pourtant, quoi qu'on en puisse dire, Nor, Sir, are we plain prose-writers, happily for ourselves, excluded from our fair share of the aid of nonsense. Our use of this exquisite ingredient is somewhat less ostentatious than that adopted by the versifying gentry, but scarcely less frequent or less successful. We are obliged to be a little more cautious-the tricks of verse are more happy in concealing the infusion-and this is necessary, for much as the public parate likes the flavour, no good cook ever thrusts down a whole undisguised dose even of the most favourite among his sauces and spices. I am happy to say, however, the public stomach is not very delicate in this respect; and, thanks to our newspaper editors, lottery and blacking puffers, bellmen, and government pamphleteers, radical addressers, royal address-answerers, act of parliament-drawers, and sitting aldermen, spouting-club barristers, and paradoxical essayists, and other preeminent masters of the vernacular tongue, the stomach of John Bull is disciplined into such excellent vigour as to be in condition to bear a tolerable draught of nonsense withost danger of nausea. What think you, Sir, of the following morceau from the pen of an eminent and learned university genius speaking of a German author? "It would be necessary to point out how his genius is free from that mixture of sentimentality with technical ethics, which, originating in the separation between the head and the heart, and the inability to reunite them, and to perceive the coincidence between the laws of reason and of nature, oscillates between the two, and now bowing down its neck before a formal reason would change virtue into a mere wordy skeleton, now throwing itself into the arms of nature, pampers the morbid lusts of the will,"!!! &c. &c. Is not this exquisite? You and I never studied Kant (or cant either) and Jacob Boehmen to half so much purpose as this metaphysical gentleman. But I know, Sir, of no spot where the beauties of nonsense are better understood, or clothed in a garb of more imposing solemnity, than in Westminster Hall Ah think not, mistress, more true dulness lies In folly's cap than wisdom's grave disguise. You remember, a short time ago, a learned Judge charging an assembled Grand Jury, that it was a part of their duty to believe that the National Debt was the greatest blessing enjoyed by the country, and ergo, that the more they had of it the better;-a tolerable dose for twenty-four landed squires, with their rents in arrear and their farms thrown up! The nonsense of legal forms and fictions, of John Doe sueing Richard Roe, and Richard Denn giving bail for John Fenn, of implied assumpsits, quasi contracts-of expressing a sound drubbing by a friendly molliter manus imposuit-of fathers of seduced daughters recovering damages against seducers, not for corruption of virtue and dishonour to families, but for depriving them of said daughter's services in scrubbing kettles and pans, and mending shirts and stockings; all these and fifty other legal nonsensiana are of the most invaluable service for not only is it an established legal principle, that in fictione juris consistit æquitas-but these terrific technicalities tend to frighten away many dilettanti lounging men of talent from the champ clos of the profession, to humbug clients, and strike attorneys dumb. But it is in the Nisi Prius advocate's address to twelve good and lawful men in the jurybox that nonsense comes gorgeously and triumphantly in aid of the stale and hacknied common-places of forensic litigation. Then it is that the horsewhipped plaintiff is exhibited as one, who not only "claims compensation for a wounded frame and corporal inflictions, but for those keener lacerations of the mind, those stripes of the spirit which no styptic can heal and no balsam can assuage." Does a husband seek redress from the seducer of his fragile spouse-he is young, generous, confiding, honourable in rank, affluent in his fortunes, and seeking in his lovely spouse a friend to adorn his fortunes and deceive his toils. As for the lady herself, " Virtue never found a fairer temple-beauty never veiled a purer sanctuary—in the dawn of life with all its fragrance round her, and yet so pure, that even the blush which sought to hide her lustre, but disclosed the vestal deity that burned beneath it." (Vestal as she is, she does burn.) Then the poor defendant," with the serpent's wile and the serpent's wickedness, steals into the Eden of domestic life, poisoning all that is pure, polluting all that is lovely, defying God, destroying man-a demon in the disguise of virtue, a herald of hell in the paradise of innocence!!!!" Then of course passion subsides, satiety succeeds. But thus it is with the votaries of guiltthe birth of their crime is the death of their enjoyment, and the wretch who flings his offering on its altar falls an immediate victim to the flame of his devotion!!!" Bravo! King Cambyses. Now, Sir, if this speech extracts some hundreds for damages from twelve honest and soundheaded hucksters, and sells to the thinking public to the extent of fortyone editions, you will readily agree with me, that nonsense is as eminently serviceable and successful at the Bar as I have shewn it to be in other pursuits and departments of life; and I trust I have said enough, though I could say much more, to induce you to relax a few of your stubborn, old-fashioned, and misplaced prejudices against so interesting and invaluable a quality. I am, Sir, Quack Villa, Flummery Place. Your humble servant, TRINCULO SONDERLING. STANZAS. I MAY not think, I must not moralize! For it is only in the lucid pause Of sense and consciousness that feeling sleeps And woos her to her own forgetfulness. Onward I must! But how, or where, or wherefore, Is more than mystery. No hope shall hallow The bitter hardships of a dreary day; No dream of lightness shall divert the sleep To wander in the wild, cold blast of morn, P. |